extreme cleaning... (sanding the bedroom mantle)

I intended to post again last week with an update about how everything was crossed of my list and I was moving on to the little building project I had planned...

But then it snowed and I wasn't able to get the last bag of cedar shreds put down around the flagstone pathway through the kitchen garden, so that couldn't be crossed off the list.

And then there was the happy surprise of my cousin coming for a visit... which meant I didn't get any else crossed off the list either because we were busy visiting and thrifting, and not thinking about to-do lists...

I really should have finished the last two unfinished bits of projects yesterday... but instead I started on a new one.

Yes, my attention span is very short.

But this was something that had been bugging me for years, and yesterday was the day I just couldn't stand it one. more. minute.

It was the mantle in the master bedroom. The mantle that Annie and Carl (the original owners and builders of our house) decided to use a huge piece of rough sawn lumber for.

I imagine it was beautiful when it was new...

But we live on a dirt road, and that bedroom is in the front of the house and gets dusty (DUSTY!)... and it's impossible to dust rough sawn lumber. It holds onto the dust and dirt, tearing up my rag (adding little fibers of rag to the dirt that's already there) when I try to wipe it down and vacuuming it does little to nothing to clean it.

As I started cleaning that room yesterday morning, I decided it was time to fix that mantle... to sand it down.

I pulled out the big belt sander (that I rarely use because it's so powerful it feels like it's going to run away with me) and got started.

("Before" on the left, with stripes from my trying to vacuum it...)


It was a huge mess...





A HUGE mess.




Did I mention I pretty much trashed the room?





It took a LOT of sanding... starting with the big belt sander to take off the super rough surface (and all the surface dirt!) and then moving to the orbital sander as I started smoothing it.





As the decades of dirt and grime came off, I saw that Annie and Carl had picked a special piece of wood for the mantle... one with the dark streaks that are found in beetle kill wood. The decades of dirt had completely hidden the true look and grain of the wood... It was amazing to watch it being revealed again.

I sanded until it was silky smooth to my fingers.. (that crack is just "checking" in the wood... it happens in logs, and log homes, as the wood dries and ages.. it's nothing that needs to be repaired)



... and then I sanded a little more.



I did not remove all traces of the saw marks from the wood (the diagonal streaks you can see in the wood), I think they add interest to the mantle and show a little of it's history... I did give it a light coat of Ipswich Pine stain, and several coats of polyurethane.

Until, finally, it looked like this...




It was a super messy project (it's funny how the whole rest of the room had to get so dirty to get the mantle clean!) but it was so worth it. I'm loving how it turned out.






(An now I should really start thinking again about finishing those last two little things on my to-do list!)

Happy Anniversary...

...to us.

Today is the 10th anniversary of our move into this house. (If you haven't heard the story of our move in a blizzard, you can read about it here.)



It's been a wild 10 years starting with the fixing up of this poor neglected house we bought...










... and continuing through storms and sunshine....














.... an education every step of the way.





Here are a few more of my favorite blast-from-the-past photos of the past 10 years...

The goat days... how much hay CAN you fit into an Isuzu Trooper?






The day we realized M should probably not plan on getting a driver's license...



Got mud?




R and Grant...



The ever present deer...



... and even a rare albino one!



The day the circus came and painted our house gray and ran off with the kids...



... thanks to my brother's extreme photoshopping skills.

And, of course, the years of homeschooling...





It's been an amazing 10 years.

Here's the house before we moved in....



... and this morning... shrouded by fog from a cold front that blew in last night.



The barn back in 2006...





... and last summer.



If you like before and afters, there are a few more here...

fixing a dirty little secret, and finishing the blue sky bathroom

Remember when I painted my bathroom vanity about a year and a half ago?  I loved the change from the orange-y 1970's wood to a sleek black.

(This picture was taken before we moved in... the pink carpet is LONG gone!)





The vanity looked good... it looked finished... unless you got down on your hands and knees and peaked underneath.  Which no one did of course.

But if you had this is what you would have seen:




A big glaring dust-kitty catcher where the toe kick should have been.

It was gross...



I'd had the plan, when I first painted the vanity, to add a toe kick and also some chunky little legs. I even bought the legs... but then I got busy and, you know... out of sight out of mind... and I never got that last little bit done.

Until now.

All it took was a $3.00 piece of 1x3, a little creativity with the miter saw, and a little black paint. I'm not sure why I put it off for so long...

Measuring, cutting, painting and installing the 1x3 was easy. To attach it to the vanity, I just marked where the side supports were underneath the vanity, pre-drilled the toe kick, and used a few finishing nails to attach it.



Better, yes?

Unfortunately, the chunky little legs I'd bought back in 2013 to put under the front of the vanity were too wide to fit... With the toe kick in place, they ended up sticking out past the front of the vanity. I measured the space and realized that cutting one of the legs in half would give me just the right size to fit, and would make it easier to install because of the newly created flat side.

But how to cut that round little ball of wood in half without cutting off a finger or two in the process?



I ended up using scrap wood to make a box that held the leg tightly, making one side of the box extend out an extra 8" or so to use as a handle. Then all I had to do was hold the handle and cut the whole box in half with the miter saw. The leg was held firmly in place, my hands were far from the blade, and one leg ended up two.



(Towards the bottom of the cut one half got a little bigger, but it doesn't show now that they're in place.)

A little wood glue, and the vanity is finally done...



I like how the little legs update it, and give it a much more finished look... (MUCH more finished than the gaping dust bunny catcher!)



All that's left is painting the bathroom door, the rest of the room is done...

It hasn't changed much, but it's amazing how much the new paint brightens it up,  and I do love the shutters...

temporarily unplugged... (and a project update)

.... that's the short story of last week.

My computer ended up with a virus, which left it virtually unusable...

And then I broke my (new!) cell phone.

It felt odd not to have either one of them working.

But I did take that time to keep working on my bathroom, and I have to say I'm really happy with how it's turning out.

I spent most of the week working on adding shutters to the bathroom windows. I started out with these two sets of old bi-fold shutters that came off the basement windows in daughter E's house... She didn't need them, but they were too good to just throw away...



I liked the chippy paint, and wanted more privacy for the big windows in my bathroom...



My plan was to somehow adapt and recycle these old shutters to fit the bathroom windows. The height of the shutters was perfect, but unfortunately, the bathroom windows are MUCH wider than the little basement windows the shutters came off of... so I had to get creative.

I finally decided to take the shutters apart, and use two louvers shutter sections, and two newly made solid sections for each of the three windows. Using them that way would give me enough width to span the window, and hopefully look intentional.

I bought some of the better grade pine at Home Depot, and had one piece ripped to size there, because of the strange widths of my windows, and then started taking the shutters apart, and cutting the wood to fit, and then putting them back together again and mounting them on the windows.



I mounted vertical supports between each of the three windows for mounting, so I wouldn't have too many holes in the windows frames... (Just in case this turned out to be a huge fail! I was planning ahead...) Here's a picture of one of the vertical support pieces... i'st just held on with a couple of finishing nails.



I'd already started hanging the shutters in that photo... a looong process that involved hanging a couple of the sections twice to get them as straight and level as possible on a window that, like the rest of the house, isn't as square as you would expect a window to be!



Lots of wood putty and paint later... here's the finished product..







I do love how they turned out.


Plenty of light when I want light, but plenty of privacy too. It was kind of a long, too-much-math-for-me project, but I'm so glad I did it. Just a little more baseboard work and the bathroom is DONE. Pictures soon... (unless my computer crashes again!)