Last week I got inspired to take the crib down and refashion it into something different.  As usual my inspiration came from Pinterest and I wrote briefly about it here before starting the project.

This was my inspiration:

Its such a great use for a piece of furniture that can no longer be used for its original intent.

In our case we were given a crib by my mom in the hopes that my son would sleep in it.  Well that never happened so we have had an assembled crib just hanging out in Sophie’s room for months unused.  The moment I saw this picture I knew we had to recreate it with our crib.

Because the crib we were working with is a drop side the process was extremely easy to make it into a desk for the kiddos.  After disassembling the whole thing so I could get it down the stairs I set it back up only to take it apart a few times.  Sometimes it is better to take a minute and think through your project instead of just jumping in full force.  Thankfully it is really quite easy to take apart so it didn’t delay my project all that much.

I debated just leaving the springs in the base of the crib but decided to just take them out so the board would sit flat.  It took a bit of work by myself and my husband to get the springs out but once we did it was ready for the desktop.

Just a side note, those chairs I scored on the side of the road at a school not far from where we live.  There were piles of them from what I can only assume is the result of getting all new chairs for the school.  I was just lucky to be driving by because within a few hours they were all gone.  I scored 4 of them!

Back to the refashion for the week.  Other than the finishing details the only thing that needed to be done was a desk top so off to Home Depot the kids and I went.  I am not sure about any of you but taking two kids to Home Depot dangerously close to nap time when both are recovering from sickness is not one of my better plans.  But we pushed ahead and got amazing help from the lady in the lumber department and we were out of there as fast as possible.

Sophie was in charge of picking the chalkboard paint colour for the desktop, and it was no surprise that she went with pink.  The pink option was more of a raspberry colour but it didn’t matter to her as long as the end result was pink.

After 3 quick coats of paint we were in business.  I am the worst when it comes to paint and this is probably why I end up with peeling paint sometimes.  I rarely wait the suggested amount of time between coats.  In the case of the chalkboard paint it said to wait 4 hours between coats.  Considering I wanted to get this project done today there was no time for 4 hours between coats so I settled on 3 coats in 4 hours 🙂  We will see how it holds up, and if it doesn’t I will just paint it again.

Sophie was napping while I finished up this project so I was excited to surprise her when she woke up with her new desk.  She has been asking me for days to go get the wood to finish it so I knew she would be excited to see it.  Here is the finished product, for now that is.  I can’t decide whether I want to paint the crib or not so for now it is staying the original wood tone, but that might change in the future.

She absolutely loved it and kept mentioning that it was pink.  As soon as Sean got home she told him about the pink paint and then had to show off her desk.  It was very cute.

I would like to add more organizational things to the desk but for now we have a fun corner of the dining room for the kids to draw, paint and create that is all their own.

I am not sure that sweet boy could be any cuter.  He was just sitting there watching Sophie paint.