Kitchen Cart Intensive Care

This post, like so many others, starts with Bart's Barn, and me having a postage stamp sized house. My house has 14.2 square feet of counter space built into it.  For someone who is actually handier in the kitchen than in the tool shed, this is not sufficient. So I have supplemented over the years with cutting boards spanning the sink, microwave carts with no microwave, and eventually a beautiful 1920's era sideboard. All of which are currently cluttered with mail, boxes of microwave popcorn, kitchen aid mixers, bottles of wine, knife blocks, and various trappings of cookery. I yearn for great expanses of counter space for chopping and baking and what not. So when I was mining Bart's Barn for drawers to turn into shadow boxes and I happened upon an old sad kitchen cart, well I just had to have it (no matter that there was no way it was going to fit in my car.) I wrestled it home and got the hardware off.

It cost me $40. First order of business was that butcher block top.  I sanded it down to get out the worst of the knife scars, and applied liberal amounts mineral oil. (This can be found at your local drugstore near the laxatives. Don't ask me why.) After a ten minute wait and a brief wipe down, it sprung back to life in a way I had scarcely hoped for. 

Look at it shine!

Now this kitchen cart baffled me.  It was very sound construction, but the materials were pretty crappy stuff. 3/4 inch plywood and particle board made up most of the structure.  The handles for the doors were a nice copper, but you could hardly notice against the rough surface of raw plywood. Some of the cut ends of the plywood hadn't even been sanded. So, I decided to paint the whole thing. I started by sanding everything that hadn't been sanded.  I mixed some of my blue paint leftover from the pot lid holder with some darker blue to get a denim color. Since I had mixed the paint, I didn't want to run out halfway through the project, as I'd never match the color. Normal people would turn to primer for this much raw wood.  I didn't have any primer.  What I did have was a hideous gallon of oops paint my mom had bought.  It was roughly the shade of my skin, and she swears it looked good in the store.  So I slapped a coat of that on everything to soak into all the raw wood and spare me 3-5 coats of blue paint.

I promise I'm not going to leave it this color.

Then everything got a coat of blue. When it was time to put the hardware back on, I decided those copper handles were filthy and needed a cleaning... with science!  When you were a kid did you ever clean a penny with vinegar and baking soda?  No?  Ok, you need to go watch some Bill Nye. Pennies are made of copper so I figured it would work just as well on my copper handles.

For Science!

While I was at it, I chopped off the feet of the cabinet, and added a piece of plywood to the base, to screw some industrial type castors onto. The castors that came with the piece were the kind you pop into some kind of hole drilled into the feet of your piece.  Basically what this means is any time you lift your cart, your castors come out and roll away.  No bueno.  My new castors are screwed in tight and aren't going anywhere, plus two of them lock for keeping my cart in place when needs be. I didn't take pictures of the process, but it's really pretty self explanatory. Next I turned my attention to the interior. The shelves got shelf paper.  BTW, contact paper doesn't stick too well to particle board.  If anyone has any tips on making it stay better, let me know. I put it in place and weighed it down with books overnight. That helped some.  

The next little tidbit comes from Pretty Handy Girl. I wanted to not see the support braces in the back of my cabinet, so I made false backs out of fabric and foam board.  This is cool for the backs of open cabinets.  Step one, measure your cabinet backs carefully. 

Step 2, cut a sheet of foam board to fit the space.  I used an exacto knife on my handy butcher block cutting board. 

                                      

Step 3, cut your fabric 2-3 inches bigger than your foam board.  I picked this orangey yellow solid, since my shelf paper is a kind of busy print. 

Step 4, use packing tape to stretch the fabric tight and sort of "upholster" the foam board. 

Step 5, push the foam board carefully into the space you measured it for.  Ta-da!

And now for the big reveal!  Somehow, magically, my cart came out to be EXACTLY counter height. So cool!

My total cost was just under $100. For a little perspective this similarly sized butcher block cart with open shelves is more than three times that.  

Kitchen Drawer Shadow Boxes

Handy Mandy!  Where have you been?  I've missed you so much last August!
I know, my fellow DIY friend, I have been MIA.  But you know what happens in August?  School. And I am not just a super hero when it comes to slapping a coat of paint on junk and turning it into something totally cool. I am also a super hero who teaches children how to read, write and do 'rithmatic. So I don't have time for a lot of handying around the house in the fall. But I'm back!  And I have a tale to tell.

It all started with me getting a circular saw for Christmas.  (Thanks Santa!) It's green and beautiful, and I couldn't wait to cut stuff up. So I carried it out to my garage, so it could have a place of honor on my work bench.  And this is what I saw.

So I decided to clean up the space a little. First order of business was to hang that mirror that had been waiting patiently since last summer for a place in my back bathroom, and then I thought I'd throw up some shelves for all my paint. So I went to Ace Hardware for some D brackets for the mirror, and while I was out I picked up some remnants from JoAnne's, and then I went to Bart's Barn.  Well, you know how it is with me and Bart's Barn.  Sure I found parts for my shelves.

Total cost $7

And sure I hung me some shelves. 

But I didn't stop there and you know it. I wandered around looking at what they had.  When I got to the cabinet section I noticed that there weren't very many cabinets to be had, but there was a whole mountain of drawers and doors.  Someone had probably gotten their cabinets refaced and abandoned all the doors and drawers that were original to the skeleton. They were like pound puppies or orphans or something.  I couldn't just leave them there. So I picked out a few and brought them home with me. 

They need me!

I took off the hardware and put it in a ziplock baggie with it's screws so I could find them again.

And then it was a matter of sanding, painting, drying and reattaching the hardware.  And I put some contact paper in the drawer to make it pretty. 

Now these aren't going to hold anything particularly heavy, so I threw on some D rings, and strung them together with picture wire. 

Oh come on now.  You know how to do this part.  Hole in the wall, molly bolt in the hole, screw in the molly bolt (not all the way) and hang your new shelves!  

                        

 


Aren't they so Martha Stewart?  No?  Good. This is turning into the bathroom that the kitchen built.

Wall mounted lid organizers

Now ever since I've made my pot rack, I've wanted a way to store my pot lids so that I could completely clean out my former "pot cabinet."  After some research I found several very ugly industrial looking solutions. I figured I could improve upon them.

My grandmother died several years ago, and my mom has not gotten around to dealing with most of her possessions.  So whenever I need something furniture-wise I tend to go mining in her house.  I found exactly what I was looking for.  A huge painting of ducks. Some stiles from Bart's Barn were purchased for 50 cents a piece to make up the rest of my supplies.

MR Ducks.

I really hope none of my relatives painted this picture, because I slapped a coat of blue paint on it. I cut the ends off the stiles so they were as wide as the inside of the frame. I cut the ends into graduated blocks 1 inch, 1.5 inches, and 2 inches tall.  Everything got painted blue.  Then I used some white paint and some dark blue paint to mix up some just a little bit different color blue.  To stripe the stiles I covered them with massive amounts of painters tape, painted the darker color over the lighter one, and hung them up to dry with cup hooks.

Hung from a string attached to a temporary nail in my rafter.

Remove tape while the paint is still wet!

Then I went about attaching the stiles to the blocks of wood.  I clamped the stiles to the table to prevent them from rolling on me. 

Then I carefully leveled the stiles and screwed them in from the back of the picture. I put the shortest stile/lid bar at the top and the tallest at the bottom.  For good measure I added a spare bit of wood with a bunch of cup hooks to hold utensils. I hung it on an unused wall in my kitchen.  The only way I can get a photo of this actually hung on the wall is to put my camera inside my pantry.  So here it is.  Yes I know the picture is not fabulous.  It's dark in my pantry. 

Yay storage!

Rescued Chair Night Stand

My mom's been spending the night more often since she started visiting my chiropractor in town, and she's blind.  Or rather, she doesn't know exactly where everything is in my house, and stumbles around a bit in the dark when she spends the night.  I keep my house pretty dark at night, because I can't fall asleep if there's basically any light anywhere.  So I decided that the guest room needed a nightstand and a lamp. 

I went to my parents' house a few weeks ago, and on my way, I noticed that their neighbors had thrown out a perfectly good kitchen chair.  Ok, so the legs were broken, and it was kind of beat up, but other than that it was just fine.  So I ripped the legs off (by hand) and painted it green. 

I went a thriftin' and found a very cheap hideous wooden lamp.

This got a coat of yellow paint and a hand me down shade. 

To mount the chair, I got some brackets and attached them to the wall. 

Then it was just a matter of adding a light bulb, setting the chair on the brackets and screwing it in!  Sounds easy right?  The hardest part was screwing from underneath without letting the chair fall on my head.

There ya go Mom.  Now all it needs is an alarm clock.

Bedside Table Reboot

Most of my furniture is a hand-me-down.  When I run through the list of furniture in my house, I can only think of three pieces I bought new.  Everything else is either a garage/estate sale find, a dumpster dive save, or mined from my parents or my grandparents houses, like my bedside table.

I'm sad.  Paint me Handy Mandy!

So the other day when I lifted the table, and the top came off, I decided it was time to do something about my sad, water stained, broken down bedside table. I wanted a two tone look, instead of a solidly painted piece, because the table is solid maple, and the wood underneath is beautiful. So I removed the hardware, sanded the easily accessible sides, draw front, shelf and tabletop. I decided to paint the uprights, mostly because I was too lazy to sand them down.  I glued the table top back together as it had come into three pieces, and waited.

The uprights I painted purple, I stained the exposed wood with a light color for a nice contrast, and replaced the hideous shelf paper with something a little more girly. 

Pretty wood grain!

Then I took a canning lid, and VERY CAREFULLY sanded the entire thing going in one direction the whole time.  This was to get the words that were printed off the top, and even up the surface afterwards.  It also makes it ever so slightly more shiny.  I drilled a hole in the middle of the lid and the drawer, and applied my newly acquired hardware.  (I got my hardware at Bart's Barn, my favorite store!)

All done!

Bike inner-tube shelves

In my wanderings on the interwebz, I came across a going green contest, where people were upcycling this that and the other.  One of the entries was a man who had made shelves out of two furniture feet and some bike inner tubes.

The heck you say?

Well I thought that was kind of groovy, so I set out to replicate it.  I was thinking it might be a perfect way to store the excess DVDs that were stacked atop my DVD shelving unit.  I didn't have any furniture feet, so I had to make something that would work.  Bart's barn provided a large thick dowel that started out it's life as a closet bar, and a piece of particle board.  Total cost, $1.75.  I cut the dowel into 8 inch lengths and the particle board into 5 inch squares. I marked the middle of both, drilled holes, and screwed one to the other.

I used inch and three quarters deck screws for this so they wouldn't come apart.

And then everything got painted fire engine red.

*insert siren noises here*

The inner tubes I acquired by going to my local bike repair shop and asking for any punctured tubes they were going to be throwing away.  I figured they probably had some fancy recycling program to turn them into shoes for starving children in third world countries or those rubber fall zones at playgrounds, but lucky for me, shipping them costs too much to make anyone want to recycle them, and I got myself several handfuls.

So I found two tubes the same size, and saved the rest for another project. I mounted one of my bright red brackets, and then hung the tubes on it.  I hooked the other bracket to the tubes and stretched it as far as I could and marked the spot on the wall.  Then I unhooked the tubes, screwed the second bracket into place, stretched the tubes between them, and loaded it up with my excessive DVD collection.

I'm kind of impressed this worked at all actually.

I may have to tweak the placement of the brackets a bit, because those tubes are a lot more stretchy than I assumed.

Reclaimed cabinet door shelves

Casita Amanda, as it has come to be known, is very small.  930 square feet is plenty for one fabulous do-it-yourselfer and her furry sidekick.

But a small house from the 1960's does pose some very serious storage issues at times.  I spend a lot of time looking around my house and thinking, "I know there's more room here than I'm taking advantage of. Where can I put more storage?"So when I decided that my tiny powder room off the master bedroom needed more space to store things, shelves were in order.

For the actual shelves, I haunted my local Habitat for Humanity Restore, aka Bart's Barn, until I saw a cabinet door that had been sliced in half.  It was dark and glossy and too wide, so I took a trip to my dad's table saw to cut it down to size, and my mom diligently sanded away the finish so that it would take the paint.  Thanks mom and dad. I like it because it's got a lip on it, so my round things like lipstick won't roll away.

Pfft! Like I ever wear lipstick. That's a laugh. 

I applied two generous coats of white paint, also procured at Bart's Barn, which I didn't know was oil based at the time. Pro tip - if you're covered in oil based paint half an hour before you're supposed to be at a dinner party, regular old canola oil will dissolve that stuff right off your skin.  And it leaves your hands nice and soft.

I inherited the shelf brackets from the previous owner.  She had them close to the ceiling, and they were covered in dust and gunk. I used the pine shelves elsewhere in a closet, but I kept the brackets, knowing that they'd make throwing up some shelves pretty simple one day.  One coat of fuchsia paint later, and they're ready to attach to the back of the shelves.

I held the shelves in place and leveled them, and then marked the holes with a pencil so I'd know where to drill.  I drilled pilot holes and inserted molly bolts into them.

They're called ribbed plastic anchors on the package, but I've always called them molly bolts so molly bolts they are.  Use a hammer to gently coerce the bolts into the holes.  Don't hit too hard or you'll bend or break the plastic.  You always want to use these if you're screwing anything of any weight into dry wall.

Then I used screws to attach the brackets to the wall.  I was able to use my power drill to screw the bottom screws into place, but the top ones were in an awkward position due to the bracket's shape, so I did those by hand.

And TA-DA!  Storage!

A quick aside.  I love to shop at Bart's Barn, because not only do they have all kinds of neato reclaimed everything, not only is it generally much cheaper than anyplace you'd buy it new, not only are the staff friendly and helpful, but every time I shop there I'm donating money to an organization that gives people the dignity of owning their own home, of building wealth and getting out of poverty, of saying I live here, as opposed to I stay there. And that, well that means something.