My first woodworking project.

I’ve been checking out Ana White for months now and dreaming about all the furniture we could fill our house with.  Trying to furnish a house over the past year – via trips to Goodwill, and thrift stores in addition to quite a few hand-me-downs, and trips to “real” furniture stores – is a lot of work!

I have had my eye on quite a few things to build but safely decided to start with something easy – the ten dollar ledges.  They were pretty easy, but not without a few stumbling blocks.  We started out screwing them together and then filling the holes with wood putty.  After staining them – the supposedly “stainable” wood putty din’t look as good as I thought it should.  So…change of plans and they became painted. 

At this point in the process I think I got my first project ‘I told you so’ from Tim.  And ughhhh, he was right 🙂 I put it in writing and everything! So a trip to home depot and $250 later I was the proud owner of a brand new air compressor and 3 nailers – what he told me I should have used to build the shelves from the beginning! But, with the other projects in the future pipeline, this should come in handy as a project investment.

We cut down the 8 foot lengths to do two sets of shelves.  One set at 66 inches for above the couch in the living room painted ‘Wild Truffle’ by Behr; and a second set at 30 inches for the front guest bedroom painted white (leftover trim paint).

The guest rooms shelves:

Living room shelves:

Measuring for Placement

Complete!

There is still a bit of space to fill in, but eventually it will be a haphazard gallery wall.  Getting us started is the print we framed with a signing mat from etsy that we used as our guest book for the wedding (from the shop Stella & Hodge: http://www.etsy.com/listing/56608485/carved-initials-personalized-print-wall) and on the right is a old window I bought at a barn sale a few years ago for $10.  I think I took a page out of the American Pickers’ handbook and bundled it with this great braided rag rug that we have on the back deck.  That window moved with us – and then sat in the basement workshop for the past year, I just couldn’t part with it even though I couldn’t find a good spot to put it.  I’m lucky Tim didn’t toss it when I wasn’t looking 🙂

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The Laundry Room

This project came about somewhat unexpectedly….it was already on the “spoken list” but wasn’t something that we made any moves to accomplish anytime soon.  That changed a few weekends ago with a trip to Home Depot for a “few things” and us walking out with two new unfinished cabinets.

Our laundry room/area is right off the kitchen with a door to the back screened porch.  It’s a door that we actually don’t use very often, most likely because the door needs to be replaced.  The screen door is on its last legs/hinges…as a matter of fact Tim recently secured the screen frame portion back in place with gorilla glue (a step up from duct tape?) – we’ll see how long this holds up! The previous owner had replaced all the windows in the house after he purchased in 2005 – but the doors are old, if not original to the house, they pretty darn close – that’s something on our to-do list to be completed before winter 2011! They are drafty!

Back on topic, this is the before of our laundry area:

Original paint color – a grey-ish sage green, washer on the left and dryer on the right, previous owner’s DIY white ‘laundry stuff’ shelf, the tiniest and dimmest light, and random stuff anywhere it would fit.  Note: this picture was actually taken when we walked through the house to first look at it before buying – but the laundry area has pretty much looked the same since we moved in a year ago – just with our stuff everywhere!

So for the past year it’s been on my mind to do something with this area – it needed help! I had been searching for a few months at the local habitat re-store for two upper cabinets that I could refinish/paint but was coming up with nothing usable.  All of their nicer cabinets were sold in complete sets (and they wouldn’t sell just two from a set), so the random cabinets that they had were all mismatched, wrong size, corner cabinets, ect…nothing was usable.

Fast forward to a few weekends ago, while in Home Depot we see they are having a “truck load” sale of unfinished oak cabinets.  The price was reasonable and we left with two 30 inch wall cabinets – similar to this:

Home Depot Unfinished Oak Cabinets (picture from Homedepot.com)

First we painted in the laundry room – same color that we painted in the kitchen when we moved in – but just hadn’t gotten around to the laundry area yet.  Nothing like a project that adds on more to the to-do list!  The color is ‘contemplation’ – sort of a beachy feeling blue.  Prior to painting we replaced the small dim light in the room a new lighting fixture.  Here is the new light and new paint color:

Then a few coats of Behr hi-gloss paint in ‘snowfall ‘on the cabinets…keepin it real,we just throw down the drop cloths and paint in the dining room 🙂 This was a mutli day/night painting project!

And we were ready to hang them this past weekend.

We put the doors back on and added some hardware to match what we installed in the kitchen…

Complete!

We put the dog food container next to the dryer – and the broom/mop/swiffer behind it (I’d like to find some clips to hang them on the wall there).

And Roxie and Jacks’ food and water bowls have a spot right across from their food container, out of the way. 

My mom made that raised bowl stand for them!

And that’s the laundry area re-do.  All that’s left is to find clips to hang the broom and mops & purchase a few baskets for on top of the cabinets for additional storage. 

The room is just so much brighter with the new light fixture…and the new paint color really helps brighten it up too – that old color seemed dingy in comparison. 

What do you think, improvement?

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