DIY Baby and Dog Gate Instructions

Special guest blogger today! Dave! The baby gate he made a few months ago is one of my most viewed and most pinned posts. Sadly, when people view it, they see some cruddy pictures of the gate and....no real information about how to make it. We've been meaning to get the how to make it post up for forever now. The other day someone finally commented on the post to ASK how to make it, and that was, it turns out, just the motivation Dave needed to make some pretty diagrams and write it up. So here you go!

Many moons ago, Gretchen posted about a baby gate that I made to keep dogs (mostly Gable) out of the kitchen.  You can read about it here.

Every couple weeks, she asks me when I'm going to write out the instructions on how I built it.  But because I never really considered it complete, and because I'm a big procrastinator, it hasn't gotten done until now.  It's been 95% complete since October, but the hook and eye latch we bought to keep it locked never really worked.  Any toddler would be able to shake the gate with his tiny fists and pop the hook out of the eye.  For that matter, any moderately curious or determined dog could do the same.  Fiesta the Beagle is one such dog.  Fortunately, Gable the Dopey is not.  While he's a big enough problem dog to require us to build a specialty gate to keep him out of the kitchen, he's a dog of routine and appreciates having his own sun room retreat during eating times.  But with a new baby in the house, I knew we would need something a little more secure in the future, so I finally found a suitable latching device.  So now I can explain the whole process.  Lucky you!

So the reason we needed a custom-built gate is because the doorway is crazy narrow, specifically 26.25 inches.  It was formerly part of the kitchen bay window, but was opened up to a do-it-yourself addition of a sunroom by some previous owner.  Since no commercially available gates come in sizes so tiny, I set to work on plans of my own.  The Home Depot had these super cheap untreated 2x2 pine posts - so I bought enough of these to make the following gate:

So in case you don't know, lumber measurements don't actually match their name.  If you buy a 2x2 post, you'd think that you're getting 2 inch by 2 inch posts.  Nope.  It's actually 1.5 inch by 1.5 inch posts.  That means that the skinny dimension of each of those rectangles is 1.5 inches, in case you're keeping track.

The vertical dark gray 2x2s are 35 inches long.  This is the height of the gate and is completely customize-able.  I think I picked that height because it meant I had minimal leftover wood.  It's pretty tall for a gate, but Gable is a pretty big dog, so it works out.  The horizontal light grays are 22.25 inches long.  Add the 1.5 inches on each side for the vertical posts and you get a total gate width of 25.25 inches.  "But Dave, you said the doorway is 26.25 inches wide.  Why is the gate 1 inch too narrow?"  More on that in a moment.  Since the vertical brown 2x2s are contained within the horizontal posts, they needed to be 3 inches shorter than the exterior vertical dark grays, so they come in at 32 inches a piece.

After careful measuring, remeasuring, conferring with Gretchen, and measuring again, I sliced up the posts using the Skil saw and sanded all the pieces with the power sander.  I used fourteen 2-inch deck screws to attach all the pieces together.  I was either smart enough or made enough mistakes in the past to know that if predrilling was important to avoid splitting such narrow pieces of wood.  So each light gray post got five screw holes and each dark gray post got two.  If I were smarter or had made more mistakes in the past, I would have used wood glue as well.  While the screws were holding the posts in place, they made for a nice point of rotation for each of the brown posts.  Instead of taking everything apart to add the glue, I decided to use some finishing nails hammered at 45 degrees to create more points of connection between the light gray and brown.  While that worked OK, the hammering jarred the alignment off on some of the posts.  So you can feel the not-flush adjoining on some of the posts.  It bothers me literally every day of my life.

Now that the gate was complete, I had to attach it to the doorway.  I didn't want the hinge screws to go directly into the drywall (there is no wooden door frame as there was never a door there) because I didn't think that would hold the test of time and dogs and boys.  So instead, I used some more wood - this time 1x2 (so in actuality 0.75 inches by 1.5 inches) - cut to the length of the gate height.  More predrilling and deck screws attaching this new piece to the exact middle of the 6 inch wide drywall, and I was ready to attach the two hinges into nice sturdy wood.  This is, by the way, where the extra 1 inch of width came from.  The 0.75 for the wood, and the rest for the hinges and for a little leeway on the other side of the gate.

Speaking of the other side of the gate, there needed to be some sort of door stop to prevent the gate from getting pulled past where the hinges and hinge screws wanted to go.  So I used another 1x2 board and attached it to the other side of the doorway.  This time, it wasn't exactly in the middle because I wanted to allow the gate to close flush with the first 1x2.  Maybe this diagram can explain better than words.

This is an areal view - the light and dark grays are the top of the gate (color coded!) and the green and purple pieces are the hinge board and the door stop respectively.  While the first diagram is to scale, I had to shorten the width of the gate in this one in order to show the relevant details without making a crazy long image.  If this diagram really were to scale, the doorway would be a little more than one foot wide, which is just crazy.  In real life, the doorway is a little more than TWO feet wide.

So all of this worked great, except for the previously mentioned battle with the hook and eye.  We tried various configurations and angles to try to make it more secure without much success.  It got to the point where the hole the hook screwed into was so stripped that we would routinely find the hook lying somewhere on the floor.  In fact, I looked for the hook just today and was unable to find it.  What good timing that I finally bought a latch that will work!

Old system:

The new latch:

The new latch installed!

This should work great for two significant reasons.  One, the "hook" part goes deep into the "eye" part, so it won't jiggle out with excessive toddler fists or beagle paws.  Two, each piece is attached by four screws into wood (the gate for the hook, the doorstop for the eye).  This should really stay put.  Oh, it's worth noting that my previously mentioned smarts and/or experience took a hiatus when I screwed this latch into place.  I did not predrill screw holes and there are now small cracks in the wood that I hope will stay small.  This will likely bother me literally every single day for many years to come ... or until the gate breaks.

Linking with:
Sunday Showcase Party at Under the Table and Dreaming
Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories A to Z
Stone Gable's Tutorials, Tips, and Tidbits
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths
The Inspiration Gallery
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Tatertots and Jello Weekend Wrap-Up Party
Monday Funday

At Last! Board and Batten, or: Where the Caulk Was: Sort of a Tutorial

I will get to that part--where the mysteriously missing caulk was hiding--later on.

I had this idea in my head that putting up board and batten would take up most of a leisurely Saturday, and then we'd be all finished and move on to other exciting nursery tasks like making a whale. I guess all the tutorials I read entitled things like, "Board and Batten: A Tutorial in Seventeen Parts" should have clued me in.

It's not that any one step in putting up board and batten is particularly onerous; it's just that there are so many steps, and each one could be done in any one of fourteen different ways, so there are...whatever fourteen times so many is decisions to make before you can even really get started. And the overabundance of tutorials online that should make the whole thing easier kind of....doesn't, because everyone has done their board and batten a little bit differently, and yet they all look pretty similar (and good) in the end....it's like picking between eight different shades of white paint, which is maybe why I never paint things white.

So we spent a few weeks reading tutorials and procrastinating before finally jumping in. Let me summarize a few of the decisions we had to make before we could get started:

1. How high should the board and batten go? I've seen people go all different ways with this. Some people keep it low, often because they're working with an existing chair rail. Some people go all the way up to the ceiling. We opted for roughly 2/3 of the way up, or around 5 1/2 feet (with 8 foot ceilings).

2. How wide should all the boards be? Again, huge variations abound! Our vertical boards are 2  inches, and our horizontal boards on top are 4 inches.

3. What about the spacing between the vertical boards? It seemed like the ones I liked best online were between, say, 12 and 14 inches apart. Or so. This is an area where you kind of have to play around with how it looks in your particular room and also with what works best with whatever outlets, doors, etc. you have to work around. I think it's pretty rare that you'll be able to space them exactly evenly when you work around everything, so be prepared to move a board an inch here and another one an inch there. We ended up with our spaced as close to 13 1/2 inches as we could get them.

4. What kind of material should you use? You can use real wood, but MDF seems to be the most popular choice. And then you have to decide whether to buy pre-primed and pre-cut planks or to buy sheets  (Lowes carries 5 by 8 foot, so Dave did some fancy figuring to decide how to get the boards we needed out of those) and have them cut at the store (or cut them at home yourself, if you don't like yourself very much). Buying sheets will save you a lot of money but cost you more time in painting/priming (which is the most time consuming part of the project). But it's so much cheaper that it's really hard not to go that route, unless it's a very small project. Our wall was 29 feet long, minus one door, so we went with sheets, cut into planks. The guy at Lowes did not seemed thrilled about making so many cuts. Too bad, dude--it's your JOB. He's just lucky no one made him prime and paint all the damn things.

5. What kind of paint to use? See above for how choosing white paint flusters me more than it should. First we bought the super cheap, pre-mixed Olympic white paint at Lowes. This was a mistake. It was like water. I believe I've heard somewhere that some people say you get what you pay for. So we ended up using this more or less as a primer, because after we'd slapped a whole bunch of coats of paint on the wall and the boards with it, it still needed more. So we returned to Lowes and bought the still pre-mixed, but considerably more expensive fancy Valspar white paint. And this was much better. But it took a LOT of coats of paint to cover everything still.

6. When should you paint, anyway? I read over and over again that painting the wall and the boards before you put them on the wall will save you a ton of time. So I was surprised at how many people didn't do that. And then I wasn't surprised that in most of those descriptions, the people were like, "and we're STILL finishing up the paint, 11 months later!" Or something like that. So we painted first. Wall with a roller and boards with a smaller foam roller. Then all you have to do after is touch up where you've put nails and caulked and all that.

7. And what to do about that part where the vertical board hits the baseboard? I saw a bunch of different ideas here, too (because most of the time, your baseboard comes in at an angle at the top, so that the vertical boards would hang out over the top of them). Some people take the existing baseboard off and put flat boards there instead (so it matches the horizontal board on top). One blogger went along and cut off the slanting in part of her baseboard so that what was left behind would be flat along the top. We decided to cut the bottoms of the vertical boards off at a 45 degree angle, so they'd slope in to meet the baseboard. Apparently this is fairly easy and straightforward if you have a circular saw. I wouldn't know. Dave did it.

8. What about attaching it to the wall? Funny you should ask that. Remember my promise to tell you where the caulk was hiding? Okay, so we decided to use finishing nails plus liquid nails to attach all the boards. This seemed to go swimmingly...we slathered the liquid nails on, then I held it up while Dave put three nails per board in. Then a few days later I spent all day looking around for the caulk....and we finally found it....in the caulk gun that we used to put the "liquid nails" up. Oops. So it turns out we used caulk plus nails to put the boards up. I hope that works. So far, so good.

Okay, so I'll try to speed up from here, because, really, once you've decided all that stuff, things get fairly straightforward. Except for the part where you have to find 400 extra hours for all the painting.

A bunch of boards in our basement, where they all got painted:

Here they are with their 45 degree angles:

Starting to put the horizontal boards up. This involved lots of measuring and checking things with a level.

The first vertical board is up!

Making progress. Once the painting was done, things went pretty fast.

So this is what the boards look like at the bottom where they hit the baseboard. I'm pretty pleased with it.

Finished except for caulking the seams and touching up the paint. Please excuse that dresser, acting like it's all "styled" because it has 3 things on it. It was messy, and I threw a bunch of stuff on the bed to take the picture. It will be prettier when we get to that side of the room...soon!

So in that picture, you can sort of see where the cracks are where we put the boards together. So then, when I finally found it, I went back through and filled in the cracks with caulk. If you'll recall, I fretted about this a good bit, but it wound up taking all of ten minutes and was super easy. I just squirted the caulk in, then wiped the excess off with my finger. Then a couple of hours later, I went back through and painted over all the caulk and nail holes (another ten minutes. And don't forget to get paintable caulk).

And now it's officially all finished!

Couple of things I thought of and am editing to add:

*Cost: Dave says he only bought one of the 5 by 8 boards, and it cost about $25 + around $7 for all the cuts. Nails were $3, then a few bucks for caulk and liquid nails (umm, although we didn't actually use the liquid nails). The biggest expense was actually the paint, since we used nearly a full 2 gallons. One can of cheap paint and one can of expensive: around $40 all together.

*I also forgot to mention that Dave sanded down all the MDF before it went up on the wall.

*And I forgot to say that the MDF was 1/2 inch thick.

Shared with:
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase Party
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Home Stories A to Z Tutorials and Tips
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths
Tater Tots and Jello Weekend Wrap Up party
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday
Funky Junk Interior's Saturday Nite Special

Ringing in the New Year With a Fancy Bookcase for the Nursery

(I had sort of hoped to either have a baby before 2012 ended, for tax deduction purposes, or to have the first baby in my city/state/country of 2013, in hopes of getting free stuff. But, as you can see, I am still here. Historically, my babies show up remarkably close to their due dates).

So check out how I'm trying to be a less lazy blogger! I added a gadget with "popular posts" to the sidebar awhile back, but then the problem was it automatically picked the first picture from each post, which was usually some "before" shot of an empty living room or something. I thought that this probably did not make people want to click on the posts. And maybe there is some way to fix it so it won't use the first picture, but I don't know what it is.

So I went through and put better pictures at the top of all the posts that are there right now, BUT I don't want to give away the big reveal in the first picture, because what fun is that? Right? Right?! So, at least for this post, look what I did! I made a visually pleasing picture that merely supplies a tantalizing hint of what is to come. I am so terribly clever.

And, with that unnecessarily long prelude out of the way, I am going to write an unnecessarily long post about the relatively simple project of lining an old bookcase with fabric to make it look prettier.

This bookcase's first role in our family was in Ari's nursery. I'm pretty sure I got it at a garage sale in or around Boston. I don't remember what it looked like to start with, but we painted it white (or repainted it white) back then. Then it moved around our house for years, getting dingier and dingier. This is what it looked like until a couple of weeks ago:

I don't know why I didn't take a picture of the whole thing. I think there was a big trunk in front of it. Anyway, as you can see, not in terrific shape, paint-wise.

So the first order of business was just to get a fresh coat of paint on it, and I decided to go with the same gray, chalk-paintified, that I used on the dresser with the whale pulls: Behr's Burnished Metal from Lowes. Dave put two coats of paint on it and then made his first try at applying finishing wax. This part did not go well. Hint: do not apply finishing wax (especially the first time you try it) at night. Because then maybe you will use too much wax, and then you will think you did a good enough job buffing it, but when you take a look at it later, in daylight, you'll see a whole bunch of nasty yellow wax residue, and it will be way too late to get it off with a rag at that point.

Yes. What happened next was that Dave broke out the power sander and sanded off all the wax and much of the paint. Fortunately there was enough of the gray paint still left on there that one more coat did the trick once the sanding was finished. I repainted it, and then I let Dave do the wax again, because you have to get right back up on that horse, right? And this time he totally nailed it.

We now had a lovely gray bookcase, but we weren't willing to stop there. ANY nursery can have a gray bookcase, but it takes a really special nursery to have a gray bookcase with squids.

Back before Christmas, I discovered Spoonflower while poking around looking for fabulous ocean animal fabric. If you are new to Spoonflower as I was, here, as best as I can gather, is what it's all about: Spoonflower has pretty much any kind of fabric you could possibly want. I guess they have designers who make some of it, or you can design your own fabric and they'll make it for you, and then other people can buy your design, too. It's really cool. And really expensive. The cheapest basic cotton starts at 18.50/yard. It's pretty unapproachable for a bigger project (sorry dining room curtains: no squids for you!), but I only needed a yard for the bookcase, and they had really cool squid fabric, so I splurged a bit and bought it.
The fabric took a long time to get here (2 weeks-ish?), but it looked great when it did.

At first I thought I'd buy some spray starch and attach the fabric to the back of the bookcase that way. But the back was nailed in pretty permanently, so we didn't want to take it off so that we could wrap the fabric around it. And we couldn't just cut the fabric to fit the back or it would fray (plus I was pretty sure measuring it and putting it in there would be fraught with error). In the end, the easiest/safest plan seemed to be cutting a piece of cardboard to fit against the back of the bookcase and covering it with the fabric.

We very carefully measured and remeasured the back of the bookcase and then cut the cardboard (notice our cardboard is a Lowe's box which reads, "Never stop improving." So motivational).

Then we put the cardboard in the back of the shelf to test out the fit, since it would not be easy to make adjustments after the fabric was on there (you'll see in this picture that I changed the order of things to preserve the flow of the story. At this point, shelf had been painted, waxed, and de-waxed with the sander, but the repainting hadn't happened yet).

We laid the fabric out on the cardboard and cut it, leaving anywhere between an inch and a half and three inches or so all around (mostly the three inches was just so we didn't need to cut the top and bottom; it was pretty close, so we left it as it).

For the front side of the fabric backer, we quickly applied spray adhesive (which I already had on hand; apparently spray adhesive holds up much better in a cold/hot garage for years than spray paint does) and then put the fabric down on top, smoothing as we went. We actually sprayed and adhered a small strip at the  bottom first, to hold it in place and keep it even while we did the rest. I used that metal meter stick there to smooth out any wrinkles. There is not much time for all of this. Work quickly!

Try not to fret if it's not perfect; it won't really show when you're finished! Remember my mantra: "I was not really a perfectionist about this part."

Next Dave tied some of the extra fabric around his head and plugged in the hot glue gun. Have I mentioned that this glue gun is the best $3 I've ever spent?

We flipped the cardboard over and put dots of glue all along one side, then wrapped the edge of the fabric around, pulling it tight as we went, and attached it to the back of the cardboard.

I didn't worry overmuch about what the folds looked like in the back, since no one's ever going to see them. I just made sure nothing was poking out past the edges.

Here's what the cardboard looked like, all finished.

We put the cardboard in the bookcase, and it fit like a glove!

And all finished, in its spot between the nursery windows, with the shelves back in!

Now I just have to make myself cover up some of the awesome squiddiness with books and whatnot, because otherwise there is not much point in its being a shelf.

Linking with:
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Somewhat Simple
Happy Hour at Design, Dining, and Diapers
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Lovely Crafty Weekend at Lovely Crafty Home
Tater Tots and Jello's Weekend Wrap-up Party
Funky Junk Interiors
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase Party
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths

DIY Mobile: a tutorial with many pictures

Warning! This post will contain approximately 4 million pictures because 1. tutorial! and 2. mobiles are fun to take pictures of.

If one is in search of a mobile for one's baby's nursery, one can do a quick Etsy search and find many beautiful and pricy mobiles to choose from. Quite a few of them are made out of colorful circles such as the ones you see above. They looked, to me, like the sort of thing I might be able to make myself. And I could. Although, after actually buying all the materials and putting the thing together, I understand a bit better why people charge $50 and $60 for them on Etsy, I have to say. It wasn't particularly difficult to make, but it was tedious and time consuming, and I was a bit surprised at how much I wound up spending on materials.

First I looked around for tutorials online and pinned a couple. I liked the look of this one from E Tells Tales:

E Tells Tales

....but I also liked this one from Dan and Brit:

Dan and Brit

and it had the added advantage of looking a little less complicated to make. So I used it as my main inspiration/basic template. 

First up a trip to Hobby Lobby for materials:

I used a 40% off coupon for the circle punch. I briefly contemplated just tracing something and cutting out all the circles by hand, but that seemed like an awful lot of work, so I sucked it up and spent....maybe $14 or so after the coupon? (I should save receipts!) on the punch that makes perfect 3 inch circles for you. I have no idea when I'll ever use it again, but I guess I should try to find another circle intensive project now, since I have it. 

Other materials:

*double sided tape (I saw a lot of tutorials where people sewed their cardstock together, but I'm all about tape. Like Ramona Quimby, I feel that there isn't much scotch tape can't do)

*embroidery hoop: you just use the inside circle from this

*some kind of string or thread: most people seem to use fishing line, but I got this thick thread instead

*cardstock: I picked three different colors....how much  you need depends on how long and full you want your mobile. I wound up using 7 sheets of each color

*ribbon (for hanging from ceiling)

*spray paint (not pictured)--assuming you want to paint your embroidery hoop to match. I used some gray I already had.

*glue gun (also not pictured)

Then you start punching out circles. I was not a perfectionist at all about my circles. I sort of prioritized maximizing the cardstock (I was surprised how much the cardstock cost when I bought so much....I think I spent around $15 on it all together) rather than perfect circles. So a lot of them have a little chip missing. Which you'll notice in the pictures but, which, since they have two sides, doesn't really show when you look at it all hung up from a slight distance.

When you're tired of punching out circles and want to do something else for awhile, you can start making your strips of circles:

First you cut a length of string (as long as you want! It's your mobile! I did them long enough to put 7 circles on each, with just a little space between each circle). Then put down a circle under the string, with a piece of double sided tape running down the middle.

And then put another circle on top of the bottom one, to hide the string.

Eventually, your strands will look like this.

So you keep going until you have a million strands. Or, in my case, I think I wound up with something like 18. It just depends on the size of your embroidery hoop and how far apart you put the strands. I initially thought I'd put them farther apart, but then I liked the look of them really close together with some overlapping, so I wound up back at Hobby Lobby buying more cardstock.

Once you have all your strands ready (uhh, or really anytime) spray paint the embroidery hoop if you're going to do that. 

And once it's dry, start attaching the strands. 

I just positioned the string from the strand where I wanted it and then attached it with a little dot of hot glue. I was nervous it wouldn't hold well enough (as is evidenced by the unnecessary masking tape in that second picture), but so far, so good. Hot glue is amazing. Also--two hot glue projects, and I've only burned myself once! 

This part, honestly, is kind of a pain. It's not hard, really, but there are just so many strings and circles everywhere trying to get twisted up (although they untwist surprisingly easily), and I had to hold the hoop in place while the glue dried before I could turn it and do the next strand. But I got there eventually. It might have taken me a few days. I didn't measure the spacing between the strands. Had I spaced them out farther, it probably would have been a good idea, but since I was going for the overlapping, crowded look, it didn't really matter. I just eyeballed it. 

Eventually, things will start to look like this:

When you FINALLY have all your strands attached, you're ready to attach the ribbon. More hot glue!

I put a little dot on the inside, then wrapped around and put another dot on the outside of the hoop. Then crossed the ribbon over and did the same thing on the other side. Then used another ribbon going the other direction and did the same thing. Hold on....a picture might be helpful here:

So the strings made kind of an X at the top where they intersected and attached to the ceiling. 

And you're finished! Screw a hook into the ceiling and hang that sucker up! And then take a whole bunch of pretty pictures from a million different angles to show off your handywork!

Update 2/28:

And here it is in its natural habitat, which, it turns out, is over the changing table (and the baby LOVES it):

Linking with:
Craftionary's Friday Link Party
Happy Hour at Design, Dining, and Diapers
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase Party
Somewhat Simple
Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt It Friday
Lovely Crafty Home's Lovely Crafty Weekend
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Weekend Wrap Up Party at Tatertots and Jello
Funky Junk Interior's Saturday Nite Special
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday