San Fran Here We Come

Jamie Lee — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:48:16 +0000

Peter and I finally booked a trip to San Francisco. Can you believe that neither of us has ever been? I couldn’t be more excited. In my heart of hearts I imagine San Francisco to be a place that I would love to live. I guess we’ll find out during this trip. I’m a little nervous about the cold, but really excited for an opportunity to wear this jacket that Peter recently bought me.

{via The Content Wrangler}

Any suggestions on things to do? Places to stay? We’ll also be stopping through Sonoma for a couple of days.

Staining is Hard.

Jamie Lee — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:05:44 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.

Starting Out Savvy » vacation

San Fran Here We Come

Staining is Hard.