What's Going On

NO  DISASSEMBLE

Remember the Ikea FORHOJA kitchen cart that I was using as a sideboard type thing before  I built the apothecary unit?

This is it, all disassembled. It's already been sanded down fully, and given a first coat of stain. Judging by how the staining is going, it may need 25 coats. We'll see.

What else am I doing right now?

• Crocheting a blue shawl
• Crocheting a multi-colored sweater
• Painting the legs of a little nightstand-table I have sitting around in my bedroom (finished)
• Sewing 5 cushion covers for a friend's couch
• Working on a painting I'm making for a friend for Giftmas

What's Next After That? 

• Refinishing my bedroom nightstand
• Refinishing an old wooden plant stand
• Crocheting a rug for my roommate, as soon as we find the right yarn
• Crocheting some slippers, maybe 
• Sewing a skirt or top for myself out of the leftover fabric from a dress I made recently 

What's New? 

I finally bought myself a new sander!  My old one was a work horse, but it was too big, heavy, and high-powered for me to wield safely anymore - it shook me and hurt me so much my hands and arms would be unusable for days after, every time I used it.  I got myself a little $23 Porter & Cable in-line palm sander, and it's GREAT!  Much more easily controlled, and it does as much work as my big one ever did - surprising, for such a little, lightweight thing.  Yay!  

More news on the FORHOJA as it develops.  Meanwhile, here's a crocheted scarf I just finished yesterday: 

ooh, ahh

Living Room: Some Small Projects

1. From Console Table to Entertainment Center

After the TV shelf that I built three years ago died during the latest move, we decided to use a console table (from World Market, about 10y ago) for the tv instead.  The only problem was, there were no shelves for DVDs and things in it - it was just a big hole:

Nothing a 14" 8' pine shelf board from the hardware store couldn't fix.  I just happened to have a stain that matches perfectly - Rustoleum's "Kona." I cut out a 3" square from each corner to fit around the console uprights, and attached the boards with 1" L-brackets at each corner.  Boom. 

Pro Tip:  make sure the can of stain is completely closed before shaking the living crap out of it. Oops.

2. Candle Fireplace

The fireplace works; but I'm not about to use it for a fire in a rental. You just never know, you know? But, at least now I have an LED candle "fire."  I've always wanted to try this.  

I know, I know - the stuff on the mantel is wonky. Don't look. Not done yet. 

3. An Old Project Re-Purposed

Once upon a time, I played with a Medieval reenactment group. It was swell, but eventually the swelling went down and I moved on to other hobbies.

While I was there, though, I made over a wooden toybox my grandfather built for me when I was two.  It was old and battered, and it made me sad that it only ever saw the inside of my closet.  I made it into a semi-pseudo old-looking chest, then created a lid and painted a little Medieval-looking mural on it. 

Once again, now that I no longer do the Medieval thing, my beloved chest was languishing in storage.  So, the other day I put feet on it (actually blue glass drawer knobs with felt on the ends bottoms) and put it into service as a miniature coffee table.

(L)  glass knobs for feet                                                                            (R) storage! 

4. Ikea RASKOG Cart

This is an Ikea RASKOG cart that I spray-painted to use as sort of a rolling coffee table and art-cart.  The Medieval chest above serves as a coffee table for public things, like remote controls, but the cart is for my personal stuff. I like to sit on the couch and listen to movies, or BBC Earth, while I draw.  

This has it's own post, if you're interested. 

What's next? 

Chairs!  

A Completed Hovercraft

Well, it took a little over 3 weeks, but the aforementioned indoor construction site is now a bathroom again,  complete with functional, brand-new shower.  You saw the gaping hole and wall innards;  here's what the new shower looks like:

I know, I know, you know what a shower looks like.  But seriously.

More blue stuff, yay!

This is the smallest bathroom I've had since like 2003.  It's plenty big enough to move around in; but it's kind of a bitch to photograph.

They left the cute little tile fixtures, yay!  I have to say, I wasn't all that excited about the sort of pale-sand-colored wall tile at first, but the more I live with it, the more I kind of love it.

What's Next? 

The living room, which means that the garage is actually next.  When we moved in, everybody just threw things into the garage at random, so the whole space is clogged, and there's no room to set up my little workshop yet.   There are a couple of boxes of things in the living room that need to go into the garage, but there's nowhere to put them. And there are a couple of pieces of furniture in the living room that need to be repaired and/or altered, but, again, no workshop yet. 

I know what I'll be doing this entire upcoming three-day weekend. 

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!

What In the Hecking Heck?

Work on the corner desk proceeds...well, I guess it's a decent pace if you're a glacier.  Or maybe a snail, or a tortoise.  I've got two legs fully stripped and sanded now, which took about 8 hours.

(this one is stripped, but not yet sanded)

Isn't that pretty?  I'm an idiot. What I thought was dark wood turns out to be just a stain job so old that it really didn't look like a stain job anymore.  Is it walnut? Redwood? Nope! It's YELLOW: 

mostly-sanded leg on the left, mostly-stripped at
center, two legs I haven't done yet on the right

Hey, I never said I was a professional wood-identifier.

What I do know is that the wood is

• Yellow, with gray and reddish streaks in the grain
• Very soft - I can mar it deeply with just my fingernail
• Light - as big as the whole table is, I can pick it up easily, and I can balance these legs on a finger
• Odiferous!  It smells kind of earthy and warm, and almost sweet - it reminds me of fireplaces and cookies baking.  It's not a "loud" smell;  I can only smell it when I put my nose right up to the wood.  

I have no idea of the age of the piece - I'm guessing 80s or a little bit earlier, from the style; but I have no way to know for sure.  I don't know if it was made locally or not.  There isn't a single stamp or maker's mark anywhere on it, so it might have been a one-off someone made at home?  Unless the original mark was on the drawer that was replaced by the crappy pine drawer that's on it now.

If it was locally made, either by a single person or a local company, it could be either some type of elm, or hackberry.  Both descriptions seem to fit better than anything else I've read; their pictures of the end-grain for American Elm matches these legs almost exactly.

Here's another question: is the top the same wood as the legs?  I won't know until I get there.

Something else I noticed:  while the legs are turned, they're not all one piece.  Both finished legs are made from two pieces of wood sandwiched together lengthwise, then turned on a lathe.  So not super high-end stuff, but maybe not cheap and mass-produced, either? I just don't know.

Not that it matters, anyway. I love this desk, and I can't wait to "meet" it when it's finished.

This is the kind of thing that I love about refurbishing old furniture.  Every single piece is an adventure, or a mystery, or simply an...experience.  (I'm looking at you, vanity table that smelled like dog pee when I sanded you).

More soon. 

Shelfy Nook

FINISHED!  Finally.  This was like four days' work, and it took me a month. Whew! Procrastination is hard. 

 

Back to the beginning:

I started working on this nook in December  (see this post):
I  removed rotted and sagging shelves and plastic shelf clips which were painted and caulked into the wall, repaired the resulting wall damage, primed the walls and gave it a first coat of paint. 

When I painted the living room over the holiday break, I also installed these supports (1x1/4" pre-primed trim molding) and painted them in with the wall color when this wall got a second coat of paint.

Like a billion years later, I finally got the wood for the shelves out of the back of my car where it had been since December, cut it to size, and attached more (untreated) trim molding to the fronts.

Wood conditioner ftw.  I've never used it before, but WOW it made a difference. The stain went on so smoothly, only took a single coat, and sanding was minimal.

The stain is Minwax's Deep Walnut.  I'm a Jacobean girl from way back; this time I was looking for something with a little less of a green undertone, but not so warm that it bordered on reddish. This was perfect.

P.S.: stainable wood filler my ass. SO much work covering the nail holes on the fronts and getting them to blend in. Sigh.

I am loving the way these turned out.  I should have used a wider trim facing on the fronts of the shelves, so that they would completely cover the struts on the walls, but, live and learn, right?

The last thing was to deal with this nasty 30yo+ a/c return air cover.  It turned out to be a lot less work than I'd anticipated.  I removed it, banged it back into shape with a hammer (from the back), cleaned the gook off of it with my bike cleaning spray (AWESOME) then hit the whole thing with a couple of coats of plain, white, hi-gloss spray paint.

Hilariously enough, there was no filter behind this cover, and nowhere to fit one - the edges of the wall behind the cover are all crumbled and corroded, and when I tried to wedge a filter in place, it just fell flat.  I ended up zip-tying the filter to the cover to keep it where it belongs. Thankfully, it doesn't show:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 


I LOVE the way this all came out. :)

Things I Did Over the Holiday Break, Part II

I finally, FINALLY built that extra project bench in the garage I've been talking about for months!!! 

I know, I know - it doesn't look like much.  In fact, it looks like half a table humping a kitchen furniture.  Which is probably because that's kinda what it is.  I was going to strip all the wood and stain it, or paint it - and you know, I finally realized I didn't care.  It's a shop bench, dude.  It's going to get f'd up.  

Things That Have Been Cobbled Together To Make A New Thing: 

(because they're still on the garage floor, but now they're only taking up ONE spot, and serve a purpose) 

• counter-height, unfinished kitchen cabinet piece, donated*  by a friend
• two boards, both alike in dignity 2x12"x6', which have served me many a purpose over the years
• Two steel table legs, harvested from my old project bench (which you may remember) 
• Two heavy-duty plastic bed risers

* "donated" = "Come get this or I'm throwing it away."

Okay, so, don't laugh about the bed risers.  They're totally sturdy.  I've used them for years, for various purposes (okay, mostly for making things taller, but, all sorts of things!)  They make the steel legs exactly the same height as the cabinet, so the whole thing is very stable.  I did put non-slip padding in between the risers and the legs, to make sure they wouldn't wobble around if the workbench got bumped or shoved.  And finally, the big, dirty, messy table in the background? That's my WORK table.  This one is just for sitting at, working on small stuff, like putting together lamps and things.  It won't be taking a lot of abuse. 

Ah, my faithful pair of boards.  They started life in a cinder block shelf on my balcony at an apartment complex, so that I could put MOAR PLANTS out there.  One of my favorite spiders started her life in a tiny, tiny web on that shelf, and grew until her webs were three feet across and she was taking down small planes all by herself.  Zippy was so cool.  The boards are strapped together underneath with some scrap lumber, on the open end; and screwed into the cabinet frame on the other end.  Sturdy stuff. 

Okay, so, I do actually plan to spruce this thing up.  I just got tired of waiting for myself to deal with the parts before assembling the thing, and tired of waiting for its assembly in order to finish some small stuff (like lamps!!) that I have waiting in the wings, lacking only a space on which to work.  I will be sanding down the top of the boards and re-sealing them, as well as sealing the cabinet.  I may change my mind and stain both, or paint both.  I have no idea, to be honest. 

Springy-sproingy drawer dividers FTW!  This is not actually what I'll be keeping in this drawer.  I have no clue what I'll keep in it.  This was random junk I grabbed from a nearby pile just to make the picture look better.  I posted this on Facebook, and my friend says, 

"I wanna see what comes of the tent stakes and Moroccan lamps." 

Me:  "Broken glass." 

Her: "No glowy wildebeests?"  

Zippy II

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The Oldest Wildebeest

So, this wood I bought at Lowe's the other day.

As I've mentioned before, once upon a time I kept a crap-ton of aquariums.  I migrated from various types of fish to newts, in my twenties; but then last year, my last aging newt finally kicked the bucket, and I took down my last aquarium.  I've missed it terribly.  I miss the soft bubbling in the background, the light from the water reflections bouncing around the room, watching the cats watching Fish TV, lol.

In 2006 I began building an aquarium cabinet: 

July 2006

painted and sealed interior, with floor. August 2006

...And then I stopped.  I had a very good reason for not finishing this cabinet...not that I remember what it was now, five years later.  But all this cabinet needed was an outside, a shelf in the middle, and a top.

That's where my trip to Lowe's this week comes in:  I now have materials to create walls, doors, and a shelf on the inside.  Will I get it done this weekend?

To be continued...

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In Which the Mini-Couch Gets A Step Ahead...

Starts off on the right foot?  Puts its best foot forward? WHAT?  I'm tired, and I hate post titles.  :P

Anyway, as you may have noticed, the mini-couch is a bit short...

Low to the ground much? 

But, after a few slats of scrap wood and some feet cut from old coffee table legs I had sitting around in the garage...

 Much better!  (There isn't any trim on the sides of the couch in this picture; I attached it after I took the pic).

I attached the feet with these guys: 

good stuff.

But wait...

Just for a bit of fun...

Tada!  

Now to get this sucker slipcovered...


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Wildebeests: Nice Rack (Part I)

Look! I posted something!  I actually DID something this week! :)

Okay, well, I've done a lot this week so far, just no project-y things.  But I got this one good and started:

This was a section from a queen-sized headboard that I found on the side of the road last year.  It's been sitting in my garage since then...leaning on things.  I had no idea what to do with it.  Until last week.

I cut it into thirds - a middle and two "identical" end sections* - then deglossed the finish and went over it with a bit of black-brown paint to change the color and also make it look a bit worn.   (It's halfway done in this shot - no judging!)

*  "Identical" is in quotes because although the ends looked identical, they're totally not!  Who carved this thing, anyway?  Hee.

It's going to be a coat rack when it grows up.  Just you wait.


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