Making Over the Craft Room

It was time to do a complete overhaul of the entire craft room.  Here's what it looked like before:

Cluttered, crammed full of small furniture, and with a terrible, dark paint job.  We basically moved in, shoved a bunch of crap into this room, and never touched it again.  Bad. 

This little bookshelf wasn't being put to use very well - it was crammed up against the doorway and stuffed full of random crap that belonged in the closet.  

The closet doors were missing, and nothing in the closet (or out of it, truthfully) was very well organized.

First I set about organizing the room.  There were a couple of boxes which should have been stored in the garage that I moved out there;  everything else in the closet got reorganized and re-stacked, so that it would STAY in the closet.  Surfaces were cleared, things were put into plastic bins and stored on an Ikea Hyllis shelving unit in the closet.

Next:

1. I painted the room, in a color I mixed myself by adding some yellow-gold to the SW Silvermist I had on hand leftover from my bedroom. The resulting shade matches up to SW Comfort Gray, if you're interested.  
2. I hung curtains - I moved the white Ikea Matilda semi-sheers from my bedroom into this room, once replacements for the bedroom arrived in the mail (more on that later).  
3. I found the closet doors in the garage, ordered some replacement hardware for them, and re-hung them in the room.  The doors also got a fresh coat of white paint.  
4. I hung the ironing board on the wall behind the entry door, to keep it out of the way
5. I hung a pendant lamp over the sewing table, using an Ikea Hemma light kit and a glass sconce I've had for years.  It and the sewing machines are plugged into a power strip mounted on the side of the desk so that I can turn the entire sewing table on with one button.  
6. I moved a short bookcase from the door of the room over to the corner behind the sewing desk, and moved a small dresser to the door of the room, to hold the printer and printer supplies
7. I hung new art (printed from online) over the bookcase and art table in the rear of the room

Here's the whole room, more or less, in its finished state.  It's lighter and brighter, the windows softer, the furniture balanced and the floorplan open.  I rearranged the furniture and moved that little bookshelf next to the window to balance out the art table on the right side.  I LOVE my new sewing desk, and having doors back on the closet makes a huge difference in how clean and organized the room feels. 

The desk is made from a pair of Ikea Helmer file cabinets, spray painted in "Coastal Sage" (Rustoleum American Accents), with a 2x4' birch project panel across the top - up on 1" shelf risers to make the desk height the correct height.  I've got both sewing machines, the overhead light, and the pencil sharpener and iron plugged into the power strip on the right side of the desk, so I can turn EVERYTHING on at once with the touch of a button.  

Finally, the closet doors.  There's nothing remarkable about them, except that they're finally hung (it took some doing, and I had to buy all new mounting hardware), and they CLOSE and hide all the "organized clutter" inside.  

Tada!   

Dogability Ramp v2.0

Back in January I built a little handicap ramp for my elderly doggo, Shelly, who has bad back knees.  She's in great health in general, it's just that she's the dog equivalent of 96 years old.  She couldn't step down from the threshhold onto the patio at the old house, and would often just fall out the door to the outside.  The ramp made all the difference in the world, and it worked great...right up until we moved house. So, over the weekend, I built her a new one.

The plan - in which about half of the measurements are off, but I fixed them as I worked. 

Here's the old ramp.  It was covered with an Ikea bathmat for traction (which constantly slipped off and had to be adjusted daily). The structure, if you want to call it that, was just a leftover piece of plywood screwed to a 2x4 stack of 2" sticks.  It wasn't stable anymore, and without a flat landing, and because of the very steep slope,  the front of the dog was headed downhill before the back of the dog even got out of the door - which caused her to fall and smack her face on the ground. :( 

The new ramp:

• is an inch taller
• has a complete frame with internal support to prevent the ramp sagging
• has a 14" landing to step out onto before going down (for dogs' and humans' safety), and 
• has a non-skid coating all the way around for traction for the dogs and to prevent the ramp sliding on the patio surface

LR-:  parts cut out;  frame assembled; frame clad with plywood

After hemming and hawing over how best to make this new ramp grippy so Shelly won't slide down it (stair tread safety tape, another math mat, adhesive non-skid shower floor stickers, etc.), I opted to coat the entire thing in Rustoleum's Truck Bed Liner spray.  It's solid stuff, and two coats of it were enough to pretty effectively rubberize the entire surface, making it slip-proof.  It was also much cheaper than any other options, at $7 per can.

Turns out, even grippy truck bed liner spray was too slippery for Ol' Sheller...or maybe it's just that she just doesn't like new things.  Either way, neither she nor Daisy would walk on the ramp AT ALL. Shelly felt trapped outdoors, and Daisy just jumped over the whole thing, which was pretty impressive, I have to say.

So, I picked up a gigantic, $20 shop rug from Blowe's, and cut a piece from it to the shape of the ramp.  Now both dogs use it as if it'd always been there. Whew!

Sure, the thing is huge, dark, and kind of an eyesore. But it helps my dog. And it's awfully comfortable to walk up and down for me, too.  I'm no spring chicken myself, you know? The landing at the top makes a HUGE difference in walkability and comfort.  I wish I'd thought to make it wider, as wide as the door, but I was working with the size plywood I had.   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Incidentally, this is both (a) what I looked like while I was building and spraying the ramp; and (b) how I looked when my new duplex-neighbors rolled up to their new place for the first time.  HR! R'M LRRA!!  *gloved handshake* 

That's all, folks! 

♥♥ Dog of my heart ♥♥

Heehee. Like I said.

Insurance Adjustor:  "Yep.  I'd say that door is pretty well shot."  

Heh.  Yeah, I kinda knew that.  The whole door needs to be replaced, though thankfully the tracks are fine.   I should get an estimate sometime this week;  then I can start shopping around for overhead door companies - and probably also paints, just in case whomever replaces my door can't match the color exactly.

I had a dream about it, the morning the guy came out to scope out the damage.  In my dream, the guy was fantastic - a tall, flamboyant, lovely gay man, built like a wrestler and bedecked in all sorts of crystal jewelry, and pink Elton John sunglasses.  Except he got to work right away, instead of providing an estimate:  he started building a new door from all the scrap lumber in my garage, and messed up all my tools, and accidentally let my cats out and they got lost, and he built this GORGEOUS door but the HOA hated it and I got fined, and so on.  GACK.  Stress dreams are so annoying.

Is it silly that I'm excited about getting a new garage door that will look and function exactly like the old one?  Hehe.


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Annual Sewing Room Refit

Do I really do this every December/January?  I do, don't I?  Weird.

Anyway, the gray and white that I did last year was boring the heck out of me.  This is a creative space.  Grayscale?  Really?  I have no idea.

Before (last year)

Beige linen curtain (love), fabric boxes on wall shelves,
white above, grey below with grey trim. 

Closet shelves.  Grey and white and grey and white. 

What has turned out to be an awesome fabric storage idea, 

What's happening now... 

Fabric bins moved into the newly-pink closet

Doors back on.  The curtain was always a pain in the rear;
I ended up taking it down, and then the closet was
just this great big gaping hole.  

Last week and over the weekend I did a LOT of painting, refinishing, spray-painting, and re-arranging.  I'm not quite done yet; but by way of a preview, the whole room is going in somewhat this direction:

made using Olioboard

Update soon!


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Door Envy

Ever since I painted my hallway doors black last weekend, I really want to replace my laundry room door with something like this:

(via Pinterest; image from No. 29 Design)

Wouldn't that be awesome?  And yeah, you'd be able to see my dirty laundry and cluttered shelves...but that's what glass-frosting spray is for, right? :)

that one. 

Dear Craigslist...


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Black Hole To Black Door*

So, about that hallway.  While priming the bathroom and all the trim and doors, I did the same in the adjacent hallway.  The trim there was also in need of a refresher, and the color in that hallway! Ugh!

Actually, it was a lovely color, in and of itself - a deep, shadowy olive green.  It was pretty, but it was WAY too dark for a teeny tiny hallway that gets absolutely *no* natural light whatsoever.   I completely forgot to take a "before" pic, but imagine a hallway where this thing might live:

So the entire thing got primed:  walls, trim, doors, ceiling, and even the attic hatch.  Then nearly all of it got painted in the White Clay, just like in the guest bathroom:

that's the bathroom door at the very end, then clockwise, the
guest bedroom and sewing room.  Around the corner on the
left is the hall closet. 

sewing room door, and laundry room on the right

Pretty! Bright!  HUGE-looking, after seeing that cave-green for several years!  But there was one more step - which you may have guessed if you noticed that the doorknobs on all the doors are taped off.  After seeing stuff like this on Pinterest for the past couple of years, I couldn't resist anymore:

bathroom door straight ahead

That's the same near-black that I mixed up from leftover  black and charcoal paint that I used on the dressing table in my bedroom, and the little candlestick table. I also removed the gold-colored brass doorknobs and spray painted them all silver (mostly - at the time of that picture, I still had one to go).

laundry on the right

This and the bathroom, together, took me about three hours on Thursday night, about six hours on Saturday, and about four hours on Sunday.  NO MORE PAINTING EVER OMG!  *falldowngoboom*




*  Know what made me giggle the entire time I was planning, and painting, and blogging about these black doors?  The Black Door is the name of the vampire night club in Austin, TX, in my favorite vampire novels, The Shadow World, by Dianne Sylvan.  So now I have like, five secret vampire night clubs in my house.  Six, if you count my front entry, which is also black.   (^_^)

Spring Cleaning?

I keep seeing these pop up on blogs this week, so I thought I'd do my own slightly-snarkier and personalized version.  Not to give YOU advice, just to mutter to myself "out loud" (as it were) and in public.

1.  Wash the dog.   I have three 50lb dogs.  YOU wash them if you want them clean.

Actually, Raven's on my to-do list for the back half of this month:  he's a hair farm, and I'm *done* trying to keep this dog clipped myself.  He's up for his shots, so as soon as he's got them all up-to-date, he's going to the store for a professional cut, I don't care how much I have to pay for it.  I'm sick of pulling burrs and dreadlocks out of this dog's fur.

2.  Clean the windows.  I DO actually "do windows", and usually I do it this time of year.  I didn't last year, though...or the year before.  Whoops.  They're a bit manky.  Someone gave me a really nifty car washing brush tool once that hooks up with the end of a garden hose - you can put soap or liquid wax into it if you want to, and the handle extends to like six feet.  Really nifty tool.  Do I wash my car, like, ever?  Nope.  But it's awesome on windows!

3.  Cobweb patrol!  Yeah, I admit it:  my house is crawling with cobs.

*ba-dump-CSH!* 

And I DO run the long-handled duster around the ceiling and doorways more than once a year, but MAN that crap builds up, with all the hairy animals that bring dust and other junk in from the backyard all day long.

4.  Deal with built-up piles of clutter.  Also something I actually do more than once a year - otherwise I'd live in a dumpster.  But I did just recently tidy up and re-organize the laundry room that I spent all that time and effort to sort-of re-model two years ago. (Yeesh, has it been that long?)

I'm also in the middle of cleaning up and re-organizing the garage, and dealing with half-finished projects out there.  The next step (a new wall o' shelves) is going to be a doozy, though. Stay tuned.

not my actual house,
thank goodness

5.  Wipe up built-up fingerprints on wall switches, hallway corners, and around doorknobs.

Yeah, it's probably time to do that, actually.  Just because most of my walls are painted gray doesn't mean that manky crap doesn't show.  Bleh.








Also on my Spring Cleaning list:

• take down all the draperies in the house and run them all through the washer.  I do this about twice a year, actually, for my allergies.  I don't use curtains I can't put into the washing machine for exactly this reason. 
• fireplace cleanup - already done, actually. 
• Bleach and re-seal the grout in the tiled areas of the house.  I used to do this every Spring, but I haven't in about three years.  It needs it, though.  

And some maintenance items that need to be dealt with soon, or else: 

• the deadbolt on the nifty new storm door I installed a few weeks ago is suddenly not working, for some reason.  I needed to take the cylinder out and take it to the hardware store to have it re-keyed anyway;  I'll have them look at it while I'm there.  
• Another door issue: the "temporary" gate I put up over a hallway door to keep the dogs out of "Catland" (where the food, water, and litterboxes live) has now been in place for nearly FOUR YEARS.  And it's falling apart, of course, because it was never meant to last this long or put up with the abuse it's gotten over the years.  It's time to get off my ass and put the real solution that I've always meant to get around to, into place.  
• Two years ago, I scrubbed, patched, and re-painted all of the baseboard trim in the entire house...except for the dining room.  Sigh.  
• Oh, and the guest bathroom, too, and the paint on the trim in there is yellowed and chipped.  It needs to be re-done, especially since I re-painted the room not long ago, which just made the old trim look even worse than it did. 

And the garden...oh, don't even get me started. 

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I can has a storm door!

Before

Aaaaaand we're back (from a week and a half long vacation, which was epic, and you can read all about it here, on my +2 Blog of Dorkitude).  The first day back involved a lot of sitting around, moaning about post-camping aches and pains, and laundry like you would not believe.

On the second day, I got to work refinishing the storm door that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It was given to my friend Mary by a friend of hers, and she gave it to me.

took it apart, scrubbed and dried all the parts

it was red!  and with a mirror-finish
shade film on one side of the glass.

how to use up old wrapping paper
(and protect your glass from spray-paint dust)

After: 

YAY!  

 It took about an hour and a half to get the frame pieces and the door hung, and it went off without a hitch.  Special thanks goes out to my awesomesauce boyfriend Kress - I could never have done it by myself, this thing was so heavy.

Finally, light in the 24' long entry hallway!!!

Next post:  some yardwork! 

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+3 Vacuum Cleaner of Awesome

Introducing: Da Bomb

Seriously, this little blue thing for the WIN.  Got a new vacuum this week.  A canister, for the first time - I dunno where this thing's been all my life, but I'm pretty much never going back.  I can't even describe the filth that happens to my floors with eight four-legged animals running around the house;  this thing made sweeping twice, vacuuming twice, then mopping into...just vacuuming.  Once.  0_0



Other things going on in the Land of Me: 

• MAJOR preparations for Gulf Wars, a big honkin' SCA event in two weeks, that I'm actually pretty prepared for, except for the part where I'm going to be spending the next twelve days sewing like a woman possessed. 
• I got the HOA approval to hang the storm door (seriously, guys? a month?), so, next spare ten minutes I get that's not taken up by sewing is going to get devoted to spray-priming and -painting the door and mounting hardware to match the trim on the house, and getting it hung in place.  Can't wait!
• I'm also in the process of putting the flooring - and everything else! - into the guest room all in one fell swoop.  Gulf Wars is out of state, and so Kress' mom is coming to house-sit and dog-sit, so we're sprucing up the guest room for her.  We got an entirely new set of bedding and linens for the room from Kohl's recently;  and I've been gathering furniture from Craigslist and friends.  I can't wait to show you! 

More updates as soon as I can!

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When One Door Closes, Another Opens Somewhere Else

It's true!

First, last night, I visited a friend I hadn't seen in some months, and she showed me this fantastic giant metal storm door  that she'd picked up for free and couldn't use...and offered it to me.  I hemmed and hawed - my front door is just slightly a funky size, enough that most other doors don't work with it.  Hers was exactly right! YAY!!!

And then I got in my truck to leave attempted to get into my truck to leave, and couldn't get the key into the lock.  I had to go in through the passenger side to unlock the driver's side door!  The hell?  I got it fixed this morning, though, so it's all good.

Soon as my friend and I can get that door across town (when we both have time, since it won't fit in my truck), I'll have a new storm door to refinish and hang.  Yay!

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AHA!!!! (Craft Room Closet B&A!)

It took six hours, and it like to killed me by the time I was done last night, but I have FINALLY fixed up the craft room closet!  What was wrong with it, you ask?  This...

Before

O_O

1.  I mean REALLY. 
2.  I am so. over. the green.

catbomb!

See the "panels" on the wall back there?  Once upon a time, this closet was a little computer desk nook, and those cleats were part of the support system for the desk top.  When I turned it back into a closet, I left the cleats on the wall thinking maybe, just maybe I'd end up putting another desktop in there...

After

the same blue from the bedroom and laundry room

Et voila!  The desktop returns, and can be used for storage or as a small work surface on occasion (when the closet was a computer nook, I really liked being able to do small crafty things in there, too). 

The top shelf is the same one from the "before" picture;  the middle two are adjustable, thanks to the rails and brackets.  The narrow space between the top shelf and the first of the adjustable shelves is intentional:  I have so much flat art stuff - canvases, giant sketchbooks, rolls of paper, trays of supplies - that I always ended up piling it on my sewing table (gah!!) or putting it on a shelf and then stacking stuff on top of my artwork because of all the wasted space on the shelf (gah!!!!)  Now I have a dedicated art-stuff-shelf which is exactly the right shape and size.  I am SO excited about this.

Now all I have to do is take all the stuff from here: 

And put it here:

 

 

HAHA

Ah, if only it were that easy. 



To be honest, though, I'm not crazy about the blue doors:

The green's gone, which is awesome.  But the blue is ...wrong...for where I'm planning to go with the room (which is a completely different place than I was thinking of last year, so if you remember that post, please shake your brain's Etch-A-Sketch and erase it). 

Anyhoo, I think I'd rather leave the blue closet as a surprise, and paint the doors white again, like they were before the green thing happened.   They could probably use, like, knobs, too.  Or...bifold doors? Or...*gasp*....curtains??  Hm...



Anyway.

FREAKING TADA!!!   I did something, yay. 


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Before + After: Back Door

Before

This is my back door:

This is my back door on drugs...sorry.  No drugs, I promise. Notice anything about the following two pairs of pics?

Microsoft Paint: kickin' it old school

I've been thinking about painting the back door.  Dark.

It was painted the same color as the walls.  I did this a few years ago, after sick of looking at a BIG. WHITE. RECTANGLE. breaking up the back wall.  And I liked it, but with all the dark wood furniture and floors, the room was getting a little quite bottom-heavy.  Painting the blinds brought some of the dark, warm wood tones up onto the windows (and no, I'm still not finished - been waiting for the rain to stop)...but what about the door?




After 

But it wasn't enough.  So yes, I painted my back door.  ORANGE!

do YOU have a blow dryer in your tool kit?

Haha, not really.  This is the undercoat for the faux-bois - a light, warm color that will later form the light, warm highlights in the "wood" look.  Normally I use a brown-ier color...but I had orange already in the garage! 

Me:  I dunno, baby, I kinda like the orange. What do you think?

Kress (from the other room):  WHAT?  I'M SORRY, MY BULLSHIT ALARM WAS GOING OFF 
   IN HERE AND I DIDN'T HEAR WHAT YOU SAID.

Me: *dies laughing*  Dude, that is so going in my blog.   

1st and 2nd coats of dark brown, streaked and stippled on with a wet brush

I love it.  It's not the BIG. DARK. RECTANGLE that I was afraid it might become.  Next step is to paint those white mullions (wow, those are bright), and to replace the turquoise scarf with a curtain that coordinates better with the white sheers on the windows. (I love the scarf in the day, but not at night).

morning light <3

corner "seam"

More later this week! Or not! What will be will be.  Or something. :)



QUIZ QUESTION:  how many animals can you see in this post?  If you guess correctly you can have one of them.  Not really.


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