Crib turned Craft Station!

To VOTE head on over here and scroll through the bottom of the projects and click on the blue vote now. I'm #10  Thanks!!

I can't believe I'm back for week 2 of American Crafter!! All of the contestants are SO talented! I have been having so much fun with this contest. It really makes you dig into the creativity bin from within! But so far, this has to be my all time favorite project. This week the theme was "KIDS" so I just knew that my kids would be thrilled to know that they would benefit from what ever I chose to make. A couple of months ago, while searching Pinterest, I saw this:

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How creative is that?! Well, I love a Pinterest challenge (as you might already know from this post), and this was the perfect time to take this one on!! I had a crib in the garage that someone had given to me for my daughter, but it was a drop front crib, so I was nervous to use it.

It really is a nice crib and had I thought about it before getting my daughter a different one, I could have just put brackets on the front so that it wouldn't go up and down. Good thing I didn't though! Because now it looks like this:

Here are the supplies I used and what I did to achieve this:
a crib
ASCP Pure White
ASCP Graphite
Valspar gloss luscious green spray paint
Krylon Chalkboard Spray Paint
Sanding blocks fine/medium
grow grain ribbon
Sharpie Oil-Based Medium Point Paint Marker
dark wax
chalk
2 chairs
polyurethane
plywood
circular saw
2 hinges
4 corner brackets
painters tape
hot glue
glue gun

I don't have pictures of the entire process because I ended up in a time crunch, but I'm sure you can picture it. I started by painting the sides of the crib with the pure white and wanted them to be distressed a good amount. Then I spray painted the back with the green spray paint. (I'll warn you, I have a lot of pictures!!)

This crib had a slide out drawer which is what I used for the table. I painted it with Graphite and used dark wax to seal it. All of these things were easy! It would be the table top that would be the challenge. My friend had a huge piece of press board that she didn't need, and I knew that would save me quite a bit of money, so I was determined to make it work. I set the drawer on top of it and traced the size I needed, leaving about an inch in the front to have an area for the kids to be able to lift it up. Using a circular saw (for the first time!) I cut it down to size.

It obviously doesn't have a finish on it that could be sanded smooth, and splinter free. So my options were to cover it with something hard and smooth, or figure out something else. Since I didn't have anything on hand to cover it with, I had to think of the something else. I decide to put multiple coats of polyurethane on it to "fill in" and seal the wood

To my surprise, it worked!! So now that the wood was smooth (for the most part), I sprayed 2 areas with the chalkboard paint.

Using painters tape, I taped off the 2 sections that I wanted for the chalkboards and painted the rest with ASCP Pure White. I decided not to seal any of the top, so technically the entire thing is a chalkboard. 

Since this is for my son and daughter, I wanted to give them each their own area. Using the ribbon that had pink in it, I framed one side for my daughter Drew, and using a brown ribbon with blue polka dots, I framed the other side for Nick. (Sorry there aren't pictures of any of these steps) Then using the hinges, I attached it to the drawer, so they could use the drawer for storage! Now it was time to turn the crib into a craft station. Since the kids aren't so little anymore, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't only high enough for them to use now, but to be able to use it for quite some time. I drilled new holes into the sides of the crib and bolted on L shaped corner brackets. Then I was able to just set the "table" onto the brackets and secure it all with screws underneath.

That took care of the table, but now they needed somewhere to sit! I have a pretty big collection of chairs to redo, so that was no problem! These would be perfect!

I used 2 coats of ASCP Graphite and with a Sharpie Paint Pen I put their names of the back. And tada.....they have a great space to do their homework and crafts!!

 I loved doing this project so much! And the kids are THRILLED with it!! I hope you like it as well! You can see it at naptimecrafters.com  and I would LOVE  it if you would vote for it! The contest is based on votes, so I can use ALL the help I can get!! Voting is open NOW! :-) I hope to make it to next week and show ya what I come up with! Thanks so much for stopping by! I would love to hear what you think!!

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