Category Archives: DIY

How to refinish a dresser, the not-quite-perfect way

Posted by Melissa in DIY, Kids and tagged with , ,

This was the scene in Miss Seven’s room a couple of months ago. We had moved my old dresser out of the master bedroom and into her room, because she (and her clothes) had outgrown her smaller dresser. Unfortunately, her immediate reaction was, “I don’t want an ugly brown dresser!” Knowing her, she’d refuse to get dressed in the morning if her clothes were housed in something BROWN. You haven’t seen stubborn until you’ve seen her little lips pinched into a tight line, usually accompanied by a brief but emphatic, “UNH, unh!”

Fine, I said. You can’t really tell in the picture, but the finish had seen better days. It was scratched, scuffed and generally dinged up. I didn’t want to paint it–see all those interesting wood grains? I decided a colored stain would be a happy medium. Miss Seven picked out a stain color (Sangria by Minwax), and then winter came and the project stalled.

Eventually, the Hub and I carted the dresser downstairs and out to the garage, where I coated it in Citristrip. Lesson #1: Do not cover the whole piece in stripper if you don’t have time to scrape it all off the same day.

That dried-on drippy gunk is a combination of stripper and old varnish, and it required a lot of elbow grease to remove with countless wads of steel wool dipped in more stripper. Elbow grease applied in short bursts over several weeks.

After stripping as much as I could without going crazy (I didn’t get too picky about getting every last nook and cranny in those carved areas–that extra patina gives it character, right?), I sanded a little, wiped everything down with a tack cloth, and then brushed on some Pre-Stain Wood Conditioner.

Two coats of stain (this was the fun part), and then some Paste Finishing Wax (which I much prefer to polyurethane as a protective finish). Lesson #2: A dark-colored stain covers a multitude of sins. I even dug out some gold paint and applied it with a tiny paintbrush to the outline on the three bottom drawers.

I soaked all the formerly blackened drawer handles in Jules’ homemade brass cleaner, which restored the brass finish nicely. Miss Seven helped me reattach all the handles, vacuum out the drawers (after all those weeks in the garage, we had a nice spider collection), and carry them to the foot of the stairs. The Hub and I hoisted the dresser back up the stairs into her room, and we had a quick and dirty session sorting all her clothes into their new drawers (and filling yet another bag of outgrown clothes to pass on).

It’s hard to get a good sense of the true color in these photos. The one above looks a little browner than it really is. The photo below looks a little more accurate.

We are all happy with the result. It is purple enough for Miss Seven, but not too purple for me. I think it will stand out nicely once we repaint her walls from pink to a pale aqua. And as for her old dresser, I already sold it on Craigslist and got it out of the garage.

The Garden Project, Part Whatever

Posted by Melissa in DIY, Garden and tagged with , , ,

So much to do, so little time. However, with a few days of really nice weather and a little help from Mom and Dad, we knocked out some yard work in the past couple of weeks. Stuff we’ve accomplished:

  • power washed the siding and shutters on the front of the house
  • raked the front lawn (lots of dead grass and pine needles)
  • tilled the front flower bed where the old tree and hedge used to be
  • dug up weeds and grass in the bed alongside the driveway in preparation for grass seed
  • transplanted some hostas and sedum
  • assembled and filled two raised beds, planted vegetables and strawberries
  • dug up all the diseased rose bushes
  • mowed the lawn
  • cut down some overgrown shrubbery

Whew! What to do next?

  • rent a core aerator for the front lawn
  • over seed the front lawn
  • redraw the borders of the front flower bed and sow grass seed where necessary
  • buy and plant boxwoods along the porch
  • plant some annuals
  • mulch everywhere
  • sow some more spinach
  • prepare soil for summer garden crops like tomatoes

Today, though, I’m not going to do anything in the garden but watch my little plants grow. See the little radishes peeping through?

I’m finally making good progress refinishing Miss Seven’s dresser, and I’d like to get it finished in time for her First Communion in nine days. It’s obviously not essential to the celebration–she just needs the extra storage for her clothes so that her room doesn’t look like someone tossed the contents of a laundry basket in the air and let them fall where they may. I’d also like to get the dresser out of the garage so we can park the other car there again. I need a convenient deadline, so First Communion it is.

 

 

Why yes, I am staining this dresser purple. (Sangria, actually.)

The Garden Project: Ordering seeds

Posted by Melissa in DIY, Garden and tagged with , ,

The snow has finally melted, the sun is shining, and I can see blue sky out my dirty windows. The daffodils are inching their way up. Spring is whispering in my ear. It ought to be saying, “Get on with the spring cleaning already,” but instead it’s telling me, “Plant a garden!” One morning last week, before coffee even, I ordered seeds and–on a whim–strawberry plants. I found that Home Depot has some reasonably priced raised bed kits that are in stock at my local store. There is still plenty of work in the back yard that requires the professionals, but I don’t want to wait until everything is perfect (that could be a long wait) before we start growing some vegetables this year. Right now I have a sunny spot that is clear and seeds on the way, so I have to make it happen!

I have no gardening expertise. A few times in years past we have planted a handful of vegetables, with mixed results. I am trying to start small this year so I don’t get in over my head. (“Baby steps, Bob!”) I’m not starting seeds indoors. I chose my seeds based on what the almanac tells me I can sow directly into the ground in March and April. I bought lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, sugar snap peas, basil, parsley and beets. I plan to set up two four foot square beds, one with some trellis at the back for the peas, and see how it goes. Later in the spring, I hope to add some tomato plants, and maybe cucumber and squash.

In other landscaping news, we had our big tree and the remaining hedge cut down. We took advantage of a city program tree trimming program that gave us a reduced rate.

BEFORE

BEFORE

We are still waiting for the crew to return and grind out all the stumps. The front of the house looks dreadfully bare right now, and you can see all the pine needles the tree left in the gutter.

DURING

DURING

But thanks to Dig Right In, we have a beautiful plan to work from, and once the stumps are gone, I plan to work on amending the soil and adding some new plants in front of the porch.

AFTER

AFTER

I’m calling it officially Spring!

 

Are you making any plans for your outdoor spaces this spring?

Choosing busy

Posted by Melissa in DIY, Kids, thoughts and tagged with , ,

I read a blog post the other day about how people should stop complaining about being too busy, and just slow down. While I read the post, I found myself agreeing with it. I don’t like to be so busy. I don’t thrive on dashing from one activity to another. I’d like nothing more than a few uninterrupted days of NOTHING. Time to read a book or three, watch a movie, fiddle with a DIY project, work a little in the yard (if it ever warms up again, O Snow on the First Day of Spring). But then I started to feel guilty about the busy-ness in my life, and now I resent that article for making me resent (more) the many claims on my time and attention.

I say no to a lot of things. No to PTA meetings, no to chaperoning field trips, no to scouting and soccer and Little League. No to joining a second choir, no to Wednesday night club meetings. But there are still so many things I can’t opt out of–and wouldn’t want to–and it doesn’t do much good to anyone to resent the time they take.

Cooking dinner, doing laundry, helping with homework, sweeping up the crumbs, writing. Junior high band festivals, supervising snow fort construction, book signings with a favorite author. It’s all about choices.

Yesterday I said no to folding the mountain of clean clothes in favor of finishing the paint job in the bathroom. Little Five spent some quality time with Curious George and PBS Kids, and I spent an hour and a half painting the baseboards and giving the beadboard wallpaper a second coat of paint.

Today I skipped emptying the dishwasher, and instead framed and hung the kids’ artwork. Later this afternoon I’ll say no to folding clothes again and say yes to a playdate. But at least the bathroom is complete.

Prepping for progress

Posted by Melissa in DIY, thoughts and tagged with , ,

So much life and work has been happening in the past week. Along with so many of you, I haven’t had much uninterrupted time to spend working on home projects. Little Five had two days off from preschool, the Hub was slammed with a tidal wave of work, and then we had the Big Snow. Even though I couldn’t get to them, two projects have lingered on my mental list: finish the kids’ bathroom, and make the computer desk for the living room.

I know I already shared photos of the nearly complete bathroom, but I’ve discovered that the beadboard wallpaper definitely needs a second coat of paint to (hopefully) protect it from little dings and gouges. The baseboards still need two coats of paint. I’ve yet to frame and hang the artwork on the empty wall. The tools and the register cover are still hanging out on the floor in the hall.

If anything, this week of busy-ness has demonstrated how useful that new desk is going to be. After the 8 or 10 inches of snow we received on Tuesday, the Hub decided to work from home on Wednesday. He took my laptop and settled at the desk in the master bedroom, which is is the most private workspace in our house. I took my work (blogging and working on a grant application for the nonprofit organization on whose board I sit) and worked at the desktop computer in the living room. I’ve complained before about the computer armoire–how the kids stash their garbage behind the monitor, how the doors refuse to stay closed and the pull-out keyboard tray has lost all its ball bearings–but working there really emphasized the lack of good task lighting and a surface to spread papers and materials while in the midst of a project.

It’s true that I didn’t get either of these projects finished, but I did take some small steps toward making them more likely to happen next week. I took Little Five to the paint store and bought more of the paint I had run out of. I bought the trestle legs for the desk, and picked out which discarded closet door I’m going to use for a desktop. I pondered and consulted the rest of the family, and decided how long to make the desk and how to finish the top (a dark stain plus furniture wax). I bought Citri-Strip so I can strip the paint on the door. The Citri-Strip will later come in handy to start on Miss Seven’s long-awaited dresser, and the paint to freshen up the trim and door in the downstairs powder room.

It didn’t feel as if I accomplished much, but it’s good to know that when that slice of time appears in my schedule, I’ll be ready to jump into these projects and finally cross them off my list.

Kids’ bathroom progress part 2…almost done!

Posted by Melissa in Design, DIY and tagged with , ,

So, so close.

Since last week, I finished painting the gray walls, installed two shelves on the wall over the toilet, hung the beadboard wallpaper, scraped and sanded the old caulk off the baseboards and reinstalled the shoe moulding, caulked, and painted the beadboard wallpaper. It’s obviously not a big room, so it took 15 minutes here, an hour there. Still to do: paint the baseboards and perhaps give the beadboard a second coat, and finish hanging artwork. I was on a roll and probably would have finished yesterday, but I ran out of paint. But if you don’t look at the baseboards, it looks good!

For fun, here’s the evolution of this bathroom over the past 6 years:

Before

Before

This is how it looked before we moved in. Certainly not terrible, but the details became annoying after we lived with it for a while. Wallpaper, shower doors (have you tried bathing a squirmy baby when you can only reach half the bathtub?), two-toned hardware. And a toilet paper holder waaaay too far for a kid to reach when he needs it!

First attempt

First attempt

After the first major set of changes to make this bathroom more functional for three small children: removed the shower doors, installed hook rail for towels, painted the vanity and changed the hardware, moved the toilet paper holder, stripped the wallpaper, changed the light fixture. At this point I wasn’t really sure where the color scheme was going.

After

After

Now, the gray and white is a cool backdrop for the kids’ bright towels and accessories. There aren’t any heavy glass shower doors to clean or worry about safety (one fell off the track once–very scary!), and there are plenty of hooks to hang towels, robes, and wet bathing suits. The colors feel more like us, and the room functions much better.

How much did I spend on this final stage?

  • Ikea shelves: $30
  • Ikea towels: $22
  • beadboard wallpaper: $19
  • wallpaper paste: $5
  • 1 quart Heather Gray paint: $2

The rest of my supplies I already had…caulk, white semi-gloss paint, etc. I got my wallpapering tools from Freecycle! Even though I need to buy more paint to finish the baseboards, I have lots of other trim in the house that needs a fresh coat.

I’m very pleased with the beadboard wallpaper. For a novice like me, it wasn’t difficult to hang. As I hoped, caulk and paint disguised my sloppy edges and less-than-precise measuring. It only took about an hour to measure, paste and paper that half wall.

Ikea towels come with loops for hanging!

Until I get around to buying that paint, I’ll focus on hanging the rest of the artwork. Miss Seven will be pleased when I get the stack of frames out of her room and onto the wall.

Bubble prints made at the school art fair

Kids’ bathroom progress

Posted by Melissa in DIY and tagged with , , ,

One of the items on my New Year’s resolutions for the home is to finish the face lift of the kids’ bathroom. It already had one makeover three or four years ago, when I stripped the floral wallpaper, repainted the vanity, and changed the light fixture. Later I added a chair rail with hooks for towels and sewed a shower curtain. But once I added some colorful accessories, I decided that the wall color no longer worked.

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I bought a couple quarts of gray paint from the mistake bin at Home Depot ($2/quart for Behr Premium Plus), and along with a few tester pots I already had, I slapped several test swatches on the wall. I figured that would motivate me to get it painted. It didn’t motivate me as quickly as I thought it would (maybe because I enter only to turn off the light, flush the toilet, and pick up wet towels). But yesterday I finally spent an hour prying off the shoe molding (someone put silicone caulk on it that paint won’t adhere to, so it needs to be sanded and repainted) and putting a first coat of paint on the walls.

The paint is darker than I first envisioned, but I think I like it. (It’s called Heather Gray by Benjamin Moore, according to the label on the can.) I have white beadboard wallpaper to put under the chair rail, so along with the vanity and all the white tile, there is plenty of contrast. I’ve been saving a stack of the kids’ artwork to display on the wall above the chair rail, and I’d like to put two floating shelves over the toilet.

Later this year, I hope we can have an electrician update the wiring in the bathroom and raise the light fixture several inches, so it isn’t sitting against the mirror. Then I’d like to frame the mirror, probably following these instructions.

I’m excited! I plan to finish painting today, and follow through with the wallpaper over the weekend. It will be my first attempt at wallpaper, but it’s only half of one short wall. Tomorrow might involve a mad dash to Ikea for some shelves. While I’m there, I might pick up some legs for the computer table for the living room. It’s so gloomy outside that the prospect of completing a project inside makes me very happy.

Are you in the middle of any DIY projects?

 

Garage, girl’s room, and plenty of recycling

Posted by Melissa in Cleaning, DIY, Organizing and tagged with , ,

Clearing one area in the house makes me long for a magic wand to zap away all the other messes, visible and invisible. Very soon–maybe today!–I’m going to clean out the computer armoire in the living room. It’s full of old Christmas cards, empty printer ink cartridges and defunct computer games that won’t play on our computer.

Over the weekend, back when it was 47 degrees (and before the thermometer plummeted to 3–have I mentioned how climate change is beginning to feel so immediate and scary?), we did the garage cleaning we should have done in the fall. Hanging the bikes, collecting the outdoor toys, putting garden tools away in the shed, and sorting the pile of recycling that had accumulated since Christmas. Now the second car fits in the garage, making the Hub’s mornings slightly less chilly.

I also dealt with the large pile of Christmas boxes and gift wrap in the basement. All the boxes and packaging to recycle went on the curb, all the reusable wrapping got folded and put away in the proper place. Yesterday I even took a trunk full of plastic grocery bags to the recycling bin at the grocery store. For people who usually use reusable grocery bags, I don’t know why we had so many. Usually isn’t the same as always, apparently.

The Hub also dragged the 8′ x 10′ rag rug (possibly originally from Pottery Barn) I bought on Craigslist for Miss Seven’s room to the laundromat. He brought it home, clean but wet, and we hauled it to the basement and draped it over every spare chair and stool to dry. Three days later, I took it up two flights of stairs (dry, it was much lighter), rearranged all Miss Seven’s furniture, and installed the clean rug. Now I’m getting motivated to get the brown dresser down to the basement so I can begin the process of stripping and restaining it. (Hot pink! I mean, “Sangria.”)

What else? I got out my tube of epoxy and glued the casters back on the Hub’s reject Ikea office chair. It still doesn’t roll very well, but the casters don’t fall out and it works well at my kitchen desk where I have no need to roll, anyhow. It has lumbar support! My back approves.

It all felt so productive, so I looked at my New Year’s resolutions. Surely I could cross something off the list. January is nearly over! Alas. We did make progress on Miss Seven’s room, but that’s not going to be finished quickly. I have seven more days. Which project should I choose?

New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by Melissa in DIY, Organizing, thoughts and tagged with ,

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. A list of things I ought to improve about myself that will mock me when I find it balled up in the back of a drawer in November? No, thank you. But today, as I caught up with the hundreds of posts in my Google Reader, I discovered that several bloggers had made lists of resolutions for their home. That seems nice and concrete to me, a list of things that, once achieved, I can cross off and pat myself on the back.

So here, in no particular order, are my 12 resolutions for our home in the new year. Sure, there are plenty of other projects bouncing around in my brain (oh disorganized pantry and sticky cabinet doors), but I think committing to crossing one off the list each month is enough for me. As they say, anything else is gravy.

2013 Resolutions

  • Paint and paper the kids’ bathroom; replace the shoe moulding; add floating shelves (bonus points: raise the light fixture and frame the mirror)
  • Organize the tools in the garage
  • Clean out the laundry room
  • Replace the computer armoire with a simple desk in the living room (maybe a DIY with an old door and some IKEA table legs)
  • Continue the landscaping project–at the very least, the vegetable garden and compost pile
  • Spackle and touch up/finish paint all over the house
  • Figure out two comfortable reading chairs and lighting in the living room
  • Refinish or paint the extra kitchen barstools
  • Cut down the rest of the old shrubs around the driveway
  • Patch the concrete under the garage door
  • Organize basement sewing area and kids’ craft area
  • Paint, refinish dresser and redecorate Miss Seven’s room

 

Do you have any home-related New Year’s resolutions?

A little of this and a little of that: Annoying household repairs

Posted by Melissa in DIY and tagged with , ,

I was going to tell you all about my holiday cookie plan, and find out if you have any great cookie suggestions that I should try this year. But I’m going to save that for tomorrow. Today is all about finishing a few jobs around the house that have been bothering me. It even involves a trip to the hardware store, so I’m going to make a list and actually consult it while in the store. Revolutionary, I know.

Here’s the plan:

1. Replace the set screw in the kids’ bathroom toilet paper holder. The original screw fell out and disappeared, and the whole thing keeps threatening to fall down.

2. Install the closet door knobs already on the master bedroom and linen closet doors. I’ve had these for…a year? Not too long ago I bought the correct size screws, so I have no more excuses.

3. Finally, I have vowed to anchor the very tall china cabinet to the wall, for the safety of both my children and the china. This story on the Today Show this morning put me over the edge. The cabinet used to be anchored (especially when we had toddlers in the house), but when we renovated and rearranged the room, I failed to anchor it properly. It’s an annoying project: I have to remove everything from the cabinet, get the big ladder (the step ladder is too short), and pull the cabinet away from the wall to install the bolt (the cabinet comes so close to the ceiling that there isn’t room to maneuver the drill).

4. If I successfully complete the first three projects, I might treat myself to a fun project: spray painting some pinecones gold. It’s time to put away the plastic pumpkin that’s been lingering on the sideboard, and we have a surfeit of pinecones littering our yard. I think a basket of gold pinecones will make a nice wintery decoration.

What do I need to buy? The set screw, some wallpaper paste (so I have no more excuses to put off the larger project of redecorating the bathroom), and gold spray paint. Oh, and eggs. We keep forgetting to buy eggs.

I’ll report back on my progress. It’s going to be riveting.