DIY Space Divider

….We have been so delighted when we were approached by the talented team at Martha Stewart to compete for an opportunity to join the ”12 Months of Martha Stewart Crafts Team”. As part of the plan, Bloggers get a month-to-month box of Martha’s newest and hottest craft product, develop some thing incredible, and post about it on their sites. These projects are promoted  on the @MarthaStewart Pinterest board and MarthaStewart.com. All we required was a point of inspiration, so I looked about my home for some thing that would be functional as well as aesthetic and soon identified anything that was long overdue to be tackled.

My husband and I have both the convenience, and inconvenience, of functioning from home, in quite various careers. We share a light-filled, lofty, space on the 3rd floor of our suburban NJ residence. In common, the pros do outweigh the cons when both partners are residence-primarily based and operating, but we desperately required something to divide our office regions and give a sense of privacy and definition of workspace – without losing all of the luminosity we enjoy from opening the space up when we remodeled. So, Michelle and I decided to produce a stylish, yet cost-effective, area divider and create it ourselves from scratch, to serve as a distinct border in between the two offices. Sounds ambitious, right? In fact, it was surprisingly effortless and cost-effective – and not to mention a lot of entertaining. Here’s how we did it…..

1) Wooden Dowel rods (we selected 3 distinct sizes, by thickness)
2) Eye screws (the smallest we could uncover in the nearby arts and crafts shop)
3) Aluminum jump rings (12mm size)
4) Martha Stewart Crafts™ Gloss Spray Paint Kit
5) Martha Stewart Crafts™ Sprayable Gloss Enamel Finish
6) Martha Stewart Crafts™ Multi-Surface Glow-in-the-Dark Acrylic Paint
7) Martha Stewart Crafts® Stains

Here’s a stroll-through of the approach:

We had an old patio garden table we didn’t mind to function on with paints and supplies and stained the dowel rods by wiping on the stain with a cloth and leaving them to dry. If you don’t have an old table, make confident to put down dust sheets or newspaper whenever you use paints and stains.

Masking / Painter’s tape is the very best strategy for covering any regions that you do NOT want to colour or stain.

We then produced a makeshift ‘dryer’ from an old plastic tub and created a grid from the painter’s tape to avoid the painted rods from sticking collectively. We then applied the spray paint to the sticks, using the white paint with 1st and permitted them to dry. Note that you may possibly need to apply a couple of layers of spray paint for a clean,constant, finish.

Repeat the last two measures for any other color you would like to introduce to your project. We chose colors that are quite present, i.e. dark wood with white contrast and a splash of luminous pink.

As soon as the paint is dry, basically remove all of the masking / painter’s tape and start fixing the eye screws in 2 at the bottom and 2 at the best (for our project we measured 1.5″ from the edge, which was also at the paint line on a single finish of each dowel rod). A great tip to support you with fixing the eye screws in spot is to use a micro phillips-head screw driver (we improvised and did it this way), or far better nonetheless a Bradawl (we couldn’t discover ours), to make a tiny hole in which to commence fixing the eye screw. This will save your fingers feeling like you just went 15 shelves deep with Ikea’s finest.

We connected the rods, via the eye screws, with 3 12mm jump rings, but you can decide on whatever amount you feel is proper. As a rough rule of thumb, the thinner the dowel the less rings you would want to location amongst them so you do not shed the feeling of one thing physical in between the rooms.

We then stained a piece of wood that we had measured to the desired length of the 3 columns of rods, with some space in between each column. Utilizing nylon fishing line, we connected the columns of rods to the leading piece of wood and voila! – we had a beautiful space divider. From commence to finish, with out taking into consideration time to collect the components or for the paint to dry, it took around two hours to prep and full the project. If you started in the morning, on a warm sunny day, as we did, you can be installed and placing the drill down in a single day!

The bonus for us was when we realized that when we’re bored with the color scheme, or just seeking to alter, we think this project would make an outstanding statement as a piece of wall art. It was a lot of entertaining, supplies a lot of function and style, but most of all – it was straightforward and affordable!