Playroom Makeover-Tropical Tree

As I said, on Monday,  in the preview of this room makeover, I love this tree.  It is my favorite part of the room!  It was made specifically for the tropical animal bobble heads that my children have. 

Let’s play I Spy for a moment.  Can you find the following things?:
Sea Horse, Tree Frogs, Tropical Birds, Monkeys hanging from vines, Monkey with a banana, Birds in hammocks, a shark eating a fish, Kitten with swim goggles, Animal floating in inner tube, and the Beach area. 
These things were thought about when coming up with this design; ocean, island, tree, vines, shelves, and beach. So that all of the different bobble heads and accessories had a place to go!

We started making the tree by free hand cutting out wood for the shelves.  We knew we wanted one larger one and then a smaller one.  Then, we screwed brackets into it.  Next we painted the whole piece (top, bottom, and sides).  We started with a dark green that all of the kids helped to paint.  The detail painting was done by Grandma and my oldest daughter. 

The lightest green was used to paint the leaf shapes and filler designs between the leaves.  Last, a darker green was used to paint in the vein details of the leaves.

The next step is purely optional but for me it did take priority!  Take a break to free your child from the bathroom that they locked themselves in!  ;P

Assemble parts of the tree to the walls.  Look at the tree trunk and branches.  They were made by free handing the shapes onto pieces of foam core (over the weekend they were on sale for $1 each).  Our tree is actually two parts because it was going in the corner of the room, so it is on two walls joined in the center.  We just used an exacto knife to cut the design out.  The tree parts were painted a medium brown and then details were added in a dark brown.  Our tree trunk/branches were done by Dad and Grandpa!  We stuck the trunk/branches to the wall with double sided tape.  Then screwed the shelf/leaves to the walls.

We found this amazing fluffy green yarn at JoAnn’s!  It was perfect to add as vines from the tree.  We actually wrapped an end of the yarn around a short screw and screwed it right into the underside of the shelves.

Notice the lovely brackets.  We had a perfect fix for this that also added another awesome dimension to this tree!

We cut leaves out of the extra foam core.  We painted them up similarly to the leaves on the shelves.  Add double sided tape to them and place them over all of the brackets and extras to fill in the space.

Look how perfectly they covered that bracket up!

Look at it now that we have the vines (yarn) and extra leaves!

My oldest daughter was given the remnants of the fluffy green yarn!  Being the creative soul that she is she went and finger knitted a hammock to hang in the tree!

Even better was that she knitted two of them!  So we *attached them the same way we *attached the vines, with screws. 
*I had to reword that as I had first said we screwed up the vines.  But no, we did not mess them up!

Here the tree is with some of their bobble heads in place.  Plenty of space for playing.  Even better is that there are lots of ways for them to play with this that is open to imaginative play!

This view also gives you a preview of how the rest of this play area was done.  There are such cute details painted on!  I’ll show the rest tomorrow and friday!

Rebecca

PS You still have time to leave a comment on my post to enter to win a $100 Visa card from Jimmy Dean and BlogHer.