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!   

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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A Craigslist Dresser Facelift

I did two things over the holiday weekend break!  (I mean, aside from sleep all day Sunday, because I could).  The first was a quick furniture re-finish:

Before

I found this baby on Craigslist for $40 last week.  It's just a little MDF jobber by Sauder, but brand-spanking new, and pretty nice.  And certainly better than the thing it was replacing (which I'll get to tomorrow).

The first thing I did was remove the drawers, and dismantle the child-proof hardware that was attached to each one, which prevented (a) more than one drawer from being open at a time, and (b) any drawer from being opened without being pushed in and pulled up or some weird combination, in order to release the child-lock before the drawer would open.  I don't have kids.  And now I don't have a dresser that's a PAIN IN THE ASS, either.

The second step was to degloss the entire thing with my trusty Liquid Sander, and hit it with a bit of fine sandpaper to muck up the finish enough to take a coat of paint.

Then I wrapped the entire thing in plastic (yay, planning!) and spray-primed the top.

After

I streaked the body of the dresser, and the drawer fronts, with black paint, to darken the finish and give this thing some actual texture (rather than just the ultra-smooth Picture-of-Wood finish).

I also replaced the wooden knobs that came with this dresser.

A better shot of both the paint
finish and new hardware.

The bottom drawer sports a pair of these guys.  Yes, I adore maps, but actually this was because I only purchased enough handles for the top three drawers the first pass through Hobby Lobby, and when I went back for one more pair, they were out of the flat key-shaped handles I bought before.  I got these instead, because they're adorable.  And I kind of like the mish-mash of hardware on this thing, actually.

The top got another faux-marble paint treatment (whites and grays this time, in stead of the alabaster-y cream and brown like I did on that little nightstand), and I'm sorry to say that most of the picture I took of it just didn't want to come out right.

But this dresser makeover is actually a part of a much larger ordeal - I finally fixed up my bedroom closet!  More on that, and better pics of the dresser top, tomorrow.  :)






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