A Busy Weekend

My family was in town last weekend and, like always, helped us get a bunch of stuff done around the house! We tackled several projects and ran into trouble with almost every one. But I guess that's DIY for you. :) We do still have a whole list of things to work on next time they're here, but here is a quick look at what we managed to finish:

1. Installing a new microwave/hood!

 

Isn't it lovely? We had to buy the stove when we moved in because the one left here didn't work. There had been a microwave hood left too, but the microwave part didn't work very well so we had a small countertop microwave (taking up precious countertop space) to make up for it. We decided it would make more sense to get a microwave/hood that worked and ditch the other two. The problem we ran into here was that the former microwave hadn't been installed properly and was too low, so the new microwave wouldn't fit! We ended up having to move the cabinets above the stove & fridge up to make room, which also meant moving up the outlet the microwave plugs in to. In the picture below you see everything taken apart. Fortunately my mom worked some wiring magic and got things running smoothly...after only one shower of sparks. :)

2. Installing a new light above the sink

Yes, this is a terrible picture. But the light is beautiful in real life. I promise. We found out the light had to be replaced when my mom was replacing the outlets & light switch by the sink (we switched the standard outlets out for GFCIs that are safer to use near water). The fluorescent light that had been above the sink was just generally acting goofy, which my mom found out was just because it was a bad light! So we ran out and bought a much snazzier pendant light to put up in it's place. And it was 50% off! Yay! Unfortunately, we found our first problem with this as soon as we took the old light down. Whatever goofball put the thing in didn't know what he was doing, and there wasn't even an electrical box there! Actually, that was our second problem. The first problem is that when we took the clock down we found this behind it:

 

An electrical box with a bunch of connections in it. Turns out the light switch runs through here (and who knows what else!) which wasn't a huge problem, just weird. And not normal. Anyway, back to the goofball. We tried to cut out a hole in the drywall to put in an electrical box, but found out Mr. Goofball had actually drilled through a support board that was there and run the wire through the board. We didn't have the tools to make a hole in the wood. This is where it tuns out to be a good thing that we chose a pendant light. We were able to make a hole in the drywall off center, at a place where there was no wood, (see the picture below) and then just put a small hook in the center and ran the light cord over it, so it looks like the light is still centered. All in all, this turned into a very long, very messy process, but my husband took it like a champ (with some help from my dad and sister. The pregnant lady gets excused from home improvement and just gets to tell everyone else what to do!)

3. Making wider shelves for the pantry

 This was an easy project. This small pantry had teeny little shelves centered in it with wasted space on both sides! We just moved the brackets from the old shelves farther out for more support, and then cut pieces of 1x12 that would reach all the way across. It was amazing how much that little thing increased the storage. I put back all the things that were in there before, and have almost 2 whole shelves left! The only problem we had here was my sister using the saw. Scary!

4. Painting...I mean REpainting...the nursery

 

 We had painted the nursery this nice neutral tan (called pony brown) since we don't know baby's gender, but it just looked so boring. So we bought some chair rail in the clearance section at Lowe's and decided to break things up a little in there.

 We started by painting the top half of the room a lighter off-white color that we found in the basement. Yay for free paint! We painted the trim pieces with glossy white that was left over from another project, so really the only thing we bought here was the trim. (note: the only problem here was the crookedness of the paint line. oops.)

Here is my cutie patootie working hard. I know it's fuzzy, but I love that smile! :)

Then we put up the trim and viola! A much more interesting effect, don't you think? I just finished touching it up today, so hopefully we'll have finished nursery pictures soon.

And that was our very productive weekend. We also watched Despicable Me at least 8 times. And laughed every time. Oh, and here is a picture of my Christmas tree for good measure. I just took it down yesterday.

The End.

What a Girl Wants

What every girl wants is a great kitchen. A room that is both beautiful and functional. A place for friends to gather and memories to be made. Unfortunately not all of us are lucky enough to have such a kitchen, or the loads of money required to buy new cabinets & countertops to make such a dream come true. Such is the case in our house. That's why I am on a mission to do the best I can with what this house has given me and create a DIY kitchen masterpiece spending as little money as possible! This is a project that will no doubt take time and planning, and one that we probably won't even begin to tackle for quite sometime (think summer when it's warm enough to open the windows while we paint). Nonetheless, my wheels are turning and planning has begun!

Here is our kitchen the day we closed:

All the storage is what you see, and we knew going in that it wouldn't be enough! And that is all the countertop space we have. It's tight. Since this photo, we took out the wall between the kitchen in living room (you can see it peeking in on the the left) to open up all the main living areas of our home. It was one of the first things we did on closing day, thanks to the help of my parents and grandparents. They are the best!

Here is our kitchen as it stands now:

I'm kind of embarrassed. It is such a mess. So just focus on how much better it will look when I have good places to put everything away! :)  It is already improved by the removal of the wall and feels so open! It's great! You can see we've added mismatched storage all along the right wall, just trying to make enough room to keep everything. (sorry for the bad picture, I should have done it in the morning for more daylight!)

It needs a LOT of help. Obviously. Remember the two things I mentioned before? Beauty and function? Well this kitchen has neither. So on to the plan!

Here are some rough plans of what we will be shooting for. This is the general feel I want for the kitchen:

Bright and airy and warm. White cabinets with light walls and a darker countertop. And I definitely like the idea of bamboo shades instead of curtains. Since we'll be mostly working with what we have, I plan to get the finishes I want on the existing cabinets by following this tutorial. It should look something like this table:

The final part of the plan today is to remove the mismatched storage along the right wall and replace it with one cohesive piece, probably somethings like this:

And that's all I've worked out so far. We're hoping to spend no more than a few hundred dollars on this whole project. (Which would be waaaaay better than the thousands it would cost to start from scratch!) And although we won't be starting for awhile, I just wanted to get my ideas down, kind of like a design notebook, so I can keep track of my favorite ideas and any links/tutorials I'll need to find later. I hope you've enjoyed daydreaming with me today! :)

Refinishing Floors 101

Within 2 hours of closing on our new house, we were tearing up the carpet to reveal the hardwood underneath. Mmmmm...potential! When we first peeked at a corner of the floor it look perfect, but once we got it all up we noticed some problems and realized we would have to totally refinish it.

The biggest problem was this glue that was left from some old carpet (that apparently had a flower pattern!). Everywhere the floor looks grimy there is glue, which turned out to be the whole floor and a big pain. Below is a close up of how thick it is on there. Nasty. Besides the glue there were also some scratches and gouges that needed fixing.

We waited until right before Thanksgiving to to tackle this because we wanted it to dry and air out while we were far away! We put on the last coat of polyurethane, hopped in the car, and and left the state hoping to return to a beautiful dry floor. But I'm getting ahead.... Let's start at the beginning.

When I started looking for tutorials online about how to refinish floors, I didn't find too much that was really helpful. I found tidbits here and there on what to get, what to do, how much it will cost, how long it will take, etc. but no one-stop guides. Fortunately I have relatives with experience, a handy husband, and no fear! So we took whatever advice we could get and just dove in. Hopefully this is helpful to you!

We started with a trip to Lowe's to get our supplies. We spent just under $200 on our first trip, and ended up being closer to $250 when it was all said and done because we had to go back for more sandpaper so many times. Here is everything we got for the job:

• Rented Lowe's floor sander for $35
• Sandpaper disks for the floor sander (ended up using 3 packs of high-grit and will be returning the medium and low-grit)
• Sandpaper disks for our small rotary sander (the 50 pack and used the whole thing)
• Some hand-sanding supplies that we didn't touch and will be returning
• 2 quarts of Minwax "Provincial" stain (used less than 1, so we'll return the other)
• 2 gallons of Varathane water-based high traffic floor finish polyurethane in semi-gloss (the biggest cost of the project, but totally worth it! It doesn't have the stink of an oil based product, recoats in only 2 hours, and cures in 3 days)
• Applicator brush for polyurethane (attaches to an extension pole)
• Ear plugs, masks, goggles, gloves

Once we return all the extras, we should be back down around $200 again. Not bad for a refinished floor!

Once we had all our supplies, we got to work. We knew going into it this would be a big job, but it ended up being MUCH more time consuming than we expected.  We started by covering the doorways with paint tarps to try to contain the dust. We also taped plastic grocery bags over the vents. We opened the windows (I think we got lucky and did this on the warmest day in November!) and had a fan blowing out the door.

This is just how we are living until the furniture gets put back tomorrow. That is the pathway through the kitchen. We can't get to the office at all, and the couch is in the garage! Another good reason to do this when you won't be stuck at home!


Once the prep was done we hopped right in to sanding. (When I say "we" I mean "my husband" because I pretty much sat this one out. You can do that when you are pregnant.) We started with the big floor sander from Lowe's. We only had it for 24 hours and didn't want to waste any time. The sander takes 3 disks at a time (1 pack) that come in 3 steps. The great thing about the sander is that it has a built in vacuum and we had no dust flying around while we used it. If you don't have glue on the floor, this might work out just fine for you. Unfortunately not for us. We started with the roughest grit paper and kept running into this problem:

That is glue gumming up the paper. We spent a whole Saturday with me sitting on the porch picking the glue off the sandpaper then giving it back to my husband so he could continue sanding. It was not fun, but we only went through three 50-packs of sandpaper that way and it would have been MANY more if we had just put new ones on each time. We spent a solid 12 hours sanding that day. Only stopping to eat. After that we decided to rethink our strategy. We had a good amount of the glue up, but we didn't want to pay for another day with the sander and by that point we weren't convinced it was the best way to get the glue up. We decided to return the sander and use our smaller hand held sander to finish. It gave better control at was more accurate than the big sander at getting up the glue.

Enter Sunday. Went to church and then spent the rest of the day (a good 10 hours) sanding with the hand sander. And Monday. After work we finally finished with the rough paper! Then we used a fine grit paper (80) to smooth everything out. And finally my husband stained before bed. He probably spent about 7 hours on it that day. That's right, about 20 hours of sanding. What a trooper! After a thorough sweeping and vacuuming to remove sawdust, he used a rag to rub the stain on, going with the grain. Remember that any overlapping of staining areas will make the overlap slightly darker...so if you do 5-foot sections at a time like he did, you will notice a darker line between the sections. You may be able to avoid this by staining entire lengths of the floor at a time. The next day he used the applicator we bought to put 3 coats of polyurethane on the floor. One at breakfast, one at lunch, and one after work. It was finally done! So we headed out and hoped to come back to a beautiful floor...

... And we did! Like I said before, it is supposed to cure in 3 days, but we are waiting a full week just to be safe. We don't want to risk messing it up after all that work. The only bummer is that I'm waiting that long to put up my Christmas tree too!

 

So shiny! So to sum up floor refinishing: it takes a long time, keep your receipts so you can take back all the extra stuff you buy,  sand the floor starting with your roughest paper (the smallest number), apply stain, apply polyurethane (at least 3 coats!), and then get out of there and wait for it to dry! It is actually a very simple process, just time consuming. And totally worth it to save thousands of dollars!

Pin It

A Dresser Makeover - And Some Changes!

It's been a while, and we've made some changes! First, we bought a house which means I have plenty of projects to come, many of which are started but not finished. Oops. Second, we have a baby on the way! Which means even more projects! So you could say we've been a little preoccupied as of late.

But I have one project finished! This is a dresser that used to belong to one of my aunts who passed away when I was little and it has been passed down to me. Side note: her name was Linda Lou, but everyone called her Boo Boo. I know, you wish you had an Aunt Boo Boo, too. But back to the dresser! I thought it would be perfect for all the little clothes we'll need for baby-on-the-way, plus it's short enough we could let it do double duty as a changing table.

 As you can see, it's not too pretty to look at, though. But that is fixed easily enough! I decided to stain the bottom part of it darker and paint the top a nice glossy white (to match the white crib). The veneer on the top had cracked and peeled so I ended up pulling it all off and sanding it down before I painted. You can see in the picture that the top looks different. That's why.

 

Here is a progress picture showing the newly stained base next to an unstained drawer. Big improvement, huh? I don't know why this picture is sideways. I can't figure out how to make it straight! After I stained the whole thing I added a coat of polyurethane all over, and a coat inside the drawers to seal in any old dresser smells. I used a great water based polyurethane from Lowe's that had the faintest smell while wet, but was totally odorless as soon as it dried. No stink in my baby's room, please!

This project didn't really take long at all. I spent more time waiting for it to dry than I did working on it.

 

I think it turned out beautiful and will be great in baby's room. I like that it looks completely updated, but still has a traditional style. Plus I love that it has a story behind it. 

Here is the pretty white top. And since I always learn important lessons when I do new projects, here is my lesson from this one: If you are painting bare wood, use a primer! The wood bled yellow through my paint pretty badly. It took four coats to hide it.  But in the end it worked out okay, and I know for next time!

The last thing I did was replace the old hardware with some new brushed nickle knobs from Lowe's. I went a little modern with the knobs, but it works. This is all we have done for baby's room so far, but we have big plans so I'll keep you posted. We have plenty of time to get it done, right? :)