Moments Of Sanity In My Madhouse: Avery's Sports Room

My husband and I bought our house on May 3, 2010. It was 3 years old at the time and looks like all the other houses in our neighborhood. The inside of our house was never changed by the previous owner (paint color and such). All of the walls were the same tan color and the cabinets were honey oak all throughout the house. From May 2010 to May 2012 every time I would get the urge to paint or “decorate”, I would talk myself out of it. I didn’t want to personalize the house too much, because I didn’t want it to be hard to sell. I finally have come to the realization that we will be living in southeast Texas (blah!) for a while, so I might as well be happy in my house. I am hoping that decorating and making the house “ours” will make me happier living down here. I am trying to turn our “house” into a “home”.

The first room I decided to change was my son, Avery’s, room. When he was born, we decorated it with jungle things (but did not paint the walls). When he turned a year old, I started collecting sports things for around the room. I took his jungle themed bedding and decor to a local consignment shop in June and began the transition to his sports themed room.

Of course, my first inspiration came from Pinterest. We decided to turn one wall in his room into a baseball. You can find the original pin here. We did not follow the blog exactly. We figured out how far out we wanted the stitches on the wall and cut a string that would reach. I held one end of the string in the corner as my husband took the other (with a pencil tied to the end) and drew the curve on the wall. We went from the bottom left corner and the upper right corner for our baseball. I tried to free hand the stitches on the wall, as the people did in the original blog, but that wasn't working out great. So, my husband grabbed some card stock paper and cut out a stencil of a stitch. We took a small roller, red paint, and the homemade stencil and painted the stitches along the penciled line. We made each stitch roughly 2 inches apart. Then we used a sharpie marker to draw the line that represents where the stitches bring the fabric together

The wall before

Avery helping daddy put marks on the wall

The finished product

We were really pleased with the way it turned out. While my husband was out getting the paint for the baseball wall, I decided to work on a different project. I bought some sports fabric and batting to turn an existing shelf into a bench. It was inspired by this this pin, but I put my own twist on it so that I could use a shelf that we already had.

First, I spray painted it red. It was brown before. To save on spray paint, I only painted the parts that would be showing after it was covered in fabric.

This is the finished product.

I wrapped the bottom part in fabric only, using a staple gun to hold the fabric in place. I then covered the “seat” in batting, stapled, then fabric, and stapled. I was originally going to cut off the fabric that hangs down (shown in the next picture); however, we discovered that it hides the toys underneath!

Avery loves it!

And so does Peanut!

That night I spent 2 ½ hours wrapping Avery’s name letters in the leftover fabric from the bench. This was a very tedious task. It took about 30 minutes per letter. The hardest part was getting the fabric to pull tightly around each corner of the letters.

The letters were jungle themed

Now they are sports themed!

The next day, I finished adding pictures and curtains. Also, I hung the letters on the wall

Before

After

Avery!

We later added super cute curtain rod ends my mom found at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I will try to add a picture of those used in his room later.

After a few days of admiring our baseball wall, my husband suggested painting the wall on the other side of the room as a football. I searched the internet for ideas for doing a football wall, but couldn’t find what I wanted (even on Pinterest!). So, we just decided to get inspiration from a real football and go for it. We made a trip to Wal-Mart to get our supplies. We got a football from the sports department and compared paint strips to find the colors we wanted to use. We bought rollers, painters tape, a sponge (from the craft section, the paint section didn’t have the size we wanted), paint, and the football. We started by drawing a line from the bottom left corner of the wall to the top right corner of the wall to make sure we could line the stitches up straight. (We used some string we had in the garage for that). We then taped off the stitches. This took a couple of tries to figure out what size we thought they should be. And then the painting started.

First, we painted the base color. It didn’t take long using a roller, and we only did one coat of paint. Then, we took the darker brown color to do the dots and used a Sharpie marker to draw the black stitches that go around the white stitches.