tinybloggers – Author at Plaster & Disaster

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home. Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer: Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions. Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials. All opinions are their own.

Happy Wednesday! We’re thrilled to be back with another house update. Last time we were on the blog, we shared how we resolved the pesky window issue we’d been having:

With that major structural issue dealt with, we decided to take an a lower intensity but still high impact project: getting some art for above our couch! Here’s a photo of the blank wall in question, before we fixed the windows and added a temporary rug (which is a sushi-making mat that we stole from Sage).

We knew we wanted a big statement piece, but oversized art can be so expensive! Fortunately for us, “oversized” is still “teeny tiny” by many people’s standards, so we thought we could find an affordable solution.

And we were right! We love to scavenge in Sage’s house to look for supplies, and we came across a pretty notecard that she had up on her fridge that we thought would be perfect for our space.

Sage and Naomi thought this was extra cool because it was a card from their friend Stephanie, the mastermind behind the “Plaster & Disaster” name (because they weren’t creative enough to come up with their own blog name, apparently). We just liked the card.

Anyway, Sage was willing to sacrifice the cover of the card, but we’re not living in a dorm room so we didn’t want to just tape it to the wall or something. Instead, we wanted a nice, hefty, framed piece of art. But also we wanted it to cost less than $10. Is that so much to ask?

Sage had a scrap of thin wood on hand to use for the backing. We figured we’d use the patented blogger trick of thin pieces of wood or lattice to make an inexpensive frame, so we picked up a long skinny length of balsa wood at a local craft store to frame it out. We used a simple handsaw to cut all the pieces to size.

Next it was time to glue the card art to the backing. We used a thin coat of mod podge.

Then to attach the framing pieces, we used Aleene’s Tacky Glue:

And clamped each parallel set in place while they dried:

And that’s it, we had beautiful framed art perfect for the giant empty space above our sofa!

We love how it turned out, and it was so inexpensive! I don’t know why people are always whining about how costly large art is.

We still have a few tiny finishing touches to do in this room, but we’re getting so close!

It seems that the theme for the blog this week is windows, since Sage shared her living room window update on Monday and now we’re here to talk about our own — much more exciting — window work.

As you may recall from past house photos we’ve shared, our windows are in rough shape. They got a lot of paint on them when Naomi and Sage clumsily painted our home with their giant hands and giant paintbrush:

And even before that they weren’t looking great because they had old layers of paint on them, and the glazing was missing in a lot of places such that you could clearly see the metal brackets holding the window panes in place.

These awful windows were lurking in the back of every photo and generally making the whole house still look unfinished even with our new floors and fresh walls.

We couldn’t quite figure out how to fix the issue, though, since new windows are super expensive and a big undertaking. We tried painting cleaner frames in Madison’s room, but we couldn’t get a clean result:

It seemed like new frames were the way to go, but we were stumped about how to make them with enough precision. Then one day recently, a genius idea struck us: why don’t we make them using posterboard and Sage’s mat-cutting kit?

We figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so we started by measuring one of our windows, cutting a rectangle out of posterboard to the right dimensions, and then drawing out a window frame design. We wanted it to have a little bit of interest, without being so complicated that it would take forever to cut out.

Then we used the mat cutting kit to cut out the interior sections, which is exactly what it’s designed to do.

It took a little while, but we were left with a pretty great result!

Then we popped it into the window we’d made it for, using a tiny bit of glue in each corner to hold it in place. You may have already noticed our handiwork lurking in the back of the stair makeover we shared a few weeks ago!

It was so successful that we did the stairwell, living room, and master bedroom. Eventually we’ll do the rest of the house, but it’s time consuming so we’re taking it in pieces.

The bay window in the living room we did as a single piece, first cutting one big rectangle and then scoring it in thirds so that it would bend to the shape of the window.