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.

Art Storage: An Ikea Hack*

In March of 2017, I started refinishing what would become my art table.  I got 2.5 legs stripped, and then had to stop because I broke my foot...and then I never got started again.  This will be one of my next projects, but for the time being, it still works great as an art table. Over the weekend, I picked up a couple of Ikea MOPPEs to create some storage for the top:

The MOPPE comes already assembled, so I didn't have much work to do here.


I stained the entire thing(s) with Minwax's "Dark Walnut", and added knobs and labels.

At the moment, I have butcher paper covering the table surface;  my plan is to make a custom plexiglass top for it once it's done, to protect the wood and so that I can just wipe up paint spatters without damaging the wood - as old as this table is (possibly early 20thC; more likely a 70s or 80s piece made to look like an antique).

Eventually, the table will be stained the same color, and my hope is that the table and MOPPEs will look like a single piece of furniture.

The knobs here are 1/2" button plugs from the hardware store, just glued to the drawer fronts (actually the drawer backs). 

The labels are cardstock from an old sketchbook, affixed with tiny black tacks - an idea I saw on Pinterest.

The end result is enough like a card catalog or apothecary cabinet that I'm kind of in love with them!





For now, though, I am LOVING the MOPPEs!!

Next Up: 

More living room?! 

* I refrained from titling this post “MOPPE It Up”. You’re welcome.

A Small Project With a Huge Impact

an Ikea Hack in the making

About a billion years ago (2015?) I purchased a SVARTÅSEN laptop table from Ikea.  It was awesome!  A little personal workspace - for my laptop, or my art, my nails, whatever I needed.

Problem is, moving into the house was so hectic, that this little thing got left outside, forgotten for several weeks, in the rain.  No big deal, though, right?  The top is plastic.

Except it turns out it wasn't plastic - it was laminated fiberboard, as I discovered upon turning this thing over to find a big, rotten mess.  Oops.

Not to worry:  I had a couple of small, wide boards left over from the built-in bookshelf project, and one of them just happened to be exactly as wide and deep as the Ikea Svartasen top.  I didn't even bother with copying the shape, I just used the entire board, in the hopes that the extra weight wouldn't unbalance the table (it doesn't) and that the new corners would give me more room to work (they do). 

(pay no attention to the hideous denim couch)

Here's the "new table", after I sanded, stained, and sealed the board, and screwed it onto the existing base.

I swapped the coffee table for a smaller one, too, and between these two tables taking up far less space than before, there's plenty of room for my elderly doggo, Shelly, to walk around, and lay down next to me on the floor.

The big rectangle is SO much better to work on than the little roundy-triangle shape the table came with!  It feels humongous, and it's nice to be able to spread out while I'm working. 

The little clip-on LED task light from Ikea  that's clamped to the table is REALLY BRIGHT, so I made a little lampshade out of a scrap of printer paper, to keep the light on my work and not in my eyes. It looks silly, but it works!

Cyclamen, 1-28-18

Just in case anyone's curious, this is the drawing on the table in the sketchbook on the table.  The little wonky leaf cracks me up - I was trying to remember how the patterns go without looking at the actual plant, and failed miserably.  I love mistakes like this, though; I love seeing them in old sketchbooks, and seeing how far I've come from those old drawings.

I have a weird urge to paint something cool on the surface of my "new" table.  I'll let you know if I do.

More soon!

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!

ACK!!

Freaking sewing table!  AURGH!  

The sewing room has been finished for like a week, guys, seriously.  FINISHED.  Except for the sewing table itself, which I've painted TWICE now.  The first time, it was *done* except for a protective clearcoat - what, three days ago?  And then I got this fabulous idea...and, um, yeah...shouldn't have done that.  So I had to start all over again.  Don't you HATE that?  GAH.

So, it's nearly finished again, and the second it's done and IN the room, I'll post.

Meanwhile, I'm painting paintings!  And cut out a whole new outfit for an SCA event coming up that I can't sew yet!  GAAAHHH!!  

Here.  Have a picture of Rory in the sink:

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New Life For That POS Footstool

You know the one.  Just a quick refresher:

It took way more than a coat of paint and a new top (see previous post) , but, well, here's the after:

Tada!   Blurry photo, sorry.  I'm not using the damn phone camera anymore, I apologize for all the crappy pics.

It's repaired.  It's black.  It has a bigger (and structurally sound) top.

And it's covered in music!  :D  (Can you guess which room it's going into?)

This is all sheet music from my musical exploits in the SCA.  So, it's Medieval stuff, mostly canonical, with a couple of popular love songs of the day (various days);  and where there are visible lyrics, they're in Italian and French.  Because: nerd.  

Plain ol' decoupage, nothing fancy.  Homemade medium (craft glue +  water, sealed with polyurethane).

via

And la piece de resistance?  Well,  I was thinking something like this, but for storage of music books and small musical instruments, instead of plants.


What ended up happening was more of a "fishtank on a table with junk in it."

...yeah.

It just needs some cool decoration.  And a more organized method of music storage than "just dump it all in there for now."

Update soon. :)














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They Say, If You Can't Laugh At Yourself...

So, you guys got to see my new coffee table Wednesday:

I was goldbricking at work re-organizing some of my Pinterest boards yesterday, and while perusing my Furniture board, I came across these old pins from long ago:

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c===3

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Gee, do you think I've been into this style for a while or what?  Heehee.  Just a neat little moment of, "HEY!!"

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Stuff N Thing, Part Troix

Before:  

*DRUMROLLLLLLL*

After:  

Coffee table.


The story is, and you got some of it a while back, that my existing coffee table, though lovely, and dear to my heart, was just too large for the current living room arrangement, and the furniture therein.  I plan to keep it, though I don't know yet what I'll do with it - probably just store it until someday when my living room expands again, or something.

Meanwhile, between an old trunk which became a shelf, (and then another shelf), a bulk-trash-day side table find, and a whole bunch of spray paint, a new, smaller coffee table was born.

the new table receives a cat scan

The dog loves it.  Her favorite spot in the house was under the coffee table, and I was worried that the new one would be too short for her to get beneath, but it works great for her.  Hee.

Truth:  it IS a bit small for the couch, LOL.  But honestly, functionally, it's *exactly* the right size.  And it's pretty.  And it looks awesome with the wing chair and the little gold side table between it and the couch.  Even though it makes the couch look enormous, I really love my new wee coffee table.  (And to be honest, the couch doesn't look so large without a bunch of old blankets draped over it.  Hopefully there's slipcover news in the near future).

I really  should think up a tag/label for "furniture that's been cobbled together from parts cannibalized from parts of other stuff."  But shorter.

Aside:  No shit, a friend of an ex, years ago, was the WORST at mis-using words.  One night while the boys were gaming, I overheard him describing a pirate ship that had been "galvanized" from parts of other ships, and I just could NOT keep from bursting out laughing.  I was dying laughing, and yes, I had to explain why - and then I had to explain what "galvanized" and "cannibalized" meant, and he didn't believe me,  and he was SO MAD.  Shitforbrains. 

A Ten-Minute Side Table Upgrade

You know what's awesome?

Spray paint.

This table is fucking boring.

Now it's awesome!

This is actually the original glass top for the thing.  I think I got this table at a garage sale for $20 like a million years ago.  It was white, and it had an MDF top under the glass that was SUPER gross and water-damaged.  I threw it away, and sprayed the table black.

It spent a lot of time being a table on my back porch, where it went great with the black wicker chairs.  Then it spent some time in my living room, being a pain in the ass with a silver fake-o Moroccan tray on it.

But it needed to be SHINY.  SHINY!!!!  


Now it is awesome.

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"Let's Re-do That Footstool Tonight!" I said.

I actually got quite a number of little, piddly things done last night.  I re-aligned the strikeplate for the deadbolt on my back door, which was making it really hard (and frustrating!) to lock the door.  I cleaned up the kitchen, and re-organized a couple of the cabinets to make a new place to put my pots and pans (well, pot and pan. I'm not a huge cook).  I tightened the bolts on all my dining room chairs, since a couple of them had legs that were getting loose.  I took my liquid-sander to the pieces of that little side table I told you about the other day.

Then I decided to tackle that little footstool - the one I picked up at the same time as that side table.  I got the thing entirely torn down before I remembered that

1. I no longer have a staple gun, because my other one was such a piece of shit that I threw it away the last time I used it, promising myself I'd get a new one soon.  *crickets* 
2. My spray paint stock is woefully depleted - I'm down to like two drops of a turquoise that's way too bright, a couple of silvers, and a really gross, poopy brown color that I don't even remember buying

Yeah, there's no refinishing the wood on this thing.  And I can't finish the project without spray paint and a new staple gun, but at least it's torn down and ready to re-boot.  In the meantime, let's talk about what a galloping piece of shit this footstool turned out to be: 

Clockwise from top left: 

1. First of all, the sides are laminate.  Crappy laminate.  Peeling, cracking laminate.  Sigh.  
2. And the laminate isn't even the same *color* as the stained wooden legs.  What?!?
3. It's not even MDF underneath.  It's pressboard.  UGH. 
4. The piece de résistance: one of the legs once split, and was "repaired" really, really badly.  Basically someone just squirted glue all over it and hoped for the best.  The leg was stuck to the frame, and some of the scrim cloth from the bottom of the upholstered top was glued to the wood.  This glue job will hold, but it'll never hold weight.  There goes the idea of this being my new piano stool. 

Then there's the seat itself.  First of all, under the wood was a bunch of crap and leaves and shit.  Spiderwebs, dead bugs...this thing must've been in a garage or storeroom for a looooong time.  

The scrim covering the bottom of the seat was glued in place all the way around - I had to rip the thing to shreds to get it off, and to get at the staples underneath. 

Speaking of staples...was this really necessary?!  Every corner was like this.  Most of the staples aren't even IN the fabric.  

HAHA FUCKERS. 

Was it the busted leg, or this nastiness, that made the previous owner chuck this damned thing?  This is GROSS.  The foam and fabric aren't just dirty - this is MOLD.  EWWWW FUCKING EW.  Into the garbage with both pieces.  

But wait! 

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! What the crap!?  This is three pieces of...scrap!...glued to a thin piece of luan to form the base board of the seat.  The largest piece has a hold milled out of it - it looks like a piece left over from building an Ikea piece the wrong way.  The other bit is a drawer front, I'm pretty sure.  The dark strip along the end - I have no idea WHAT that thing is, but the wood-tone on it is a strip of corrugated plastic with a laminate wood-grain backing.  Seriously, what the hell.  

So, I have three options: 

1. Replace the foam and fabric, paint the frame and legs, and make a new footstool out of this. 
2. Paint the frame and legs, create a new top for it with no upholstery, and maybe use it as a very small table somewhere, probably out on the back porch.
3. Chuck all the pieces and call it an exercise in whatever the reverse of "don't judge a book by its cover" is. 

LOL.  Wow. 

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Table Time

This is my living room coffee table:

This is my living room coffee table on drugs:

I adore it, don't get me wrong.  In fact, though it was covered in nicks and scratches, I spent about two hours the other day scrubbing the top, running a thin sheen of stain over it to cover up the marks, and then oiling it to a nice, slick shine again.  This table's not going anywhere.

But it IS too large for the seating area in my living room right now.  I'm not sure what I'll do with it next, but it's got to come out.  I'm ready for something new.

If you've been following long, you might remember the trunk table that I turned into a small shelving unit for my printer and computer supplies.  I kept the doors that I removed from the top, thinking I might use them for something one day.

So I had an idea the other day.  I took apart that two-tiered side table I found last bulk day...

That was easy.  The legs unscrew, too, so this thing will be really easy to refinish, when I get to that stage.  First the top, though.  I had thought about a round top, like this:

Pinterest, via Helt Enkelt

But then I thought, what about those door pieces from the old trunk table?

Not sure.  Two of them will make a top exactly the right size to be useful but not [as] prone to clutter, without being too large for the base.  (All three is definitely right out).  The original top is too small.  I don't have a sheet of plywood large enough to cut out a circle...but maybe if I put the three trunk doors together and then cut a circle...Hm.  Just not sure yet. 

I'll be at an SCA event tomorrow; I'll work on this some more Sunday.  Ta! 

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Music Room Loading [-------------80%---]

Little known fact:  putting guitars everywhere does not make a room into a "music room".  :D

Okay, so, this was a computer/office area at one time, at the north end of the looooong living room:

If you've been reading this blog long, you know that this was the latest in a medium-length line of computer desks that have been in front of this window.  I don't have internet at home anymore, therefore, I wasn't actually using my computer for anything...so this little table, salvaged from work by a friend and given to me, was basically just there to keep my laptop and some other crap off the floor.

The same friend once sold me a Casio keyboard, which I'd always planned to actually learn to use - but for that, I needed a table or stand of some kind, and before long, I got two ideas...

CraftyNest.com 

This was the first:  

The second was to designate the space at the north end of my living room as a music space - with the keyboard, my guitars, my violin, music stand, books, etc. all set up.  I LOVE seeing musical instruments displayed; and I thought if everything was out in the open, I might use them more often.

 

Meanwhile, ever the fan of combination projects that end up taking me weeks to do when mere minutes will suffice, I realized I really needed a new work table in the garage.  This thing was NOT cutting it anymore. 

Dirty?  Fine.  But the legs weren't holding the thing up anymore, because the screws were all stripped out, and the thing was bowing in the middle with the legs being so far apart.  The top was sound, but...ugh. 

Nothing a little elbow grease and spray paint couldn't fix, though. The legs from the "computer desk", the top from the old work table, and some cleaning in the "music room", and you have this! 

◄  the Ikea KAUSTBY dining room chair that I upholstered last year

◄  That's Ember, my Ibanez. She's the one I play most often, so she's out in the open, the most easily reached. 

The Gretch barely shows there in the shadows in the corner; but that's where the next part of this room comes in: that white folding settee (yes, the one I keep moving around all over the house, which never quite works, ever) needs to GO.  I'm just not sure what exactly to do with it yet. 

Anyway, once it's out of the way, more room for the Gretch and the music stand.  And for people to be able to walk up to the kitchen bar.  It reduces traffic flow in the actual kitchen at parties.  Plus, I like being able to reach over and get a glass of water without walking all the way around, hehe.  Because I'm lazy.  

This. 

And finally, here's that little brown  black  silver  turquoise black lamp I keep spray painting.  I think I actually like it now. It looks grown-up.  

So: tada!  And it turns out I was right:  with my instruments out in the open like this, I DO grab them and sit down to practice more often!  Couple more things to do in this room: 

• replace/update light fixture (I have a new one, I just have to work on it and hang it)
• find a way (and a place) to hang up my violin where it's easy to reach and out of the way of the cats
• move that damned folding settee somewhere. 
• paint the living room ceiling to match the rest of the house - it's the only one left to do! 

Whew!  

Okay, back to work...

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