working down the list...

I seem to have somehow ended up with several projects that were "almost" finished, but for one reason or another need just one or two more things to be complete...

Like the potting bench that still, after two weeks, didn't have a finished top...




Or the little glove crate in the mudroom that after a month, still didn't have a handle...



But despite the several mostly finished projects, the other evening I found myself sketching plans for yet another little something I'd like to build. (Apparently my attention span isn't long enough these days to completely finish what I start before wanting to move on to something else...)

When I thought about all the little bits and pieces of things I needed to finish up, I decided I wouldn't let myself start one more thing until I'd completed all the "almost finished" ones. So that's what I've been working on...

Yesterday I finished the top of the potting bench. I ended up covering it with tin...



... and adding a handle to each bin door.



I like how it turned out... and that the plywood I used for the lids is now protected from the elements.


Cross that one off the list.


Today I'll be adding the handle to the glove crate (cross another off the list!)...




... and freecycling the old metal patio table that ended up homeless when I cleaned off our little flagstone patio.

Little by little I'll get that list knocked down to nothing...





... because I really want to start that new project!

building a reclaimed wood potting bench

This is was going to be a post featuring a beautifully detailed and in-depth tutorial about how to build a sturdy, functional potting bench for nothing.

But then I realized that the potting bench I just built wasn't quite "nothing"... so far I've spend $2. on a piece of 2x2, and a few dollars more on hardware.

And I also realized that my in-depth tutorial might have some fairly significant gaps because I'm so terrible at taking pictures as I go along. (In other words I don't have a single picture of how it was built... I was having too much fun building it to take pictures!)

But anyway... for what it's worth... here's the slightly condensed version of how you can build a sturdy, functional potting bench for $10.




You start by making a quick sketch on the same envelope that holds your to-do list. (Yes, one of the tasks on my to-do list was super glue the car... don't ask... when your car is almost 20 years old it sometimes requires a little extra creativity when it comes to repairs.) Having the sketch on your to-do list guarantees you'll be looking at it often and inspired to start building.

Figure out a rough idea of the size of your potting bench (mine was determined by the space it would occupy on the back porch and the size of the scrap of plywood I found to use for the top.)



Then look in your stash of wood scraps saved from various projects... your carefully hoarded bits and pieces of wood that might-be-good-for-something-someday. When you don't find enough long pieces of wood there, check your barn and garage (and the neighbor's trash, if necessary) until you have enough for the main form of your potting bench.Then keep digging for more wood, measuring, cutting and assembling (no longer looking at the little picture you'd made because you've misplaced the envelope), making it up as you go along.... until have something that looks like it might be useful.

Don't forget to enjoy the amazing spring day as you work.



Run to Home Depot for hinges and hooks because even with the decades of stuff stored in the barn and garage you can't find any that will work and life is too short to waste time searching for a $2. set of hinges.





Add some sturdy hooks on one side to hold gardening tools.

Neglect your children (only slightly) while you finish building your creation...



Use a bit of exterior paint to paint the shelf boards if, like me, you used scraps of pre-primed 1x3's for the shelving. It will cover up the glaring white of the primer.



Stand back and admire your work...



.. and maybe re-pot a plant or two because it's so much easier now that everything is in one place, and you aren't getting dirt all over the kitchen counter each time you re-pot something.




A few more details:

The only piece of wood I had to buy is the 2x2 piece of redwood behind the top shelf, all the rest is reclaimed wood... leftovers from projects, bits and pieces salvaged from the old outhouse that used to be on our land, and even some wood side panels from a old stake side work truck.

Except for the new piece of redwood, it's all oak and pine.

It's 36" tall, counter top height to be easy to work at.

I started by building two rectangles from 2x4's (one is the frame of the shelf, the other holds the bins for potting soil) then added legs to hold them the height I wanted them. I left the back legs longer, sticking up behind the top, to hold the small top shelf.

The top... the hinged lids... of the potting bench are still unfinished, they may end up wrapped with galvanized sheet metal or tin, or maybe just painted... I can't decide what to do with them.

I used plain plastic dish tubs under the lids to hold potting soil, etc.

The painted shelf slats are coated with a good exterior polyurethane, but the rest of the wood remains untreated.

Thrifting Thursday (small kitchen cupboard)

So... the ugly green cupboard I bought a week ago or so to fix up is finally finished.

And it has ended up being one of my all-time favorite projects. I can't believe how well it turned out... especially after all the trouble it gave me along the way!

 Here's a reminder of where it started (shudder, shudder)






And after the center panel of the door was removed and replaced with wire (hardware cloth)... it was still ugly but getting there...




And now, all finished... Better, yes?




I painted it with the same white I use for most of the woodwork in the house (it has no name, I have it mixed from an old color-match color), and then lightly distressed it.

I'd noticed as I'd sanded it before painting, that there were some nice colors hidden under that hideous green, like baby blue and buttercup yellow. I wanted them to show through a bit... to expose a little of the history of the cupboard, and I knew that as I sanded and exposed the green it would contrast with the white paint and highlight the lines of the cupboard.



So that's what I worked towards as I distressed it...

I carefully preserved and reused the original latch pieces... an interesting round headed screw...



...that fits into this:



I made new shelves for it, that part was easy... but was temporarily stumped about a what do to about a knob or handle. As I had worked on the door, I saw that the cupboard pull it came with was not original... that it had originally had a single knob on the door, not a pull. So I filled the holes left by the pull, and drilled out the hole (still visible on the inside) from the original knob. But what kind of knob to use? I knew it had to be simple to match the cupboard and after playing around with several ideas, I remembered a bunch of old wooden spools of thread I'd picked up at the thrift store. I went through my little collection and found one just the right size.



It may not be on the cupboard forever, but I do like it for now and it seems to fit...  I even searched through Joe's stash of nuts and screws to find a old slotted head screw long enough to hold the spool-knob on since all the other screws on the cupboard (hinges, latch) are slotted, not phillips, head.

The cupboard is just the right size to hold a basket with my mandolin music on the top shelf:




My favorite vintage cookbooks on the second shelf:




The antique canisters Joe got me for Christmas one year on the next shelf:




And my favorite Fischer-Price barn set (circa 1967) on the bottom shelf:



This project was tough... the wood is old and brittle and the door was soooo difficult to take apart so I could replace the center panel with wire...



But it was worth every splinter and frustration.

I'm seriously crazy about this little cupboard now...



... and it has a new lease on life. It's amazing what a little paint and wire can do, isn't it?

getting worse before it gets better...

Ever notice how, with many fix-up projects, things tend to look worse.... sometimes much worse... before they start looking better?

The ugly green cupboard I bought last week is a perfect example of that. On Friday, I shared pictures of me taking the saw to it... and that was only part of the "worse" this cupboard has gone through in the past week.

Here's where it started:



It had been painted very lightly with shiny green paint (I think they were trying for an antiqued look, but missed the boat) and had prints of old seed packets glued randomly on the front.

The seed packet prints came off before it even made it into the house... they were that ugly!

The inside wasn't much better... more bad paint, a couple of shelves and plenty of grime.



I loved the size and shape of the cabinet though, and could envision it sitting in my kitchen looking something like this...



 ... with at least one shelf filled with my vintage cookbooks.

But first it had to get worse.

It shouldn't have been a hard thing to take the center panel out of the door and replace it with wire. But the cupboard is well made, and it wasn't giving up the middle of it's door without a fight.



After trying to remove what looked like tiny molding pieces holding the panel in...




... and ending up with a splintered mess, I realized that they were part of the door (the door seemed to have been assembled around that center panel!)...

...and ended up taking the door apart as little as possible, then sawing the center panel in half so it could be lifted out in pieces.





Eventually leaving me with this:



Which I already liked so much better!

Next up was adding the chicken wire where the panel had been...

I bought some tiny strips of oak to fit in the newly created grooves in the door and hold the wire in, and got some chicken wire from E (who happened to have a whole roll in her barn... lucky me!) but once I got it cut to size I realized that it didn't look right for the little cupboard... the openings in the mesh seemed too large. But as I was wondering what to do, I found a piece of old hardware cloth out in my chicken shed and knew it was perfect. I liked the smaller rectangular spaces in the wire much better.



The hardware cloth is made from a heavier grade wire than the chicken wire so it was a little harder to wrestle into place, but in the end it saw things my way and I finally started thinking this project might actually come together!

 

I moved the cupboard upstairs to make sure I wanted it in the dining room, finished all the wood puttying and sanding I had left over from the battle to get the door panel out, and started painting yesterday.



I'm so excited to get it finished, hopefully by the end of the week...

Thrifting Thursday (one day late)

A new project....

A poor old ugly cupboard I found at Goodwill.





It's getting a face-lift.





More next week...

mudroom barn door: check!

One of the bigger projects on my late winter to-do list was building and hanging a barn door to close off Joe's "man cave" from the mudroom. When we had the basement finished we didn't envision wanting a door for that area, but that room can get messy... and it's visible from the living room when the basement door is open, and it didn't take long for me to decide we should have thought ahead better and made a normal sized doorway and hung a door.

But we didn't.

So... the next best option was a sliding barn style door. I could close off the room when I wanted, but there was enough room next to the entrance into the room to slide the door completely open and out of the way too.

A couple of weeks ago I showed pictures of the track for the door, hung and ready to go... all that was left was building the door. I was a little apprehensive about that part... I'm not a carpenter, and I really didn't want the door to turn out looking crooked, poorly built or cheap.

I am very happy with the finished product though...



Here's how I put it together...

I used a piece of 4x8 plywood, cut to length (at Home Depot) for the base of the door. Luckily 4' was exactly the right width to span the door opening. I wanted a look of random boards for the face of the door, so I played around with the numbers until I came up with a combination of board widths that would evenly cover the 4x8. It turned out to be 4 - 1x6's, 6 - 1x4's and 2 - 1x3's. I just bought inexpensive. common pine boards for these vertical boards.



They didn't look like much at first...

I started by laying them out on the plywood base and playing around a little with how to arrange the different widths.







Once I had my layout planned, I cut them all to length and hauled them outside...

I didn't take pictures of the next few steps, I was in the groove of playing with the wood and didn't even think about the camera!

I sanded each board, softening the edges, removing any marks from the store, and smoothing any splintered edges, then I distressed them... hitting them with a piece of chain and the hammer, nailing in and pulling out nails, etc. (I'm sure the neighbors thought I'd lost my mind... first sanding then marring the same boards!)

Finally I brought them in the house and started staining. I went over each board first with "Ipswich pine" stain, a color that looks good with the natural color of our log walls, then I got out the "jacobean" stain and added some interest to the boards. I used the darker stain to highlight the grain of the wood, especially around knotholes, etc. in the wood. The dents and holes I'd added as I distressed the wood also added interest as the stain settled in those areas...

The darkness on the board on the left is nothing but stain... I just followed the lines of the grain of the wood to make it look natural.



I kept working with the stain and playing around the the layout of the boards until I felt like there was a good balance of color... then I attached them to the base at the top and bottom. (I attached them from the front, knowing the screws would be covered by the horizontal pieces that would run along the top and bottom of the finished door.)

The next day I attached the horizontal boards on the top and bottom using wood glue and screws through the back. I used cedar pickets, cut to size, for those pieces to tie together the door and the cedar door trim that was already in the mudroom.

Once the horizontal pieces were done R and I hung the door, and I added some handles and a couple of coats of polyurethane.

I painted the back of the door to match the wall color so that from inside the room it looks more like part of the wall then just a big piece of plywood.




Hanging the door finished the mudroom re-do and I'm happy with how it turned out...



The the right of the door is our "overflow" pantry...



... to the left is the boot-taking-off spot...




... with a spot for boots, another to hang dog leashes, and the all-important jar of horse treats on the shelf.

Under the chair is a little crate I built to hold work gloves (which always seemed to be scattered all over the mudroom floor).



We had some wheels in the barn that I put on the crate, but they are a little too big... I found the wheels on the chair (also in the barn... Joe never throws anything away!) and they are a little smaller, so I think I'm going to switch them out.

Across the room are coat and key hooks...




It's a tiny room (roughly 10x10), and works much better now that it's been re-organized...



... and I do love the barn door.