Epic fail on so many fronts: new bed, chiang mai

This weekend was incredibly busy, what with painting Princess's dresser,  packing up my house, and various projects that crashed and burned.

Epic fail #1:

About two weeks ago I bought a headboard off craigslist.  I went to pick it up, and found myself at this veritable barn of furniture.  The woman selling it was a realtor and had an industrial storage space full of stuff she used to stage houses. I bought the headboard, but also wandered around the barn looking at her other stuff.  Back in a far room, I found the bedframe that matched the headboard.  

I debated about buying the frame, but one of the reasons I wanted a new bedframe was so that we could utilize some underbed storage in the new house.  (Our old bedframe was a platform style that did not allow for underbed storage.)  The bedframe seemed a bit low, so I passed them at the time.

Fast forward to this weekend, I sold our platform bed on craigslist.  The new headboard has a weird hinge for fastening to a bedframe, so I thought rather than mess around figuring out how to attach it to another frame, I will just contact that woman and buy the matching frame and put it up on risers or something.

You'll notice that nowhere in there did I mention measuring the bed. 

Dun dun dun.....

We pick up the bedframe for $50. We stop at a hardware store to get new hinge pins for $11.  We get home. We clean the bed and put it together.  It looks great!  We pull our never-used box springs out from behind the enormous pile of crap in the garage.  We are now super hot and sweaty.  We put the box springs on the bed....

and they don't fit.  The box spring is about three inches too long for the frame.  

We think, hmm, mabe this is supposed to rest on top of the frame, instead of being cradled inside the frame?  We attempt that. We put the mattress on top.  I sit on the mattress.  The mattress comes crashing down and things sound like they are breaking.  

Ok, that wasn't it.  We spent much time trying to figure out how we might easily and inexpensively rig the bedframe to fit, but essentially every fix involves cutting parts off and rebuilding, and ugh, forget it, we are not Ana White.  I will take the $61 loss and move on.  

It did not even occur to me that a vintage king size bed might not fit a modern king size box spring and mattress.  LESSON LEARNED.  

So, we will be buying another bedframe from west elm to go with the new headboard, but for the moment, since we are moving in two weeks, we are sleeping with the mattress on the floor like broke college students.  

Epic fail #2:

After talking about my chiang mai dragon inspired bedroom, I sat down and thought, what can I do to get that pattern in my bedroom?  I love how this painted chiang mai wall has such an oversize scale--I want that.  Just ordering a piece of fabric and framing it won't give me that big of a focal point, even though the pattern repeat is pretty large.  So I came up with the brilliant idea of painting it myself on canvas.

But Lisa--we didn't know you were an artiste!

I'm not.  I can't draw my way out of a paper bag.  

I spent much of last week running around to various art stores.  One day I bought a projector.  You can get pretty awesome projectors with large magnification areas for about $500.  Hahaha. Not in my budget. I bought a $50 projector.  The salesperson at the art store said "This projector is a piece of sh*t, by the way." 

Thanks! I'll let you know how it works out!

I took it home, it blew stuff up just fine.  Only problem was it could only blow up a 3x3 area at a time with 5x magnification, and I wanted to cover a 36x48 canvas.  So I copied the chiang mai pattern, isolated the part I wanted to replicate, printed it out, made a grid on the paper, and made a matching grid on the canvas.  

Unfortunately, I could not get the pictures to line up appropriately on the canvas.  The magnification of the picture was a few inches short of the size of the canvas.  If my canvas had been smaller it might have worked.  Perhaps someone who does not have to ask her sister to do the math for her might be able to make it work.

I gave up on that particular version.  I haven't given up on getting that pattern in my bedroom, and I have a different solution I'm hoping will work.  Hopefully in the next month or two I'll post that. If it works. But for now I have to stop wasting time and money on crap that isn't working and finish packing up our stuff.