Flourish & Blotts

There was nearly an 8 month pause for the kitchen remodel.  During that time my folks came home from their mission in Uruguay and my dad helped me kick-start this bedroom project back into high gear.  Most of what follows has happened in the last month.

My dad helped get the shell of the bookshop's bay window ready for finishing.

I had made the the books months before and was so excited to get a glimpse of what the finished project would look like that I staged it within a few hours of painting the wall.  Gilderoy Lockheart and his book collection front and center!

I thought the bay window was a little plain so I added more decorative wood trim and corbels underneath.  This picture also shows the window complete over the door.  I also felt that it was all too yellow so I ended up repainting the bay and the door a brown color (see future pics).

Next was to stencil the Flourish & Blotts logo.  I had to pull out all of the books, curtains etc. to get ready for more painting.  Making this sign was a really extensive & time consuming process but the end result was well worth it!  1st I applied transfer tape to the sign area.  Then I found a logo that was similar to the F&B logo from Universal and sized it for the sign in Photoshop.  I printed it out and then traced the backside of the lettering with a graphite pencil, adding embellishments to the logo to help it match the Unviersal Studios version more closely.  Then I measured and taped the printed logo to the transfer tape and rubbed a pencil across the printed letters which caused the pencil outline on the backside to rub off onto transfer tape.  From there I cut out the outline of the logo and spray painted the exposed areas with gold paint as shown in this picture.

The end result was this.  But the original logo had 2 sets of crossed quills so after this dried added those.

Added more transfer tape and stenciled on the quills as described before.

Cut out the quills and painted them.

Viola!  The sign is finished.

Here it is with repaint.  I also added 4 panels to the door to make it look more like and outside door.  I played with several methods of distressing/aging and came out with a look I was fairly happy with.

Next was to add lighting.  I took 12 volt LED lights and taped them to some stiff wire so I could aim them where I wanted.  All of what you see here will end up being hidden under some cloth and will shine through this shelf to illuminate the books on the lower part of the bay window.

These are the upper bay LED lights.  Stiff wire in a candy cane shape to allow me to aim the light better.

Lights on and window in.  Looking good!

Added the roofing.  Now to age the wall.

3 squirt bottles with different colors and a few rags make this wall look 200 years old.

And here is my 1st wall done with a few minor exceptions.  I still need to add the cross hatching in the window.  I am debating adding a rain gutter drain spout to add to the outdoor look, and I may add a hanging sign.  But I will revisit those possibilities later.  For now I am moving on.

Prepping Olivander's Wand Shop.  I plan on stacking most of the black area bottom to top with wand boxes as though they were shoved into the front window for display.  most of them will be faux boxes but a few will be real 1/2 open boxes with some of them revealing wands.

A wand I made using a chopstick, some wood beads, hot glue, and paint.  You can also get a glimpse of the potion bottles we had collected for Slug & Jigger's Apothecary.

We begin wrapping various cuts and sizes of wood into what will be a large stack of wand boxes.  We will add labels to these and antique them to add to the aging effect.

Added the street lamp.  I was going to wait til after I had painted but we needed the light.  I'll have to take it down to paint later.

The beginning framing of Slug & Jigger's Apothecary.

That is as far as I have taken it.  We are up-to-date now.  Things are coming together and I hope within a couple months to be able sign off on this project.  But the devil will be in the details.  Details take time, and my only time is nights and weekends.

DIAGON ALLEY.... BEDROOM EDITION

 Several people have told me I need to post my progress of this project and so here goes.

It was my belief that most kids growing up wanting their own room.  With 9 kids that is almost impossible.  But for our eldest we made that happen.  What surprised us was that once she had her own space she would never sleep there.  We asked why she never slept in her own room and she said she didn't like being all alone.  We opted to give the room to another kid but they all preferred to sleep in the same room.  Weird huh?

After some discussion, Tara and I decided take down the wall between two of downstairs bedrooms and make one big room to sleep all 5 girls together.  The kids were excited about the idea.  We talked about how to decorate the room and that is when the ideas started getting out-of-control.  We ended up drawing out a floor-plan for a Harry Potter themed room.  We zeroed-in specifically on Diagon Alley.  Universal Studios had recently opened Harry Potter World in Orlando and we used some of the pictures available on the web as inspiration.

This blog is meant to be a place to see the process of creating this room.  I didn't start the room with any intention of doing this so this first post will be a photo dump of everything I could find from my wife and I's cameras as well as descriptions of what I have done to-date.  Let the photo dump begin!

This is the only photo I have of one of the original bedrooms.  I demo'd the wall on the right opening it up to the neighboring bedroom.

Wall is torn out along with the carpet.  My goal was to get the 'bed' part of the bedrooms put back together as soon as possible.  The kids slept on the couches, floors, or wherever they happened to zonk out until beds could be put back together for them.

Here is a better picture showing both bedrooms now as one large room.  Bunk-bed frames can be seen leaning over by the closet.

The 4 bunk-beds get framed.  Top ones shown here.  The window to one bedroom gets framed in and sheet rocked over.

The 4 beds are framed and sheet rocked.  The outer store framing begins to take shape.  the 2 square holes in the sheet rock are bed/cubby hole entrances.  The platform to the left leads to Maile's bed up top and Katrina's mini-door is underneath.  The rounded framing is the someday Olivander's Wand shop.

A more close-up view of the bed cubby entrances.

Closet space around the corner from Cecily's nook.  We recently decided to demo the closet wall and enclose that whole back corner to make it a walk-in closet.

A head-on view of  Flourish & Blott's someday storefront.  Also the entrance to Cecily's bedroom nook.  It will only be large enough for a twin sized bed and end table and a small dresser.

My kitchen remodel project was to start in less than a month and I wanted to get them back in their own beds so I rushed to finish their bedroom nooks.  Here is the inside hall behind Olivander's. The backside of the shop is a sitting area (right side) and Shara's nook shelves can be seen on the left.

first coat of primer then paint.  Painting the bedroom nooks white so the kids can decorate their nook with posters or whatever suits their fancy.

Outside Olivanders.  This design took it's inspiration from the Olivander's shop at Universal.

Logan tries out Vivian's nook.

Another shot of the two nooks with shelves.

Maile's platform ready for carpet.

Maile's bed nook is ready for sleepin'.  

I put LED strip lights in every bed nook.  Each has its own remote to control on/off, dimming and colors.  256 shades of color to be exact.

Each of the 4 nooks has a shelf to put their nick-knacks on.

Katrina's nook has her own mini-door and walk/crawl space.  Cecily painted a creeper (Minecraft monster) as a mural on the wall for her.

Everyone was excited to see it done!

Cecily's Nook is really a small bedroom.

I got the rooms done before I had to start the kitchen so I started in on the wall effects for the outside shops of Diagon Alley.  This is where the shop window will go.

I began framing in the shop window and did the 1st layer of brick and plaster effects.

Cecily cut sheets of insulation Styrofoam into brick sized pieces and Summer came over to help squish the faux bricks into place.  I don't have pictures of me making the rectangular pieces have the 'brick' look but it involved me and a plumbers blowtorch.  I lightly waved the blowtorch across the edges of the Styrofoam and it would shrink the edges to give it the aged brick look.  Did the same for random parts of the brick to complete the look.

That is all the further I got before I had to quit to start the kitchen project.  That project can be seen on my other blog.  I will do another post immediately following this one catch-up with this room post-kitchen remodel.