One Room Challenge Week:4
I know. I know. It’s been about two weeks. I missed a check in. Well, to be honest, this is much harder than I thought. Things happen, supplies aren’t always there, and our lives get away from us sometimes. Both my husband and I work full time jobs, and building out an entire room feels a lot like a second job…maybe just part-time but still a second job. I LOVE IT though. It makes me so excited to see the progress, but last week was tough. There wasn’t much progress. That’s why I didn’t post. It’s easy for me to get discouraged if I don’t see progress even though I know we are taking steps to complete a project. I get impatient. I want to see results.
But here we are. We have more tangible progress this week and I am excited to show you what we have done. Last week we went shopping. I think over the past two weeks I have been to Lowes and Home Depot about 5 times. The first trip we scouted material at both stores. I wanted to look at the various tile options that would work outside. We need the tile to be slip resistant and outdoor safe. My husband, Jorge, wanted to look at all of the wood options and put together a budget. After the initial scouting trip we made a list of material and we went back to the store to buy everything.
When we got back from shopping we got to work. We started by staining all of the wooden pieces. It’s easier to stain before we install everything. We used Cabot Semi Transparent Stain in Taupe. This color was not a premixed color so Lowe’s mixed it for us. The stain is oil based and will help protect the wood from water and UV rays. We will need to re-stain it every so often to maintain the life of the wood.
Once the wood was stained and cut for installation the fun part started. For me, projects like this are puzzles. And everyone knows I love a good puzzle. My husband and I researched the best way to attach the framing to our concrete slab. We learned about TapCon screws. The packs come with special drill bits meant for going through concrete and other hard surfaces. The screws are designed specifically to grip the concrete and stay in place. They worked. Sorta. Basically 50% of the time the screws went in properly while the other 50% of the time the hole was stripped and the screws did not properly secure the bottom framing. We managed to get two screws per piece of wood to work. Those screws coupled with the other boards in the framing would hold everything in place.
As far as the design of the framing, we had 4 options that I shared last time. Open, Basic, Craftsman, and Fancy. We went with the open concept for now. We want to try out the open framing so that we can see out but if our pets start to damage the screen we will install the fancy railing to help keep the pets away from the screen. We continued framing out the porch by using a drill bit guide. The guide we owned was a straight guide like this one. We used two pieces of wood and the straight drill guide to create a 45 degree drill guide. This helped us connect the wood into a + like pictured. Installing the frame, we had a few learning curves to overcome but once we understood everything we managed to get the frame up rather quickly.
I am proud that we finally have a frame and something a bit more tangible than shopping lists, and plans. Those are very important, but for the impatient person that I am, it is nice to see us a few steps closer to the end goal in the One Room Challenge. Be sure to follow along on Instagram for fun stories and funny moments.
Check out the other designers on the One Room Challenge blog. There are so many amazing designers and DIY’ers participating this year.
