Before & After: Tableshelf Printerstand Badkitty

Many moons ago (many, many moons), I bought one of those Southwestern-y looking square trunk tables. You know: rustic pine wood, pre-dinged for your battered furnishing convenience, with rusted iron hardware (because mmm, tetanus*).  Shortly thereafter, I realized I had been smoking crack when I bought it.

I refinished it a number of times, and eventually just painted it black, but it was still a big, flat, clunky table, and I'm WAY too clumsy for large, low-to-the-ground furniture. I have the broken toes to prove it.

"cabinet"

 Eventually, as unwanted furniture in my house is wont to do, it ended up in my sewing room, upended, as a "cabinet."  Yuh-huh.  I wasn't even keeping anything in it, just piling crap on top of it. (As I am wont to do).

I thought about knocking it completely apart and actually building something out of the sides, but I gave up after realizing I could really only make...a big square table with it.  (I've had a serious creativity cramp the last few months, around the house).

"table"

Not to be defeated by a table, I finally decided to just remove the table-y parts and use it as a big square shelf.  You can never have enough big square shelves, after all.

I dragged it out to the garage, removed the feet, the doors, and the center top piece that didn't open (why, exactly...?), and all the trim molding around the bottom edge.

a good start

I wrestled with what to do with the finish.

Leave it, and claim that it was beautiful in its curbside-find simplicity? Paint it a bright, snazzy, eye-catching color?  Nope, don't have any of those, don't feel like buying new paint for this.  Touch up with more black?  Nope, don't have any of that, either.

In the end I settled on using this table shelf to use up the leftover gray paint from the guest bath.

heyloogidat!

There!  Waaay better than the ex-coffee table that used to sit in this corner, which was constantly piled with books and papers, and which invited A Very Bad Cat to sit on the scanner whenever the hell he felt like it.  Something missing, though...

Now the top of the table shelf is full, which means there's no room for the aforementioned Very Bad Cat to hop up there and screw with the printer, or the curtains. Or the plant (which is an Elephant's Foot Palm, related to the Ponytail Palm (Baucarnia recurvata), both of which apparently taste really good to cats).

everything needs a plant on it (in my house)

Vertical magazine and file organizers courtesy of Ikea. Five of them for two bucks. Aw, yeah.

P.S.:

Before. Yowza. 

* And, because I said that, I have to say this, because it's an odd pet peeve of mine:  you don't really get tetanus from rusty metal. The condition of tetanus, aka lockjaw,  (which is actually quite serious, by the way) is caused by any one of a number of tetanus bacteria, which are soil-borne, anaerobic bacteria, and which die when in contact with oxygen. A rusty nail buried in the ground? Sure, maybe (boots and gloves in the garden, people). A rusty nail sticking out of a table in your house? No way. Certainly not a clean sewing needle in a sewing machine, Dr. Guy Who Made Me Get That Horrible Shot For No Reason). 

Wildebeests: Guitar Rack (Part II)

Before: 

+

After:

 

Much better, yes?  

 

This is what the black pipe insulation was for.   If it looks like the pegs are spaced differently, it's because they are:  we have two different types of guitars that need to go into this rack, with different body widths.

Of course, they're not 100% secure like this:  the weight of the guitars + the angle at which they lean makes this a very stable setup, but in order for this to be cat-proof we need...

 Dog collars.  No, seriously:  3/4 black nylon dog collars with plastic click-locks, affixed to the back of the top of the rack, which will wrap snugly (and softly) around the neck of each guitar.  Just in case.

I'm also going to hang a plastic file folder container off the back of this unit, to store music, books, and bits and pieces like tuners and pencils and cables.   

Yay!  

After the rack was done, Kress and I had one more project:  putting a strap on my guitar, which is the acoustic in the first "after" picture.  That doesn't sound like a big deal, until you consider two things:  

1. I had to drill two holes in the guitar, in order to install "buttons" (pegs) that a strap attaches to, and 
2. my guitar is thirty-seven years old.   

I just about had a freaking heart attack, but with Kress' steady hands and calm reassurance, we got the holes drilled without incident, and I didn't die from fright.  Plus now I can play standing up.  :o)


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It's Spaghetti Time!

Is there a blog award for stupidest entry title?  Heh.

Sorry I've been scarce this week;  it's been a bit crazy at work, and I've completely exhausted by the time I get home, so I haven't done much blogging...or, really, anything else besides watching The Tudors, which I'm totally into right now (I'm late to that party, I know).  But I DID sort out the Gordian Knot of a cable situation under the computer desk:

cord spaghetti:  worse than it looks in the picture!

Rather than just cutting the whole thing apart (which is what I wanted to do), I unplugged everything and then hooked it all back up in an order that made sense,  tied all the cords together and up off the floor,  and then hung a simple white curtain behind the desk (taped to it with masking tape, actually, tee-hee).

...which is TOTALLY OBVIOUS in this picture; but really, in person, you hardly notice that there's a sheet there since the white blends in with the sheer white curtains  (which, in this picture, are NOT being done any favors by those cheap, old, yellow mini-blinds, but that's an issue for another day...and it only looks like this at night (see first picture), so, I'll only have people over to my house during the day for a while, I guess).

Here's a shot of the entire "room", a.k.a. the north end of my football field of a living room.  To the left is the kitchen, and to the right is the back of the couch and the wicker chair I posted about the other day.  Last week? Week before?  Yeesh. This time of year messes with my head.  

Anyway, I also moved that set of four paintings from the corner where the blue one is to make room to stand all those guitars [neatly] on end (instead of stacked on the floor like they were before), and also to provide more of a divider between the two "rooms" than that big plant provided on its own. 





Purple = things that will each be getting their own post soon, as soon as I get my butt out from in front of the TV.  

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Weekend List

I did manage to get a curtain up behind the computer desk to conceal the computer cords, but it needs some adjustment, and the cords themselves still need wrangling, so I don't have "after" pictures yet.  I'll do that tonight, though.

I also did a bit of de-cluttering around the living room and dining room, moved some art around and added a new piece, and re-arranged some of the musical instrument storage. 

So that's what's up next in here for this week - stay tuned.  Hope you're having a better Monday than I am! ;)

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Desk Out of Nowhere!

Big, old, clunky, broken desk:

those encyclopedias should have had a V-8

Replaced with a new desk, built in April for a computer in another room that broke about a month later:

Ta-da!  Whoa, holy Cord Spaghetti, Batman!  Don't worry, I'll deal with hiding that - but first I have to sort a giant box of office supplies culled from all over the house while moving desks last night, and fix the aforementioned broken computer.

This, by the way, is the first stage of re-vamping Kress' "drum room" into an all-out Music Room capable of doubling as an honest-to-goodness Guest Room as the need arises.  Onward!

Living Room Update, Part I: Office

My "office" is parked under a window at the North end of the living room space, framed by floofy curtains and overhanging vines, making the space feel private and lush while you sit at the computer goofing around on the internet.  0:) The desk is an old Ikea piece from nearly a decade ago, given to me by a friend's mother.  It works, but it's a bit big and blocky; I keep meaning to replace it with something more like this, but so far...?

The Ikea KAUSTBY dining chair that I picked up in the "as-is" section for $20, and for which I sewed this seat cushion made from Ikea's SARITA sheer curtains in a peacock-blue.

A small view of some of the little things on my desk that I keep there simply because I enjoy looking at them:  a tiny clay pot with a Jade plant in it; a red Moroccan candle lantern from World Market, a stack of old Shakespeare stories from a thrift store, and a tiny clay "Garden Goddess" figurine made for me by a friend.

A wider view, with magazines and books-to-be-read, and a carved wooden tray (also from World Market) that contains necessities like pens, a small pad of paper, my cellphone and camera chargers.

 Part II tomorrow - the actual living room.

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Photographic Succes!

I have conquered the stupid camera battery!  YUSS!

Here's the chair pad I made using the leftover "Sarita" curtain panel from Ikea.

An interestingly-lit shot of part of my office area in the living room. 

And a quick shot of the sari quilt that my friend Nadia gave to me over the weekend.  Isn't it GORGEOUS?!  I'm almost afraid to touch it.  And I waaaaant it on my bed.  Maybe I could just wrap all the cats in bubble wrap, and tape the dogs' mouths closed...

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