Toy Box Re-do

So I have this old toy box from when my sister and I were kids and I really wanted to reuse it. It's pretty ugly and not well taken care of so I knew I wanted to recover it. I searched Pinterest for some inspiration:

I like how this one has legs on it and two different fabric choices.



I liked how this lid was filled in so it looked softer in case it slammed on your fingers.

 

Well after looking at some inspiration I shortcut what the Pinterest folks did because I was short on energy and just wanted the project completed :) I can always make changes to it later since I only used inexpensive fabric and a staple gun.

Here is where I started.

The toy box is mostly made of particle board so I was afraid if I took off the vinyl fabric the whole thing would fall apart - it is from the 70s/80s so I wouldn't have been surprised. So I decided to re-cover the box right over what was there. That made things super easy!


 



Here is the original box - I forgot to take a pic of it with the lid on before I started my project. It had little bears all over it and a sort of plaid design.



You can see I found this gray outdoor fabric that I decided to use for the bottom of the box. It was on clearance so I got 2 yards for $9 - great deal!

I took off the hinges that connected the lid to the box and put the box on the fabric as the above picture shows. I then decided to cut out squares along each corner so that I could wrap the fabric into the box and not have a horrible looking seam. I had to google how to do this and found some good YouTube videos that gave me the idea. You can kind of see what I cut out in the above picture and below picture as well.

I was playing around with the fabric in this picture and clipping the fabric around to make sure it was going to turnout how I wanted it to. I didn't want to start stapling and have issues.

Final project after folding the fabric into the box and stapling around the edges. I had about 2-3inches where I used the fabric inside the box and stapled it rather than cutting the fabric and stapling right near the top edge of the inside of the box (hope that makes sense). I only had the very small seams on the ends where I folded in the fabric but I think it looks really good!!

Next I had to figure out what to do with the lid. It definitely needed some additional cushioning so I added a piece of 2inch batting to the top (I didn't glue it down or anything - again I was short cutting everything). I just laid the lid down on the batting and then on new fabric I bought (which was also on clearance).

I starting stapling the fabric around the lid  making sure I knew where to screw the hinge back in (in this picture I had just screwed it in). I had left over batting so I added to the inside of the lid so that it wasn't hollow any longer. I think took an extra piece of the fabric and stapled that across where I but the batting.

Another picture of be working with the fabric. What I like about this fabric is it had a lot of difference colors in it so I could use it with a variety of things.

AND THE FINAL REVEAL...which really didn't take me that long in total time even though I did this over several weeks.

I had bought furniture legs to add to the bottom that I was going to screw in and paint but I decided to take those back. I think it's fine without the legs but I can always add those anytime if I want to. I think it turned out great for how easy it was to make! Can't wait to use fill it up and start using it. 

Thankful for...

We have so much to be thankful for this year but one thing in particular is that we have been blessed with a miracle! We are HAVING A BABY! We are super excited about it. AND...we are having a GIRL! We both secretly wanted a girl so it was exciting to find out that it was a she. I got to find out really early (14 weeks) because I did a special blood test called the Harmony test. One of the items they can test for is gender (they pretty much check my blood to see if I have a Y Chromosome in my blood which would mean I'm carrying a boy - there was no Y). It's 99% accurate so I was excited to find out early. Otherwise I would have had to wait until our 20 week ultrasound. The blood test also let us know that we have a healthy baby with no chromosome issues!

Since I was told the gender on the phone I got to do a fun gender reveal for Ryan. It took everything in me not to call him as soon I as found out the news. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops but I calmed myself down and came up with a plan.

I ran out to a local cupcake shop at the mall. I was just going to get a cupcake with pink frosting on the top BUT they were nice enough to make me a gender reveal cupcake while I waited. They put the pink frosting inside the cupcake so Ryan would have to take a few bites to get an answer :) I then went to Babies R Us and got  a cute outfit to wrap up in a gift bag for him to open. Here are some of the pics from that day.

Of course I bought one for myself to eat as well. YUMMY!

This is the card I wrote for Ryan to open first

 

Here he was opening and reading the card. He had no idea what was going on since I didn't tell him I should be getting the blood test results back today!

It took more than a bite or two to get to the frosting but there it is - PINK!

 

And I couldn't resist this cute set of outfits with little pink pants. So sweet!

We also were super motivated so we have made some progress on the nursery as well. That will be on the next blog post but here is a preview - I'll post more on how we got to this point in another post!

 

More posts to come...

I haven't posted in awhile but I'll have a bunch of updates to post over the next week so be on the look out. I'll link my posts to Facebook for easy access! :)

More to come.