A Small Project With a Huge Impact

an Ikea Hack in the making

About a billion years ago (2015?) I purchased a SVARTÅSEN laptop table from Ikea.  It was awesome!  A little personal workspace - for my laptop, or my art, my nails, whatever I needed.

Problem is, moving into the house was so hectic, that this little thing got left outside, forgotten for several weeks, in the rain.  No big deal, though, right?  The top is plastic.

Except it turns out it wasn't plastic - it was laminated fiberboard, as I discovered upon turning this thing over to find a big, rotten mess.  Oops.

Not to worry:  I had a couple of small, wide boards left over from the built-in bookshelf project, and one of them just happened to be exactly as wide and deep as the Ikea Svartasen top.  I didn't even bother with copying the shape, I just used the entire board, in the hopes that the extra weight wouldn't unbalance the table (it doesn't) and that the new corners would give me more room to work (they do). 

(pay no attention to the hideous denim couch)

Here's the "new table", after I sanded, stained, and sealed the board, and screwed it onto the existing base.

I swapped the coffee table for a smaller one, too, and between these two tables taking up far less space than before, there's plenty of room for my elderly doggo, Shelly, to walk around, and lay down next to me on the floor.

The big rectangle is SO much better to work on than the little roundy-triangle shape the table came with!  It feels humongous, and it's nice to be able to spread out while I'm working. 

The little clip-on LED task light from Ikea  that's clamped to the table is REALLY BRIGHT, so I made a little lampshade out of a scrap of printer paper, to keep the light on my work and not in my eyes. It looks silly, but it works!

Cyclamen, 1-28-18

Just in case anyone's curious, this is the drawing on the table in the sketchbook on the table.  The little wonky leaf cracks me up - I was trying to remember how the patterns go without looking at the actual plant, and failed miserably.  I love mistakes like this, though; I love seeing them in old sketchbooks, and seeing how far I've come from those old drawings.

I have a weird urge to paint something cool on the surface of my "new" table.  I'll let you know if I do.

More soon!

Because Poe Wrote on Both*

Another "Finally!" project is complete.  As much as I'd had an enormous Whirlwind of Projects! planned for my holiday break, I ended up sick the entire time and got nothing done (unless you count sitting around binge-watching episodes of The West Wing, at which I excelled).  Before I broke my foot in May 2017. I did two things:  I bought a new bike, and I started refinishing two desks. This is one of them, finally finished, ten months later.

This thing started life as a an unfinished, loosely Mission-style, sofa table. My roommate bought it roughly a thousand years ago, stained it herself, and used it for book and cat storage for many years, before deciding she wanted to use it as a writing table. A blue writing table.

The first task, then, was to make sure the thing was tall enough for her to sit at with an office chair.  It wasn't, but only by an inch:  four slices of a 2x2" stick, my jigsaw and hand planer, some sandpaper, and putty took care of that:

Next was to remove the drawer hardware, mostly-sand the whole thing down, and hit it with some Liquid Sander, which is still one of my favorite substances on the planet:

ready to prime! 

Liquid Sander is a deglosser - essentially a very mild stripper, that breaks down the outermost layer of finish on a piece - clearcoat, stain, paint, whatever.  It's meant to take the place of sanding;  I usually sand a piece first, to break up the clearcoat on the piece, before using the deglosser, so that it breaks down more of the outer layer of clearcoat/stain, and is better able to take primer and paint.

Just don't use it without gloves, unless you like your skin peeling off for the next two days.  Especially don't use it without gloves when you're using red shop rags to wipe it on, or you'll turn your fingers red:

sadtrombone.mp3

Since I suck at remembering to take "before" pictures, I used MS Paint to put the Mission side rails and drawer knobs back on for you, LOL:

This project leveled up in the fun department when I realized
that I could just KICK those side rails out.  BLAM! Hee.

First coat of primer: 

I put another coat of primer over the first, then painted it.  The paint was mixed from a remnant of SW's "Tradewinds" (which is what's on the walls), a little bit of a midnight blue to mute the color without graying it out, and a touch of orange to warm it up just enough to bring it into a "dusky" blue without turning it green. It took a bit of work to get it just right; but I love this shade of pale turquoise - a bit darker, and a lot greener/warmer than the wall color. 

(this looks crammed into a corner because of the angle of the
photo; but there's actually a good six feet of space back there) 

Roomie hasn't found the perfect drawer knobs just yet, so I threw some cheap little brass-finish Ikea knobs on it for the time being:  

(I told you everything I own is blue)

Now my roomie has a dedicated space in the house to work on her novels, when she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  

Next! 

cat tax

*The answer to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" in case you've ever wondered. 

Accessibility Design for Doggos

The time has come, my furry friend, to put you up on blocks.

No wait, scratch that.

This is Shelly! 

Shelly is 15 (approx. 90 in human years, for a doge her weight/age/breed).  She old.  And her poor joints - especially her knees - have been aching her something fierce this past year.  At her vet's urging, she went on a diet about a month ago, and began taking supplements for her joints.  It's helped quite a bit already; but the step down from the back door into the patio area was still really difficult for her.  Watching my girl try and try and try, and shake, and stumble, was just too heart-breaking!

So, a few weeks ago, I rounded up some scraps from the garage - a leftover shelf board from the built-in shelf project and a couple of short 2x4s - and made my poor doge a handicap ramp.  It's a very simple design - just a board on top of a 2x4 with another 2x4 under the middle for support.  Here's my very detailed scale diagram, which I made during the planning process:

Both of the doges were vv heckin confuse:

"wut"

After many minutes of tentative tries, first with one foot, then another - and Daisy finally just leaping over the thing - I realized that they were confused because the smooth wood was too slippery.  I dropped a soft bathmat onto it (with a non-slip backing), and that solved the problem.  It took Shelldog a couple of days to get used to it; now she trots up and down the ramp with ease.

bathmat is...bathmatty.

Although this works great for the dogs, I've since discovered that the ramp is WAY too short to be safe for humans.  The angle is far too steep.  For now, it works for Shelly, and that was the point.  Sometime before the warmer weather shows up, though, I'd like to replace the ramp with a much longer one, with a proper non-skid surface on top, so that neither Shelly nor I ends up on our face on the ground.

More soon!