Posts Tagged ‘Clay’

Fight Grime with Baking Soda

Written on January 26th, 2010 by Jamie Lee2 comments

When I was visiting Clay, he showed me a quick trick for cleaning grimy faucets. You will need is baking soda, vinegar, a plastic bag, and a rubber band.

Cleaning a Grungey Faucet

Pour some baking soda and vinegar in the plastic bag until the mixture starts to bubble like a volcano. Then attach the bag to the sink using your rubber band. Wait awhile–we forgot about it for a few hours but I’m sure an hour would have sufficed.

Baking Soda Volcano

Remove the bag and enjoy a cleaner faucet! It’s that easy and look at the difference!

After Version of Faucet

Don’t you wish you had a friend like me to post photos of dirty places in your house? ;) Thanks Clay!

Staining is Hard.

Written on January 20th, 2010 by Jamie Lee3 comments

This weekend I flew to Lubbock, TX to visit Clay. Clay has owned the same dresser–a hand me down from his older brother–since before I met him five year ago. I never knew the dresser to be without dents or scratches or even to posses all six of its handles.

Dresser Before

So Friday I turned to Clay and said, “You know we could replace the hardware on your dresser this weekend.”

He shrugged, “We could…”

I started getting excited, “We could also paint it!”

More shrugging followed by, “We could–or we could stain it.”

Neither of us had ever stained anything before but we were confident in our ability to figure it out. We called around for advice, bought the necessary supplies, and got to work.

Everyone that we talked to seemed to disagree on how much you should sand a piece of furniture before staining it. Feeling lazy, Clay and I opted to go with the school of thought that preached lightly sanding rather than completely sanding down to the bare wood.

Sanding a Dresser

Unfortunately, for our project, I think we chose wrong.  The thing to remember about staining is that any imperfections that result in areas with more exposed wood will absorb the stain at a different rate that the rest of the surface area.

Stain Mishap

Scratches in staining

If we had spent the time sanding the wood to a more uniform state, then the stain would not have highlighted the imperfections in the way that this attempt did. In the end we opted to paint over our mistakes. Comeback tomorrow to see how it all turned out. Have you ever stained anything before? Tell me it turned out better than this!

Special thanks to Clay for understanding my weird definition of a vacation.