New Dining Room Table

Roommate and I needed a dining room table.  We each eat in our respective comfort spaces in the living room, but we wanted to have a large space in which to work on big craft projects that don't fit in the available space in the craft room.   It took a couple of weeks of searching for the right one;  but let me to introduce you to my new $40 Craigslist special:

It's a brown-stained, bar-height table with a built-in retractable leaf which extends the tabletop out into a full square.  I've actually had three tables exactly like this in my life, so when I saw this I was like, "Hello, old friend!"  The finish isn't in the greatest shape, but I was planning on painting it anyway.

Primer

The first thing I did was cut 6” off the legs to make this a normal-height dining room table (30").  Next I gave the entire table a thorough sanding - not to remove the finish entirely, just to eliminate any protective topcoat that would keep paint from adhering, and to smooth out dings and scratches in the top surface.

For the priming coat (above) I mixed half and half Killz primer with some of the gray paint leftover from the paint job in Roommate's bedroom (done before we moved in - Previous Tenant left us all her old paint).  This gave me a tinted half-primer to use that was dark enough for the black to go over with no problem, and it used up some paint I didn't want.

Next, the entire thing got two coats of black paint (leftover from last year's Hemnes cabinet project), which is a 50% mix of semi-gloss and chalkboard paint.  Once the black was dry, the top surface and leaf got a coat of Minwax Polycrylic to give it a little extra protection.  Last but not least, I put some little felt feet onto the legs to keep them from scraping loudly across the tile.

For $40 and a little elbow grease, we now have a place to work on craft projects, cut out fabric, and serve guests at our annual Halloween party.  I suppose we could even eat at it, like normal people, if we wanted (wait what?)

You know what you don't see in any of these pictures?  Chairs.  I've got one old Ikea Kaustby (discontinued), but a dining room table needs more than one chair.  Fortunately, I found one on bulk day this year that just needs to be fixed up.  I'm on the hunt for a couple more.

A Whole New Dining Room, Sort Of

Welcome back, me.

So, someone, at some time, painted a steel blue accent wall in almost every room of this house.  You saw the one in the bedroom a few months ago.  Here's the one in the dining room:

We'll, um, we'll talk about the burlap-and-ruffles light fixture in a minute.

For now, I wanted to show you this, which took all of an hour to accomplish:

It's nothing special, I just painted the wall white like the rest of the walls in the dining room, kitchen, and living room.  It's boring, but it blends in with the rest of the house, which is what I wanted it to do.

Okay, let's talk about this.  This is a cut-corner rectangle lampshade onto which has been hot-glued burlap and strips of an OFELIA blanket from Ikea (I have the same blanket and recognized it immediately).  It's another hideous artefact of the previous tenant, who left behind other treasures such as ugly, heavy drapes, broken curtain rods, gallons of used paint, and countertop scraps.

I mean...

For some reason - maybe this is an old light fixture thing that I just didn't know about? - I had to un-wire the bulb housing from this light fixture in order to get the shade off the fixture.  So this took a minute longer than I thought it would.  But it was easy - and here's the new shade:

There.  Plain, white, unassuming, boring, blends with everything.  It's also quite a bit brighter, since the bulb isn't having to fight against that burlap to get light out.

So that's the dining room squared away, until we can get a table in there to work at and maybe also eat at.  At the moment I'm working on things in the living room, and I'll have some new bedroom stuff to show you in the next couple of weeks, too.  TTFN.

Ikea HEMNES Pantry Cabinet: Part II

BEFORE

Hi.

This is my Ikea  HEMNES cabinet-turned-pantry.  You may remember it from such posts as this one from October.

I'd gone back and forth with the idea of painting it for months before I frosted the glass in October;  but once that was done, I was sure, and I was just waiting for a chance to get to it.

Enter Thanksgiving weekend.  I don't celebrate it, myself, but I had five days off of work, and my roommate was out of town for one of those days, so I prepped and painted this thing in about eight hours.

Here's the whole thing after painting.  *drooool*  I LOVE IT.

There was barely any finish on this thing to begin with, so all it took was deglossing and then sanding very lightly to get a good surface for the paint.

The paint itself is a 50/50 mixture of plain black semi-gloss latex and black latex chalkboard paint.  I guess that makes it quarter-gloss?  I don't know.  But the texture and sheen are really nice.  I love a piece of furniture that feels good.

For the first few hours I worked on this, I was listening to Hamilton, which is one of my favorite things in the world. Every time I look at this picture in particular, I get Wait For It stuck in my head all over again.

I almost painted the inside of this unit a pale muted blue.  I'll be honest with you, the reason I didn't was that I didn't want to go to the store to get blue paint.  There are days when you just don't want to put a bra on, you know?

The knobs and drawer pulls I used on this unit are Ikea's FAGLAVIK, which, sadly, was discontinued about three years ago.  They're so smooth and soft and pretty.  They had a brushed nickel version, a chrome, and a brushed brass - these guys.  I looooove them .

I mean, that's just sexy.

















I love this cabinet.  I love the color.  I love that it didn't become a big black hole like I was worried it would.  I love the way the glass and the black look together.

But wait til you guys see my other Thanksgiving weekend project.  I'm almost done with it, and I'm crazy excited to show it to you!




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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!

Bücher

Some of you will be horrified by this confession, but, when we moved in, we didn't organize the books. We just threw them onto any old shelf willy-nilly, just wherever they would fit.  CHAOS.  The house was still under construction, schedules were weird, the Shelfy Nook was still a hole in the wall.  You know how it is when you move into a place - no matter how well-laid your organizational plans, priorities shift on the fly. Plus, if you're doing any DIY in the process, there's always a good deal of Scope Creep to handle. 

Last weekend, once the Shelfy Nook was complete, the house underwent a weird transformation: suddenly the floors were covered in books, as if there had been some horrible library explosion.  It was terribly confusing for the one cat and one dog who absolutely abhor any environmental disruption, and a playground for everybody else.  My roommate is the resident bibliophile (I prefer e-readers, myself; though I do adore really old books), and she quickly took charge of the sorting and categorizing, handing armloads to me to shelve when she was done.

We are now officially surrounded by books - organized books. Whew! That only took three months.  See:

The aforementioned Shelfy Nook, on the west side of the living room.

A bookcase by the windows in the living room, on the east side. 

To the south, behind the primary seating area, is just about my favorite piece of furniture - also filled with books.  Here is where we put the nifty old stuff, and small collections/series.

On the north side of the room is the shelving unit that houses all the DVDs...and there are books there, too.  We're surrounded! (Which is okay by me). 

Two narrow shelves in the "dining room" (don't eat bikes, kids).  You'll see these again, soon - this room is one of the next items on my to-do list.

Yet another cabinet full of books, this one in the breakfast nook, full of cookbooks (Roommate Sylvan is also a fabulous vegan cook and pastry chef, and has even written a couple of cookbooks of her own). 

This is another room on my to-do list, by the way.  So much to do!

















Not shown: yet another shelf full of books in Sylvan's room, a couple of boxes of music books and costuming books in the craft room, and the few selections I keep in my room because I like looking at them (a boxed complete works of Jane Austen, and a set of tiny Yale Library Shakespeare study books bound in fabric, which I adore).


Everybody have a great weekend! 

Blue Paint Makes Everything Better

Last weekend, while everyone else was doing the holiday thing, I painted the living room. And the dining room. And two hallways. And the entryway.

Technically, I did more than just paint.  In what ended up being almost exactly 24 hours of work, spread over three days, I...:

• filled nail holes and caulked in the new baseboards, which were installed by the tile guys but not finished (why? no clue)
• primed the baseboards 
• primed the walls, from floor to ceiling, including the 12' vault in the living room
• cut and installed cleats in the shelfy nook in the living room
• painted the walls in the aforementioned spaces
• built shelves for the shelfy nook

I think I must've moved nearly every piece of furniture I own.  Some of that stuff is HEAVY.  Also, I'm not finished yet.  While I built shelves for the nook, I still have to sand and stain them.  So I'll have a shelfy nook update for you soon.  In the meantime, here are a couple of random shots of the other areas I painted:

This is one end of the living room, and the little tiny "hallway" that leads to the master bedroom suite (aka Gigantic Craft Room of Doom).

As lovely as this morning sunlight is, it's fleeting, and barely penetrates the space beyond this corner.  There's a serious issue with light in this house.  Time to learn to embrace lamps.

The "back" of the living room, behind the couch.  That's a lot of wall to paint, especially from the top of a ladder.

You can see the difference here between the light coming in from the kitchen windows, and the near-black shadows in the center of the picture. The neat thing about that is that all of the walls, at times, look like they're all painted in different colors, depending on the time of day.

The wall color, by the way, is Sherwin Williams' Tradewinds, which is a soft, pale blue with a touch of green in it.  I heart it.

EDIT:  wait, no it isn't - Tradewinds was what we used in Sylvan's room, and on the test wall in the living room.  I ended up swapping it out for something with a wee bit more green in it - Behr's Urban Raincoat.  

(Also on my never-ending to-do list: that empty aquarium. It's a bit of a running joke - it's been empty for years.  But it made a great terrarium for fake spiders at my last Halloween party).  

This is the dining room, aka "Room of Lost Furniture" aka "Laura's Guitar Crap Storage & Bike Workshop" (sadly, this particular bike, which is my favorite, is down with a serious case of Bearings Crud. Don't worry, though, it isn't terminal).

I'll be honest with you, I have no idea what this room is going to end up looking like.  For now, there's just stuff in it that has no place else to go.

This room has crown molding for some bizarre reason, even though exactly zero other spaces in this building have any.  I painted them the same color as the walls, to help minimize the fact of their existence - they just looked weird in there all by themselves.


 There's a lot more to show you, but there's also a lot more work to be done before I can do that.   I need to finish those shelves, for one thing; and there are still a lot of bare walls in this house, since I was waiting to hang things until after the big painting was done.

Then there's the dining room.  Hm.  My roommate wants to put a writing desk in there, which is going to be cool.  Also, there's futon just to the right of what you see in the picture that I've been trying to sell on Craigslist, but it turns out that Craigslisters are a bunch of flaky, flaky people (seven offers, all ghosted at the last minute? The hell?) I'm sure this surprises no one. As soon as it's out of the way, though, this room is going to get some serious attention.

But first: I have shelves to stain. After that I think I'll turn my attention to The Purple Glitter Situation.  But more on that later.




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Something I Want Out of Something I Don't Want

I loved my dining room table.  I really did.  Thing is, I never used it as a dining table.  It was too small to seat more than 2-3 people comfortably, and since when do I have dinner parties?  It was mostly a flat surface that accreted random detritus, and it was wasting space.  Meanwhile, I've been wanting a round coffee table for some time.  So I took the dining table apart, cut about a foot and a half out of the pedestal, and reassembled the whole thing: 

Before:

2013

After: 

And then...

I made myself a little time-out corner in the dining room, instead.  A couple of extra tub chairs that didn't fit in the living room, and the [antique?] plant stand/table that a friend gave me a few years ago.  I needed a comfy place to sit and use my asthma nebulizer machine, and now I have one.  Yay!

Ta-da!

A "New" China Cabinet For the Dining Room

After I re-purposed my old china cabinet into the living room as a bookcase, I was given another one by a friend about a year ago.  It was really big, and wasn't really my style; but I had another friend who was interested in trading her china cabinet for it.  It took us a while to coordinate the swap (she lives on the opposite side of town, and we're both pretty busy), but we finally did it last weekend.  The new cabinet is an Ikea LEKSVIK cabinet (discontinued):

The bottom half  is full of Sylvan's and my cookbooks; and the top houses some of my rock and mineral collection, which hasn't been on display for the past couple of years since I moved the other china cabinet.  Yay, rocks!

Top: shells in the back left corner; naturally-formed crystal points and clusters
Middle: carved spheres and points, a jar of tumbled stones, and a fluorite plate
Bottom: mostly fluorite, with a couple of decorated rocks from the garden

Somewhere I have a box full of fossils, and another box containing my sulfurs, chalcanthite, and a few other things; but I have NO idea what I've done with the boxes.  I'm so organized.  (x_x)



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The Wayback Machine

Whatever you may think of the various things I've done to my living room over the years since I started this blog, you can't deny that it changes frequently.  I'm still plugging away on my light fixtures and a couple other projects I'll have to show you in March; but for now, I dug out some old photos of the living room from 2004 that I thought I'd share:

Guys, this is the original almost-everything.   I hung the ceiling fan I wanted immediately, and moved the [really ugly] one that came with the house into a spare bedroom.

But the paint, doors, hardware, fireplace mantel and tile - even the original carpet is still in these pics.

No, the houseplants thing is not new, hehe.   And no, I don't know why there are pillows on top of the entertainment center.

Looking the other direction.    LOOK at that awful pendant lamp.   The original floorplan of the house had this area under the light designated as a "dining room", and was supposed to be tiled.  Thankfully, I had the option to just carpet the entire thing.  I've never wanted to do the whole dining room/living room thing.  

The area that I use as my dining room was originally tagged as a "breakfast nook."  I've never understood the idea of eating different meals in different rooms.  That's for people in Jane Austen novels.  I pretty much eat in front of the tv on the couch, because I'm a 37-year-old frat boy. 

All the king's arches and all the king's beige.  

The original kitchen and dining room light fixtures.  Actually, the dining room light is still the same, I just painted it black, long ago.  It was one of the first projects in the house, aside from the ceiling fan in the living room - painting everything  that was shiny brass, to black.  

(And because someone asked, that's a dog harness on the bar in the foreground, not something naughty).  

And that's that, folks.  Crazy, yeah?  I found these pics while looking for some others, and I was like  whoa.  And my BFF was like whoa.  And the cat was like,  are you eating that pizza crust?  

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Living Room Sneak Peek

I have a BIG living room post coming up.  BIG.  But for right now, here's a taste:  you know the big china hutch in the dining room?  The one with the rock collection in it?

This one. 

You would NOT believe what a Herculean effort it was to empty this entire thing out, find new homes for all the stuff inside - not just the rocks, but all six drawers, and the space underneath - and then push it across the entire freaking house to its new home:

Library! 

Fortunately, when I moved this thing into the house to begin with (in two pieces), I had the foresight to put slidey-feet on the bottom, so it was easier than I was afraid it would be to push it all by myself.  (I didn't repaint the living room; that's the same gray, it just looks really blue in direct sunlight).

And now it's a library!  There were two giant bookcases in the master bedroom that moved out over the weekend, and left my book collection homeless.  Some of it will be going into other rooms - music stuff, and art/design stuff, for example - but much of it now lives here.

And because I'm just cool like that, the cabinets underneath are filled with video games, LOL.

In case you don't recognize the wall, this is the "tank wall" where I've always had aquariums, and once hung a giant silk bedspread.  This is the north end of the looooong living room.

I can't wait to show you the rest. :)

Random Pictures from the Thanksgiving Break

While Kress and his mother and I celebrated Thanksgiving, a few small things around the house happened:

This crowded Peace Lily from my desk at work (which I brought home to divide months ago and never did) got cleaned up and separated into two pots:

The two new plants are very happy;  the smaller one in the center is a Chinese Evergreen that was in a pot with no drainage hole, and was NOT liking it.

Because I pretty much detest holidays, I completely neglected to plan any sort of table spread for dinner on Thursday, aside from the food.

This is simple and thrown-together (mostly from our basket of SCA feast gear, hehe), but it worked, and the food was awesome, which was the point. :)

Most of the cats, on the coffee table, scoping out someone's ice cream.  From the white-and-red one on the left, clockwise, that's
Sweet Pea
Rabi
Evie, and
Gypsy

Only Sasha is missing from this picture.

Kress' mom decided that she and I each needed a "little black apron" from Bloodbath & Beyond while we were out shopping Friday.  Lace trim and plastic pearls stitched around the neckline.  LOL!  Adorbs.



Hope everyone had a happy, safe holiday.

Dining Room Chairs - Paint Job and Upholstered Seats

The sack cloth upholstery thing has been going on for a while now.  I've always loved the look, but didn't really think much about it because where do you even get sack cloth, anyway? Turns out the answer to that is "from your friend's late grandmother fabric stash that she left behind."  Muchas gracias to said friend for the metric buttload of fabric she sent me home with a few weeks ago.  :)

That stack of fabric included several pieces of both cotton and linen sackcloth, some of which was still printed with lettering and logos - they were landscaping product sacks of some kind, once upon a time.

And so....

Before

Seat removed, frame cleaned, then deglossed with Liquid Sander, and finally painted with a plain black semi-gloss latex paint, with a 1.5" china brush with ragged tips, for that streaky wood-grain look I adore painting with.

The overall effect looks black at a glance, but up close it's a deep, deep espresso-brown and black "stain."

Covering the seats with the cotton sackcloth and eggcrate foam (which I happened to have a bunch of sitting around, left over from old projects).

One chair finished!

I did three of the set of four today.  I actually can't find the rest of my foam!  I know it's around here somewhere.  Soon as I find it I'll get the fourth chair done, lol.

I think when I do find the rest of my foam I'll put a seat cushion on the little Ikea dining room chair that I use at my computer desk, as well.  I'm tired of sitting on a throw pillow to blog.

Before & after comparison.

The dining room table is black, and I keep a rough, white, linen tablecloth on it.  These will coordinate much better.











All of the sackcloths I had were different prints.  So what?  I think it's cute that they're mismatched.  The third one, not pictured, has a simple print of black text;  the fabric for the fourth chair is the same, but the text is different, and placed differently on the cushion.

After

Things That Rock

This is my brand-spanking new china cabinet.  Or maybe it's just my same old china cabinet with different stuff in it.   I kept all of my herbs, oils, waxes, and other supplies for making homemade body care products and perfumes for years...so long, in fact, that it was all completely out of date, and most of it was *rancid*.  Eeeeew.

Meanwhile, I have this massive rock collection that's been scattered all over the house and boxed up awaiting some magical day when I had a good place to display the entire collection all together.  Tick...tick....tick...

goodbye, rotten herbs

I was standing around the dining room the other night, just sort of absently gazing towards the china cabinet while my mind was on what I was going to do with all the knick-knacky clutter that lives in my house, breeding like freaking roaches, when it hit me:  a GREAT place to start would be to deal with the clutter by categories...like my rock collection!  Perfect solution!   And I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

the central, open shelves.  The punch jar
and cups are a set my mom bought in Germany
before I was born. :) 

still using this top shelf for overflow from the
spice cabinet in the kitchen 

A few highlights: 

a polished Smoky Quartz point

Citrine sphere

Emerald Quartz sphere

Somewhere, if I can find it, I also have a whole box of quartz pieces, some nice sulfides, a box of fossils... I wonder where they've all gone?

purple Fluorite octohedron with pyrite inclusions

Add caption

Enhydro agate, sealed - has pocket of water millions of
years old, trapped inside! 

Note:  IDK WTF blogger is doing with the spacing and format here.  @_@

a plate of tiny Amethyst crytals

Celestite cluster

Rogerley Fluorite, which fluoresces a light blue
in natural daylight

And don't even get me STARTED on my collection of dead sea critters - shells and skeletons and corals and things.  If I ever figure out what to do with those, it'll be another post. :)