I will warn you that this may be one of those epic books that has about 700 chapters. Hopefully not. I mentioned yesterday that taking off the door to the linen closet (To be clear, I’m not talking about the actual bathroom door. I’m open to a lot of things but no bathroom door is definitely not one of them!) was a huge turning point for us. It instantly went from a giant unconquerable task to something that we could manage one step at a time. Why did we think it was such a turning point? See for yourselves.
Before:
After:
Doesn’t that feel a million times more open? Imagine Peter and me sitting on our bed a about midnight on a Friday night. I say, “It’s just so cramped in there. That door gets in the way.” And then Peter exclaiming, “Let’s just rip it off!!” Here’s an action shot just for fun.
Unfortunately, removing the door left us with huge slits and holes in our door frame from where the hinges used to be.
The holes can be easily patched using wood filler. I put some in each hole, making sure to pack it into the small crevices in the back.
After letting the wood filler dry for about 24 hours, I sanded off the excess, and then repeated the process. If I was going to do this over again I would have put an insane amount of wood filler over the hole so that when I sanded it I wouldn’t have to add any extra. The reason being that making wet wood filler attach to dried wood filler is much more difficult than when it is all wet. I ended up battling the bits that were falling right off onto the floor.
When the holes were patched and the door was off for a few days, Peter and I couldn’t bare to look at the awful wall color any longer. For some reason, the linen closet was painted a terrible yellow color. You’d really have to see it to understand just how bad it was. I’ve attached a photo below but it really doesn’t do the color justice. If you want to get an idea imagine urine mixed with whipping cream and then covered it with high glass paint. It was really that bad!
Anyone who knows me well knows that grey is my absolute favorite color. (I remember asking a friend of mine if it was OK to paint my entire house in different shades of grey. The short answer is no but I still believe I could make it work.) After a trip to Home Depot, we brought home a few paint swatches and taped them inside the closet to get a better idea of what the paint would look like.
Wondering what we chose? You’ll have to come back to find out, but since I forgot to take pictures when we first removed the door, the after photo at the top will give you a sneak peak of what’s to come.
What’s going on in your bathrooms? Many of you are probably following Meg’s bathroom reno. Heather wrote in yesterday saying that she has an embarrassing bathroom as well. Does anyone else have anything to share? Or does anyone else just want to help me encourage Heather to post her bathroom photos? (Misery loves company.)
Around Valentine’s Day I fell in love with these hearts from the Etsy seller Sarah and Bendrix, but I couldn’t bare to pay the $76 (item plus shipping cost to the United States) that she was asking.
{via}
So, I went to the craft store and bought a heart shaped paper punch and some thick red, gray, and cream card stock.
Luckily, just about everything I bought was on sale. Don’t you just love that about craft stores?!
When I came home I started punching little red hearts. My heart punch is different than the one used by Sarah and Bendrix. Mine has a more defined point, but I like that about it. I also love that it lets you see what you’re punching before you do it.
Fold several of the hearts in half, positioning them in straight lines on the paper. Leave space for one (or more) different colored hearts and a few that have not been folded.
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I spaced the hearts further apart then they were in the original piece, but this choice is just personal preference. I carefully glued the hearts into place, making sure that the lines seemed organized. In my opinion the concept is interesting because it is a balance of order (the rows of hearts) and disorder (the apparently random nature of the folds). If both aspects were disorganized, then it would probably look like a giant mess.
Here’s the end result leaning against a wall:
We assembled ours using Yes Paste and an IKEA 9×9 Ribba (Shadow Bow). The total expense was less than $20 and now that we own a heart punch I could make a second one for the price of the frame plus an extra $0.50 for the card stock. For the next one I may try putting the hearts closer together and using a larger frame that would allow a border the size a a photo mat. Thoughts?
Meg over at House Notes is currently having an Anthropologie Inspired Craft Off. I didn’t manage to participate on this round, but head over to her blog to see some pretty amazing stuff.
When Clay and I decided to refinish his dresser it was in pretty sad shape. There were dents and scratches all over and, as you can see in the picture below, one of the handles was missing and one was mysteriously upside down. Strange.
After our attempt to stain the beat up dresser failed, we decided to hide all of our mistake with paint–but first we wanted to challenge ourselves in one more way. The pulls that Clay found to replace his old ones required holes that were wider apart than the originals. Instead of searching for pulls that fit the preexisting holes, we decided to patch the old ones using Elmer’s Wood Filler. The process was simple. Fill the holes with putty and let them dry for 2-8 hours (huge window, I know). We left them overnight just to be on the safe side. After the putty dries, you sand off the excess until only a smooth surface remains.
We also did this with some of the major scratches and dents on the outside of the dresser.
After two quick coats of paint and the not-so-quick process of re-drilling holes appropriately sized for the hardware, Clay’s dresser had a brand new look.
I think the handles were meant to go on the other way but Clay preferred having them look like they pointed at one another. Overall, we’re really pleased with the way that it turned out. The dark color balances the curves of the wood making it feel more masculine. It’s definitely more suited for a guy’s room.
The area near our TV needed help. My brother, David, gave us a great media stand but because we don’t own enough electronics to fill it, it just served as a shelf to collect clutter. Here is what things looked like before:
Do you see how we had picture frames, board games collecting dust, and the partially chewed box on DVDs collecting dust? We decided to take a shelf made of fiberboard and repurpose it as our media shelf. Since the shelf is much smaller we don’t have as much surface area to set things. Of course I forgot to take a before picture but here’s a shot of the shelf after a couple coats of primer.
(It had that awful fake wood look before we primed it.)
This painting project really taught me a thing or two about the strategy behind painting. Our most valuable lessons are as follows:
- Don’t do a bad job priming something because those drips of primer don’t just magically go away.
- Think about the surface areas before you start painting. If you will have to move the paintbrush over an area in order to reach something then don’t paint that passing ground first. I painted the surfaces that were parallel to the ground first, but if I had to do it over again, then I would start with the inside surfaces of the boards that stand vertically. My method ended up in a really gooey first coat, because as I painted the sides I would drip paint on the area that I had already painted, which forced me to go over it repeatedly.
- I would move the piece of furniture to a new part of the drop cloth before continuing to do the second coat. Both when we primed the shelf and when we painted it, we dripped little bits of paint that dried and formed a bond between the shelf and the drop cloth. When we eventually went to move it inside we damaged the paint on the edges.
- If you do have paint chips attached to the bottom because of the mistake mentioned above, use a razor blade to shave them off the wood. At first I tried pulling at them and it resulted in tearing some of the paint that was on the shelf.
Oh, learning experiences!
Here is how it ended up. What do you think?
(Yes, we’re dorks and still own a Super Nintendo.)
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