Under Construction

Well, it's been three months - I suppose I should update this thing and let you all know where the heck I've been.

I broke my foot! I was out on a bike ride with a friend, and when the group stopped to take a photo together, I stepped in a hole and rolled my foot upside-down, which broke two bones in my foot and strained the ligament that wraps around them both (the sound it made...eeugh).  I've been grounded since then, strapped into a velcro SpaceBoot, and pretty much unable to do anything besides lay around with my leg propped up.

The upside is that I have a really cool knee scooter to wheel around on, and while it's not my bike, it sure is fun.  It's confusing, a bit - it feels kind of like a bike, and kind of like a skateboard.  My body says, "Do I bunny hop over that extension cord on the floor, or ollie it?"  and my brain says, "GIRL."

The silver lining here is that I'm finally starting to get around a lot better.  In three weeks I get to trade my SpaceBoot for a flexible brace, start physical therapy, and start walking again.  I may be able to get back on my bike by the end of July. 

Meanwhile, I'm contemplating resuming work on the pair of desks I started in March.  The smaller one, the one I'm refinishing, needs some alterations that I can't do yet, because I can't stand up at the workbench for long enough yet.  But the corner desk, at this stage, is still just sitting down and stripping and sanding and stripping and sanding.  So we'll see how that all goes. 

My brand-new bike, my very first actual road bike, which I
haven't ridden since I broke my foot.  I'm counting the days. 

Back In Action. Lots and Lots of Action.

I haven't been on the blog much the past month.  There were some personal things I had to take care of that occupied 100% of my time for a few weeks; and at the moment I'm neck-deep in a few different projects.  So far, I don't have much to show you, but I figured I'd at least tell you what's going on:

1. Refinishing A Corner Desk 

Once upon a time, someone ruined a perfectly good piece of furniture.  I'm not normally one of the "Never ever paint wood!" people.  I prefer stained to painted, it's true, but I know that either can be done well and produce an attractive piece.  This desk is neither of those things. 

It's a five-legged corner desk with a drawer, made of solid walnut, which was once stained (badly) and then painted (badly!!)  twice.  The paint job is full of drips and mucky thick spots; the top of the desk is cracked all over, which could be age, or lack of proper surface prep in the paint process, or both.  Also, the original drawer was, at one time, replaced at one time with a badly-constructed one made of cheap pine. It doesn't fit the desk well, and is so thick-walled and over-engineered you'd think someone was using it to store very small explosives.

Regardless, overall, it's a potentially gorgeous piece. The walnut wood itself is in great shape, and so far, it's stripping nicely, so I'm hopeful that I can restore this thing to its former glory.  I have no idea how old the desk is - I think at least 80s, maybe 70s (?)  The hardware is oddly shaped, and blackened and rusted with age; but it's sound, and so far I've been able to clean most of it up pretty well.  I haven't seen a maker's mark yet that might give me a clue as to where and when it came from;  I'm hoping I'll find it buried under paint. I hope it wasn't on that missing drawer.

2.  Repurposing the Bicycle Storage Area Dining Room

The desk is part of an ongoing repurposing of the dining room.  Let's be real here:  I don't use a dining room, or own  any dining room furniture.  I eat in front of the TV.  So  I've got this big, empty room which is flooded with natural light, and adjacent to both the kitchen and the living room.  It's well-lit, and there's a ceiling fan. 

Oh, hey, look!  There's that corner desk in the picture, behind my mountain bike.  

Anyway, 90% of the things that were stuffed into this room temporarily have been removed to other locations, and this room is about to become a(nother) shared creative space - a room where I can set up my big easel and start painting again, and where Sylvan can sit and work on her novels on days she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  I'm also about to start remodeling and refinishing a table for her to use as a writing desk. 

3.  Creating An Outdoor Entertaining Space From Scratch

I used to have a really pretty, comfortable back porch space, many years ago.  I'm not entirely sure what happened to it over the years, but, new house: new awesome patio.  Right now I'm only window-shopping (my last surviving patio chair is on it's last legs), hunting around for patio furniture and decorative stuff. 

The Zilker Garden Festival is this weekend.  I haven't been in a few years, but it's an AWESOME little weekend event, and I plan to come home with many, many plants for the patio - decorative flowery things, vegetables for a container garden, maybe a small potted tree? 

Y'all, I bought my very first leafblower this week.  Do you live in central Texas, or somewhere else chock full of Live Oak Trees?  Then you feel me when I say: fuck those messy, crusty, little oak flowers!  And all that nasty, sticky, yellow pollen!!  UGH.  The mountains of stiff leaves aren't helping anybody, either.  They're not even terribly good for compost, because they're so thick and hard that they take forever to break down.  Those leaves and crunchy little flower strings are about to become my bitch.   

I'll have updates over the next couple of weeks on how all this is going.  I'm hoping the corner desk will come first.  I'm having a lot of fun working on it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out! 

*      *      *

Meanwhile, wanna see a gross spider pic?  I thought you would: 

This is Frances.  Frances is a Funnel Web spider (Agelenidae) who lives on my front porch. She's about an inch long, and occupies a corner right next to the front door, by the doorbell.  Needless, perhaps, to say: people don't ring my doorbell anymore. 

Frances is harmless to people (she's not related to the Australian Funnel Web spiders you may have heard about).  She enjoys collecting dead bugs and hiding behind the trim on the siding, and usually cleans out her web long before it reaches this embarrassing state.  Bad Frances. 

Frances has an upstairs neighbor named Rapunzel who has a web about three feet up the wall.  I don't know what kind of spider she is.  She's much pointier in the leg and rounder in the body, and a bit larger.  I think she's some sort of false widow, but I haven't gotten a really good look at her just yet. 

Anyway, back soon!

They All Rolled Over and One Fell Out

Seven years is a pretty good run for a bed.  Especially a wooden bed that you built yourself, when you'd never built more than a simple shelf before.  Sadly, my long-beloved bed finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and I've been sleeping at an angle ever since, due to the way in which it sort of half-collapsed.
Oops.

I'd been looking for the perfect metal bed as a replacement, and I really wanted the SVELVIK from Ikea.  However, (as with 90% of the things I lust after at Ikea), I waited too long and the SVELVIK had been discontinued by the time I showed up ready to buy one.
Oops.

Target, and the internet to the rescue!   It isn't exactly the SVELVIK, but it'll do nicely - and does.  This went together easily and relatively quickly.  It's nice and solid, and I like the finish on it.  Best of all, it's inexpensive - and it was even 30% off last week when I ordered it.

I've been playing with the bay box window in the bedroom, too:  more plants, fewer laundry baskets on the windowsill.

Bonus:
Ikea's RASKOG cart being a bicycle  workshop cart (with GLIS organizer box in the top).  It's not terribly organized yet;  I just have small things on top, medium-large things in the middle, and BIG things in the bottom (mostly the tarp I put down when I clean the bikes indoors).

Sorry about the weird photo filter. My phone did that and I couldn't be arsed to take a new pic at 6:30am.  :D

Shelfy Nook

FINISHED!  Finally.  This was like four days' work, and it took me a month. Whew! Procrastination is hard. 

 

Back to the beginning:

I started working on this nook in December  (see this post):
I  removed rotted and sagging shelves and plastic shelf clips which were painted and caulked into the wall, repaired the resulting wall damage, primed the walls and gave it a first coat of paint. 

When I painted the living room over the holiday break, I also installed these supports (1x1/4" pre-primed trim molding) and painted them in with the wall color when this wall got a second coat of paint.

Like a billion years later, I finally got the wood for the shelves out of the back of my car where it had been since December, cut it to size, and attached more (untreated) trim molding to the fronts.

Wood conditioner ftw.  I've never used it before, but WOW it made a difference. The stain went on so smoothly, only took a single coat, and sanding was minimal.

The stain is Minwax's Deep Walnut.  I'm a Jacobean girl from way back; this time I was looking for something with a little less of a green undertone, but not so warm that it bordered on reddish. This was perfect.

P.S.: stainable wood filler my ass. SO much work covering the nail holes on the fronts and getting them to blend in. Sigh.

I am loving the way these turned out.  I should have used a wider trim facing on the fronts of the shelves, so that they would completely cover the struts on the walls, but, live and learn, right?

The last thing was to deal with this nasty 30yo+ a/c return air cover.  It turned out to be a lot less work than I'd anticipated.  I removed it, banged it back into shape with a hammer (from the back), cleaned the gook off of it with my bike cleaning spray (AWESOME) then hit the whole thing with a couple of coats of plain, white, hi-gloss spray paint.

Hilariously enough, there was no filter behind this cover, and nowhere to fit one - the edges of the wall behind the cover are all crumbled and corroded, and when I tried to wedge a filter in place, it just fell flat.  I ended up zip-tying the filter to the cover to keep it where it belongs. Thankfully, it doesn't show:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 


I LOVE the way this all came out. :)