Plaster & Disaster

There are tons of of pretty projects on the internet, but these beautiful little clay planters out of oven bake clay kept popping into my head (and my Pinterest feed). It doesn’t hurt that their creator Claire’s photography is unattainably beautiful, but the idea is also intriguing: happy little planters in whatever shape inspires me? Succulents? A return to my elementary school Sculpey days? YES.

(Inspiration via Fellow Fellow)

In dreaming up my own take on the project, I was inspired by the adobe houses that I saw in New Mexico around the holidays. We visit Brad’s grandparents in Albuquerque every year and I love the landscape and the new (to me) shapes of plants and houses.

Adobe Style House from tinyhousedesign.com - Plaster & Disaster

(via Tiny House Design)

I do really love the southwestern look, but other than rugs and art (and fuzzy plastic cacti in the shape of a drunken cowboy OF COURSE) I find it hard to incorporate into my New England home. A pretty clay adobe house planter could take care of that!

Adapting Claire’s simple shapes into an adobe house required some planning – particularly because I wanted to do a more complicated, three tier structure. So I drew up a template for myself in Serif DrawPlus. (See what I did, or use these too, by downloading the two-page template here: Adobe House Planter Template. You’ll get a folder with two image files, ready to print on 8.5×11 paper.)

To do this project, I needed oven-bake polymer clay (affiliate link — read our policies), a rolling pin, my template, various cutting and poking instruments (some pillaged from a local high school), a good surface for rolling and cutting, and a wooden dowel (not shown).

I used the X-ACTO knife to cut out the template pieces and then started to work out the clay, roll it, and cut down to size.

One thing that I apparently forgot from the clay-filled-haze-of-my-youth is how tough Sculpey is out of the box! This stuff needs to be worked out and warmed by hand in small pieces, so it took longer than expected. Still, I didn’t let myself skimp on the clay by rolling the pieces too thin. The structure will need to be sturdy, so I made mine around 1/4 inch thick.

The pieces were pretty floppy once I started to get into the 3-D assembly, so I found it helpful to have some extra surfaces to prop them up against to maintain the structure while I worked. I used a box of scalloped potatoes mix, but you could probably use something else if you don’t have that on hand.

I followed Claire’s instructions for sealing the interior creases to make the planters water tight: I rolled out tiny snakes of clay, poked them into the corners with my various pokey-tools, and then smoothed to form a tight seal. (If you find detail work to be therapeutic, you’ll probably love this project.)

When it came to add the front of the house, I wanted to make space for one of my favorite features of adobe homes – the wooden beams that are often exposed in rows along the top ridge. I had purchased a dowel to use for this purpose, so I used it to punch holes in the clay. On the “house front” I made three along the high edge and four along the lower edge.

Once this final wall was added the structural issues were resolved and the walls were sturdy enough to hold each other up.

Next, I turned my attention to adding the “porch” (really more of an entry way) that sticks out in the front. It was constructed in much the same way, and added three more holes along the front with my dowel.

I spent a little time smoothing out nicks and cleaning up the edges. But a little bit of imperfection in homemade projects is ~~the whole point~~ just par for the course.

Then, it was time to bake! Obviously follow the instructions for the clay you have. For mine, I baked it for about 15 minutes in a 275 degree oven. When the clay comes out it is still a little pliable, but as it hardens as it cools. Apparently this stuff burns easily, so I erred on the side of not burning it.

The next step – and this is important – is to trick your friend and co-blogger into cutting your dowel for you by leaving it in her car and then nagging her about it for a week. I had mine cut to about 3/8 of an inch segments.

The dremel (which Sage used to cut them) darkened the edges along the cut, so I smoothed that out with rough sandpaper as I went.

I was planning on gluing them in, but I found that they fit very snugly in the holes and didn’t need any adhesive.

As it turns out, I was wrong! Once the dowels met the moisture from the potting soil and expanded slightly, I got a few small cracks in my clay because they were in there so tightly. If I were doing this again, I would make holes slightly larger than my dowels, and would set them with caulk or glue with a little flex. I could have also sanded the dowels down a bit so they weren’t in there so tightly.

However, I didn’t know any of that at the time, so once they were in, I declared my project done!

Or almost done, because I obviously needed to buy more succulents and put it to good use.

I filled the bottom of each section with gravel to help with the drainage because succulents are not fond of sitting in water. I definitely could have added drainage holes, but I didn’t think I’d like the look of this sitting on a dish to catch water runoff. I wanted it to be a stand alone piece.

To say that I am crazy about this little planter is… correct. I took many photos in celebration.

I really love the combination of the white clay with the light toned wood. I had thought about staining or somehow darkening the dowels to be more in line with the traditional adobe house look – and I do love high-contrast things – but I like this more “modern” take on the traditional form.

I also really like that it has three levels. It lets me play around with different heights of the succulents, beyond the usual and obvious groupings.

Yes, I absolutely did need an extra shot to pose it with my last succulent planter project, transformed from old thrift store bowls. How can you doubt that?

Thanks to Claire from Fellow Fellow for the inspiration! This project was very fun, let me relive my youth, and satisfied my craving for an adobe-style house, all in one afternoon. Not bad for a little planter!

(Sharing at DIY Showoff, Tip Me Tuesday, One Project at a Time, Whimsy Wednesday, AKA Design, I Heart Naptime, Link Party Palooza, June Before and After, Remodelaholic, Think and Make Thursdays, and Two Uses Tuesday – and featured at Style Motivation, Craft Gossip, Fun Family Crafts and Totally Tutorials.)

When I finished the hallway and stairwell makeover last month, I mentioned that our basement gym was next on the home improvement to-do list. We ended up getting a bit distracted by our yard (planting a hedge and new flower beds), but I’m happy to report that the gym is coming along quite nicely. The other parts of the basement are totally out of control, but the gym is our little haven amidst the madness.

Getting the gym set up was one of our first big projects in the house last fall — we didn’t join a new gym when we moved because we knew we wanted to set up our own (it was on our short list of things we absolutely wanted to have in a new house), and that meant the pressure was on since we didn’t want to go too long without access to a gym. We picked this corner of the basement:
Within our first month in the house, we stocked it up with a bench and rack off of craigslist (which can be used for both benching and squatting), a weight set, a roman chair (affiliate link — read our policies) for back strengthening, a treadmill (affiliate link — read our policies), and some mats.

We also bought a small flatscreen TV to mount on the back wall, which was a lifesaver this winter since I was spending a lot of time on the treadmill and it’s just the most boring activity ever. (Running outside is awesome and the whole reason I run, but running on a treadmill was necessary this winter because the roads and sidewalks were too snowy and icy out in the ‘burbs and I’m a bit skittish about falling having injured myself a few times falling while running in the past.)

Altogether we spent about $1500 on equipment, which certainly isn’t cheap (the treadmill was $700 of that, and is one of the most inexpensive but well-reviewed models I could find). However, when you think about this replacing the cost of gym memberships for two people, it’s not so bad — it actually pays itself off in less than a year, since even the no-frills gyms in Boston are absurdly expensive.

In any case, by late fall our gym was functionally in pretty good shape (pun!), but left a lot to be desired aesthetically:

Creating a home gym -- Plaster & Disaster

View from the bottom of the basement stairs

And from the entryway into the other half of the basement (to the far right in the top photo)

It’s not that our gym needs to be all that attractive — we’re not looking for a spa experience, or something where I feel like my sweaty, uncoordinated self is unworthy. But we just wanted something a little less dark, and we wanted to add wall mirrors since those are so important for working on form and posture while lifting.

Speaking of not that attractive, this post doesn’t not have the most beautiful “after” pictures you’ve ever seen. Taking photos in the basement is hard (low light!), and taking photos with lots of mirrors is equally hard since they reflect back all the not-pretty things still lurking in sprawling across our basement. But hopefully you still enjoy seeing the progress down here! We still have a few things to do, but here’s how it’s looking now: We’re pretty pleased! Here’s how it all went down:

The first step was painting, which Sam decided to do one weekend when I was tied up with other things. I think about 2-hours into cutting in along the ceiling and windows he was wishing he’d waited for me (since I’m usually the one who cuts in while he rolls), but he soldiered on. He did a coat of primer and then two coats of Chantilly Lace (Benjamin Moore) on the wood paneled walls, and then semi-gloss trim paint on the radiator and stone baseboard.

Here’s ghost Sam painting while I take a long exposure photo of him

For the mirrors, I did a bunch of measuring and math and figured out that we could get some standard mirrors from Home Depot that would work fairly well in the space. The window on the back wall makes the dimensions tricky, but I determined that we could get two 60″x36″ mirrors for the left wall and then two 48″x36″ mirrors for the back wall, with one vertical and then one horizontal to fit under the window.

Altogether the mirrors came to $200 (and involved trekking to two different Home Depots because they messed up our online order), but for that amount of mirror that seems like a pretty good deal. We mounted them using the clips included, and it was pretty straightforward (though definitely required two people given their size and unwieldiness).

They really lighten up the space, and also make it feel a lot more like a proper gym.

Another quick project was putting up a curtain across the opening next to the treadmill (which you can see reflected in the photo above). We’ve been using a bookshelf that the seller left behind to block off the space an created more of an enclosed feel, but it looked pretty cluttered.

I want to use the shelf from the other side to store paint and tools when I set up my basement workshop over there, but the shelf doesn’t need to be accessible from the gym side. We don’t want to put up a permanent barrier, though, since it might be nice to have the wide access through from the exterior basement door if needed at any point. Instead, I decided to just put up a curtain rod that I had on hand (from our apartment living room, and without a new home in our house), and then some curtains I also had (from our apartment bedroom).

Please just ignore all the cords coming out of the TV and sound system. The imperfections make me more charming and relatable, right?

I originally planned to use the white curtains we’d had hanging in our apartment living room, but they were so wrinkled after being washed that I couldn’t even iron them smooth. I need to get them steamed I think.

But in the meantime these work okay and tie in with the other turquoise accents I have, like the floating shelves I made for displaying photos. In our apartment we had a bunch of photos from various races up in a the short passage between kitchen and study that we nicknamed “Triumph Alley.”

I liked the idea of doing the same here, since the gym seems like the perfect space for such self-congratulatory photos. Rather than a gallery wall, though, I decided to make some floating shelves so that it’s easy to add and swap out photos as we do more races (because apparently we can’t help ourselves). It feels a little narcissistic to have all those photos of us proudly displaying medals and such, but it’s a really helpful encouragement when getting on the treadmill is the last thing on earth you want to do after a long day. Or after a short day. Let’s be honest, the treadmill is awful all the time. Fortunately now we have this to inspire us:

I made these using scrap wood that I already had on hand from a futon frame we no longer use. I used the full length of the original slats for two of them, and then cut one shorter (on the table saw) to go next to the window. Then I painted them using turquoise paint I already had (“woodsy scent” by Ace). I didn’t use the most sophisticated technique to mount them — I just used small L brackets on top of each shelf, which I knew wouldn’t show once I filled the shelves up with photos.

To mount the brackets on the shelves at the right depth so that the shelves would sit flush with the wall at 90 degrees, I used a piece of plywood to simulate the wall while marking the holes for the brackets on the shelves.

Then to make the brackets even less noticeable, I painted the bottoms of them turquoise to blend in with the shelves, using painters tape to get a clean line.

If I hadn’t been trying to rely on leftover wood and was putting them somewhere other than the basement, I would have figured out something fancier for mounting them. But the brackets worked just fine for my purposes. I couldn’t attach to studs, since the wall is just a .5″ piece of wood paneling on top of the foundation (and I didn’t want to drill into the foundation if I could help it) — but they don’t need to hold anything that heavy, so I’m not worried. I just screwed them right into the paneling, and then arranged some of my favorite photos. Here I pulled out one of the photos so you can see the bracket hidden behind:

I did add a few new photos that we didn’t previously have in our apartment, so I busted out my trusty mat-cutting kit to whip up some custom-sized photo mats for them. It may be a basement gym, but we’re no heathens!

We still have a few projects to do and I think I do want to replace the curtains next to the treadmill, but for now we feel good about where the gym stands. It’s never going to be the prettiest room in the house, but at least now it’s a little less cave-like! Of course we did this right as spring hit and I’m no longer spending so much time down there because I can run outside, but this is Boston — winter will be here again before we know it!