[music]
So, for the past 21 years, I've been waiting for HGTV to give me my own room makeover show and..
It hasn't quite happened yet. So, in the meantime, I'm just doing as many room makeovers as I possibly can.
I promise I am working on my own apartment makeover,
but I am being such a little anal-
I don't- nope, that wasn't the right word to call myself.
I mean, a bit of a perfectionist about it.
So, in the meantime, I'm making over David's bedroom,
which is like middle-school-Ashley: a little ugly, confused, and desperately in need of a glow up.
So without further ado,
I'm heading over to Home Depot to play my favorite game of
"How Long Can I Shop For Hardware Without Getting Harassed and/or Patronized by 60-Year-Old Men?"
The answer is: usually not that long.
I love this game... so much!
Uh, let's get started!
[music]
First, we're gonna redo the floors with some hardwood.
We're gonna get some paint to repaint the walls.
We're gonna build some shelves out of some wood and some 6-inch steel nipples.
Yes, that is what they're called.
And,
we're gonna fill some holes with some caulk.
Drywall caulk, that is.
Okay. I promise I'm done now.
[music]
Come over here-
Hi, I'm David.
Room on 3, room on 3!
1, 2, 3! ROOM! (ROOM!)
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First and foremost, we are getting rid of this ugly-ass carpet.
As some of you might know, carpets and frats are not a good mix.
Do you think there's a whole handle of vodka inside this carpet- can you wring it out?
I think there's at least 4
[laughter]
You can probably drink that and get REaL drunk
Let's RIP this baby up!
[music]
David's frat has two cats that are named Chad and Brad
Alright, the carpet and the carpet liner have all been removed.
Underneath we found a disturbing amount of mold so we picked up-
these masks.
Oh, let's do a Home Depot try on haul!
So I really like the blue accent strap on this,
I think it would pair really well with just like a simple pair of denim
or maybe like a twirly skirt for that industrial feminine
juxtaposition.
Okay, let's get to
Disinfecting!
--Because we love not getting respiratory diseases from mold.
yEaH
[music]
NoOoOooo
Alright, next up, we have to install our laminate flooring
so installing hardwood is basically like putting together a puzzle-
Except it's a giant puzzle that covers your entire floor,
you can't start with the corners,
you have no reference image,
and you have to cut your own pieces yourself.
So just like the worst puzzle you could possibly imagine
So the first part is kind of easy; laminate planks come with these interlocking edges,
so all you have to do is slide in the horizontal edge and then press down the plank
to lock it in place.
It gets a little bit complicated when you get to the edges,
which is where you need to cut the planks to size
I used a knife and this right angle thingy to mark where I needed to make a cut.
Luckily, at the frat they have a circular saw,
but they do not have any clamps.
So instead, we're weighing it down with a gallon of paint
and another box of laminate
because you do what you gotta do
Probably don't do this at home
After miraculously emerging with my appendages still attached,
I locked our freshly cut piece in place.
There you go. Now we just continue that for
seven more hours until our entire floor is covered.
And from there on out, it was a pretty simple rinse and repeat process,
with the exception of this special 90-degree piece
We had to cut to fit around the edge of the L-shaped room.
You know you've been working hard when your boobs
are literally just completely covered in sawdust.
And David hasn't even been touchin' 'em.
[music]
The last piece... David's doing the honors
[angelic sound effect]
I gotta say, for two people who have absolutely no
experience in construction whatsoever
and who were cutting wood literally with a bucket of paint as a clamp,
I think it came out pretty well.
As long as you don't look at the edges of this floor,
which came out a little bit janky because I just didn't measure everything perfectly
But luckily I have our friend- aAah
I have THIs which is called a quarter round
It is essentially like a band-aid for the edges of your wood or just like a really good full coverage concealer
You know?
I measure out each side of the room and then marked on my moulding where I wanted to make a cut
After playing another fun game of
"Will Ashley and David Lose a Finger Today?
Who the Hell Knows?"
we nailed the molding into place with some small finishing nails
and I got to say we also kinda nailed
ba-dum tss~
this hardwood installation, if I may say so myself. (Oh, yeah.)
[music]
Hello, and welcome to probably the jankiest wall in this entire room,
this is a pure styrofoam wall-
it has a ton of holes in it. It's half painted black, half green.
It's silver up top.
Really weird situation.
So, I figured, what better way to cover up styrofoam than with more styrofoam?
This is my precious little baby from my last room makeover
I spent like two days burning this brick pattern into a piece of styrofoam
and probably lost a lot of brain cells to Styrofoam fumes,
but let's not think about that right now.
Anyways, a couple months ago. I moved out of my old apartment
and I'm looking for a new home for my styrofoam baby.
And I figured this would be the perfect thing for David's wall.
I think he'll be a good adoptive father
and I'll get visiting rights occasionally when I come to see him
and then I can be
reunited with my baby.
Yes, I am strangely attached to a piece of styrofoam, okay? But I spent a long time making it.
To install my faux brick wall
I trimmed the styrofoam to size with a box cutter
and then nailed it into place with some small finishing nails.
If you don't conveniently have some old faux brick laying around from a past apartment makeover,
they also sell pre-made faux brick sheets at Home Depot that you can buy and apply this same technique to.
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Lo and behold, there was another weird styrofoam patch on the other side of the room.
Since this is a smaller patch,
I just ended up smoothing out the holes with an aggressive amount of drywall spackle.
This is like the same stuff that you use to fill a little nail hole in the wall,
except I was filling like 10 cubic feet worth of
wall-swiss-cheese.
And to finish off the day,
we finally covered up the ten different
infuriating half-ass paint jobs on this room
with one full juicy ass of a paint job
[music]
Hello, and welcome to day two of our room makeover
Today, we are tackling David's true nemesis
this fucking cabinet system.
[David] I hate them. They're terribly painted.
They're an utter waste of space.
[Ashley] Basically, David has been itching to tear out these cabinets for so long,
but, whoever built them put them in so sturdily.
They're like, on a platform, they're painted in by like ten layers of paint,
they're nailed in-
Tackling the whole cabinet system...
A little too much for us today.
[Ashley] So, [David] Yeah [Ashley] Cabinets - 1, David and Ashley - 0
So, we settled for just tearing out this little bottom section
since this is by far the most
awkward storage space and we're gonna turn it into a little kitchenette area.
There is conveniently an outlet right over here,
so David can plug in his fridge,
we're gonna build him some shelves.
As for the rest of the cabinets, even though we have to keep the frame,
we're gonna clean them up, paint them, make them look a lot nicer,
so hopefully you'll be able to look at them and not be super infuriated.
[David] Okay [Ashley] Just mildly infuriated.
Let's get
demolishing
[music... and hammer banging sounds]
Cabinets - 0, David - 1
All right, time to get painting
for the second time.
And I'm gonna get into my painting outfit.
I have no idea whether that transition was horrible...
[music]
Welcome to our third and hopefully final day of this room makeover.
David is off to work today,
so, that just leaves you and me to put the finishing touches on this room.
First up, probably the easiest step of this entire room makeover is gonna be
switching out David's bedsheets
I bought him these ones from Target, which remind me of my fashion icon: "Bananas in Pajamas."
Changin' 'em out in one, two, three
That's probably a really awkward cut-
I gotta get better at those.
But here are the new bed sheets!
Since they're a lighter color
they're gonna help open up the room a little bit and make it look bright and spacious.
And now, it is our pleasure to present:
an extremely amateur woodworking tutorial with Ashley.
Fun fact about David is that he has not owned a desk since he lived in the UCLA dorms..
freshman year.
And that was like.. five years ago at this point?
I honestly have no idea how he's been productive for the past five years without a desk...
I think the answer is a lot of adderall.
..Ashley--
So, today I came up with a floating wall-to-wall desk design
First of all, I think it's gonna be great for space optimization.
Second of all, I just am not that good at woodworking,
so I came up with the simplest design possible.
To build this desk,
you will need
For me, that's seven feet.
(Also the length of your wall.)
Essentially, we're creating a little frame around the wall that our desktop can rest on.
So first, I'm drilling pilot holes into my wood with
a drill, then attaching the wood to the wall with 3-inch long screws
You really want to use some long bois and screw a lot of them~
I need to stop,
it's getting annoying at this point.
You really want to use a generous amount of screws
So your desk is extra sturdy and it won't, like, casually rip out of the wall
and crush you.
Cons of buying the cheapest drill
possible off of Amazon is
that my drill bit got stuck in this piece of wood and it will not come back out.
I've tried like reattaching it, tightening it...
She's stuck.
So, you do what you got to do. I just have another piece of wood,
I've drilled a hole that matches up with this drill bit, and we're just gonna put it on top, screw it in place...
Nobody'll be the wiser.
[music]
After my little frame was all finished, I painted it white so it would blend more seamlessly into the wall.
Next, it's time to lay down our large planks that act as the tabletop,
and then stain them a nice, deep, poopy brown color that
matched the floors perfectly
[music]
For the finishing touch in David's little office corner,
I framed these 50s ads for him.
I found these at a vintage t-shirts store and it really made me want to save magazines from
like, nowadays or my magazines from the 2000s because one day
Hipster trash little kiddos like me are gonna pick them up and think that they're super cool.
[music]
In David's last room, he pretty much kept all of his stuff in a giant pile underneath his bed,
so in this room I thought I'd help David stay a little bit more organized
by giving each of these cabinets a specific theme,
instead of just having it like a giant area for general stuff.
So, for our closet cabinet, this conveniently already comes with a bar for hanging clothes.
Now, I wanted to switch out this bar for a really cool industrial pipe detail
that would look a lot more fancy than this, like, random piece of wood...
But, again, whoever built this cabinet did too damn well.
This thing is, like, stuck in here. It's not coming out.
So instead I'm gonna kinda do a poor man's pipe,
which is basically just painting this piece of wood with a glossy black paint.
Nobody's actually gonna think it's a pipe, but I figured would be a nice contrast
detail and it would match with this black cabinet below.
[music]
Hello, and welcome to this middle section,
which will soon be a little kitchenette area.
David and I already moved his mini fridge into the bottom of this cabinet,
but obviously this needs a little bit more storage to hold all of his food.
We're gonna kind of do like an open
pantry concept.
Which is just a really obnoxious way of saying that I'm gonna build two shelves into this wall.
I wanted to do this kind of industrial, like, manly vibe since the rest of the room is so light...
stereotypically, like, you're gonna want a couple dark accents in a male-themed room
I don't know, societal standards of gender are very strange.
So, for these shelves
I've already stained a piece of wood this lovely dark color that matches our hardwoods that we installed earlier
and I'm gonna attach them to
the wall with this industrial
This is literally just plumbing pipes that I attached together.
I love how plumbing is considered aesthetic now.
These brackets are pretty self-explanatory to attach, but I will explain nonetheless.
I lined up the brackets to the wall, marked where I needed to drill with a pen,
and then drilled some small pilot holes
so that my screws could slide in nice and easily into the wall.
Then screw those babies in, put the wood on top, and there you go.
Now you have some nice industrial shelves that didn't cost, like, $120 at West Elm.
I also picked up a couple little sealing hooks for extra storage solutions. Oh, yeah!
I'm basically gonna screw this into the ceiling and then David's pans can hang all fancy-like.
And I also screwed in some smaller hooks to hold David's cooking utensils.
[music]
Finally we have this bedside cabinet that's kind of gonna be David's bedside desk area.
David wanted me to install this mirror for, um,
bedside activities.
That's all I'm gonna say about that.
Also really nice to have a mirror right across from a window
because it ~reflects the light~ and that makes the whole room look more
spacious and light.
And of course, a Bestdressed™ room makeover would not be complete
without a frankly absurd number of plants.
I actually handmade this little macramé plant hanger.
Recently, I've developed an unhealthy obsession with macramé.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's just therapeutic as hell,
and macrame string was cheaper than my copay on a therapist,
so, I'll take it.
Anyway, I digress. Here's a plant to keep David company.
[music]
The one thing I have no idea how to fix in this room is how ugly this AC unit is and how it's, like,
duct-taped into the wall. Frankly, if it was me,
I probably just take the AC unit out altogether and suffer for the aesthetic.
But David is not as fucking crazy as I am.
So instead, I have a plant to kind of dress up this corner and cover at least a little bit of the AC unit and...
Well, we'll just leave it at that.
And over in this corner, which is right underneath David's TV,
I thought I would install two more shelves basically in the exact same style that I did in the kitchen.
I have some
thicc bois.
These are 1-inch, really cheap planks of wood that I stained a dark color so they look a little bit more boujee.
Then I got my pipe nipples that I can poke out of the wall.
[music]
All right, I think that just about completes this room.
I'm gonna go get David, and I'll show you and him the finished product.
I think it came out really well. I'm really excited.
I'm so sorry.
[Ashley] Ready? [David] Mhm [Ashley] 1, 2, 3
[David] Wow... wow! Wow..
That's so good.
[music]
[Ashley] Do you actually like it or are you just acting for the video?
[David] No, I was gonna try and act and make a joke, but I can't 'cause it looks so good. [Ashley] Hehe~ Yay!
[David] Gosh
It looks so good
Oh...
Do you think we can change it back to carpet?
[laughter]
I didn't think it would look that different but the finishing touches, like, really... finished it up.
[Ashley] Yeah. No, I feel like the last 10% looks like 80%.
With the 20/80 rule, like the last 20% looks like 80% of the work.
We still have to buy you a chair, but maybe we'll go thrifting for that another day.
[David] Ah, I love it.
[Ashley giggles]
[David giggles]
[Ashley] Yay.
[David] Thank you, I love it.
I hope this inspires you guys to makeover your room or your dorm or your apartment.
You know, you don't have to like replace the hardwood in your apartment, but,
change those bed sheets, hang a picture,
make a little macramé plant hanger-
I don't know.
[David] How do you feel? Do you feel more ready to finally make that apartment makeover, babe?
I will see you guys next week! Bye!
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