Antique Sideboard

There are a number of names for it. Sideboard. Credenza. Buffet. Cupboard. Press. Cabinet. Hutch. It's a narrow piece of furniture for holding articles of table service. It's top is convenient for preparing dishes or storing hot dishes you're about to serve. They tend to be found in the dining room. I bought mine in a desperate attempt to extend my counter space before the fabulous kitchen overhaul of 2013. It was on craigslist for $150.

The top is solid marble, and the cabinet is 100% quarter sawn oak. It is put together with mortise and tenon joints, dovetail joints on the drawers, wooden pegs, and very little hardware. No glue, no nails. and the only screws are there to keep the drawer hardware on. This is a true antique. I'm guessing - and I am no expert - due to the way it's made, the hardware (which I think is original) and the art deco designs on the front, that it was built around 1920-1925. If you are an expert, and I'm wrong PLEASE contact me. I'd love to have an accurate date for this beauty. 

And I scooped it up for $150. 

Now. Don't get me wrong, when I bought it only one of the drawers had a drawer. The other drawer face had just been screwed into the frame to keep it from moving. The door moulding on the front was cracked and in danger of falling off. The paint was chipping and awful. There's a couple holes in the top where pegs obviously once fit to hold two long since broken and discarded shoulders in place. The backsplash rocked and wouldn't stay put due to the shoulders being gone. It was in crappy shape.

My dad built me a drawer for the other drawer face and I used wood glue to fix the moulding on the front. But other than that, I pretty much just used it as it was.

Until now.

See that? That's the back of the sideboard coming away from the side. Because of the amazing craftsmanship of this piece, it's survived for almost 100 years. And yet, because it doesn't have any fasteners at a lot of the joints, as the wood ages, dries and shrinks, the joints don't fit together quite as strongly as they once did. And that marble top weighs like 150 pounds. It's not connected, and the rocking back and forth has caused a few of the joints to become loose. I knew if I wanted to keep this piece for another 100 years, it needed some attention.

Some idiot had spray painted the entire cabinet this steel blue - including the hardware. I painstakingly removed the hardware and saved the tiny little slot head screws in a  cup. Then I sent all the hardware for a bath in boiling water.

When the water was cool enough, I pulled the hardware out and started to rub them. The paint came right off with no stripper, no chemicals, no stink. Yay! Underneath they were a very shiny yellow brass. I didn't like that, so I hit them with a metallic spray paint in a dark color. 

Next, Boyfriend helped me remove the immensely heavy marble top. I added the tiniest amount of wood glue to the joints, and Boyfriend held the joints in place while I added the smallest finish nails I could find. You can barely see them, but they are holding the joints in place very well. Once I got the piece square again, the door started to swing a lot better. 

I wanted to fix the paint job without stripping it, and without sanding away all the neat detail work on the front. So that meant I had to paint it. But I sanded anything that was flat back down to nice clean oak and stained it. A coat of mustard yellow, and voila!

While I was at it I removed the lock from the cabinet, and took it to my local locksmith, Brian and Sons. I wanted to have a key for the lock, so I could use it as a liquor cabinet or something. I don't know. I just felt weird having a lock that wouldn't lock. t really thought they would take one look at that lock and laugh at me. Or tell me it would be a monstrous amount of money. 

They calmly took the lock, fit a key to it, and told me it would be $15 for the first key and $7 for any key after that. I bought two, and it was ready in a day. Amazing! They're professionals who do good work and I would highly recommend them. And they didn't pay me to say so either. 

The only thing left to do with this piece is replace the shoulders on the countertop. I would probably never match the marble, but I'm thinking if I can find a nice thick piece of oak, that would serve. Problem is, finding a nice thick piece of oak lumber of the correct proportions these days will take some doing. But I have not given up hope. 

I've been looking for some similar sideboard from a similar era to try to see what it might be worth - not that I could ever sell this. But it seems to be fairly unique. Everything that's anywhere near close is between $1000 and $1500, and none of them seem to be a similar construction. So I'd say I struck a pretty good bargain, wouldn't you?

Refurbished Coffee Table

I acquired this coffee table as part of the great coffee table swap of 2008. A friend of a friend got a new coffee table. They gave my friend their old coffee table. My friend gave me this coffee table. And I gave away my coffee table, which had cost about $20 at Target and was mostly made of cardboard.

Not made of cardboard = upgrade.

I spray painted it this lovely turquoise color. I did a pretty crappy job. Lots of people are out there looking for ways to make new things look old and chippy. Frankly I've no idea why. My technique for making my coffee table look old and chippy is a bad paint job and about 7 years of putting my feet on it. 

So first thing I did was sand the top, and only the top. There are lots of little details on this coffee table, and I didn't want to ruin them with my detail sander or spend hours sanding by hand. So, top gets sanded to bare wood, everything else gets a very light sanding. Then we stain.

Oh yeah. Looks better already.

Then, everything that's turquoise gets painted a blue that matches the rest of the room, and two solid coats of polyurethane on the top, so that my cups and feet don't do a number on it. 

After.

Not terribly exciting, but there you have it.

New Shutoff Valves

This is Boyfriend.

So, Boyfriend bought a house a few months ago. It's an adorable late 60s home that seems well constructed and reminds me so strongly of my parents' house, that I felt instantly at home. Boyfriend's new house had had one owner, and elderly woman who had recently passed away.  Which means that the house hadn't been well maintained in about a decade.

So it's got it's quirks and it's problems, and it's overgrown trees, a few of which the home inspection didn't find. And while Boyfriend has helped me put in a laminate floor, a whole kitchen, shelves, tile, trees, paint, etc., Boyfriend is not confident when it comes to home ownership and his own handiness. (He is actually quite handy - though not as much as my fabulous self.)

So when his shutoff valve was leaking for his washing machine, he waited for me to help him fix it. All I really did was sit on the floor and tell him what to do. 

First thing we had to do was turn off the water. You can either get the city to do this, or you can buy a key to do it yourself for about 10 bucks.  

It's called a curb key and it looks like this.

An easy way to test if the water is actually off is to set up a lawn sprinkler you can see from the shutoff, which is generally in the front of your house. You know the water is off when the sprinkler goes off. 

Then you need to remove the old fixtures. Luckily, they were screwed on, not soldered on, or we would have probably called a plumber. (I could have fixed it, but Boyfriend doesn't trust me not to burn down his house yet.)

Righty tighty, lefty loosie.

Boyfriend used the vice grips to hold the pipe still. This is important, so you don't untwist any pluming lower down in the wall, and cause a huge leak that you can't get to, and have to rip out the wall. He then used the adjustable wrench to twist counter clockwise on the shut off valve. 

Then you take the old valves to the hardware store and find new ones that match. This process can be sped up by looking cute and stupid and ditching your boyfriend to ask whatever young male employee can be found near the plumbing section. 

Or, you know, you can know what you're doing. Either way. 

Shiny and not corroded!

We took off the plastic nut, because we didn't need it. Then it's just a matter of screwing the new fixture in, and using the vise grips and the adjustable wrench to make sure it's good and tight.

Does anyone else see an angry robot face in this picture?

And then you hook up the washer and dryer, turn the water back on, and test for leaks.

No leaks! First try! Woohoo!

Boyfriend did really well with this, which was his first real home repair. Apart from instructions, I barely helped at all. I think he's feeling more confident about home ownership now.

Kitchen Reno Part Deux

See? I haven't forgotten you! I promised you a photo of my new hard hat, and here it is!

This is my first ever selfie!

Ok, so no, I haven't been without a kitchen sink for months. But my kitchen was far from finished. Now it's finished, and you can see it.

So. First thing I did was cut my butcher block to length, and cut a big ol' hole in it for the sink. I tried free handing this by dropping in a circular saw. That was a mistake. 

I ended up cleaning up the edges by using a fence to guide the edge of my circular saw. My undercounted sink is held in place with some clips and some heavy duty wood screws (since my countertop is wood.) 

I don't have any pictures of this part because... let's just say that emotions were running high that day. 

Next I needed to drill a hole through the counter for the sink. Which I did. Now my faucet was purchased online for a grand total of $38 bucks. Comparable models were about $200. It came from overseas and all the directions were in Chinese. So that was exciting. It's a good thing I'm handy. When we initially attached the faucet, we found that the countertop was so thick, that there wasn't room for the hardware to attach properly.

Does not fit.

Notice how the nut in the front is not fully on the bolt. So the solution was to carve out some space for that little metal flange thingy to sit below the bottom surface of the counter. I drew a circle around the flange and used a forester bit to carve out the surface about an inch down. This would not show from the top side. 

I smoothed the edges with my chisel, another Christmas present. Then we reassembled. And it fit!

Trust me, it's supposed to look like that. 

Now we flip the counter over, tighten everything up, and check for leaks! And we take it off again, and find the nut that the Chinese directions clearly pointed out that we should tighten, that we completely missed, flip it back over, tighten everything up, and check for leaks again! And it works! So I screwed the countertop down from below.

Yay for running water!

Then we cut the rest of the butcher block for the other counters and the window sill. I spread lots and lots of mineral oil onto the wood, and let it soak in, for a beautiful shiny, protected countertop.

Miles of counter space!

Then I attached the backsplash. This was literally as easy as using tin snips to cut the plastic to size, and sticking it to the wall with adhesive. It looks like pressed tin, but it's really just plastic.

After that, it's just a few paint touch ups, a little trim, a few quirky touches, and BOOM! Hello dream kitchen.

This is the same trim as on the cabinet - to cover an ugly place where the wall meets the backsplash.

What's a dream kitchen without an appropriately disturbing knife block?

Total costs ran me about $1200. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Kitchen reno part 1

So. I'm a teacher nine months out of the year. And I can tell you for certain that teachers do not get Christmas bonuses. It just isn't done. Heck, teachers don't get promotions, or raises. In the current political climate, we're lucky to get a cost of living increase. What's more likely to happen is that our insurance premiums go up, our salary stays the same, and we effectively get a pay cut. But, it does on occasion happen, that the school board recognizes that we haven't gotten a pay raise in, oh say, this lifetime, and they realize that that just kind of sucks. And though they'd like to give us a raise, even if they have the money, they don't. Because they aren't sure they can maintain that rate of pay next year. So when they've been to church and heard a particularly guilt inducing sermon, and Jiminy Cricket is chirping on their shoulder, a Christmas miracle happens. And we get a Christmas bonus.

Listen to the cricket people.

And so begins a kitchen renovation that I have been wanting to do since I moved into my house. I purchased beautiful butcher block countertops, a new faucet, and a new sink. My beautiful family and  friends, well aware of the task I was undertaking, gifted me with a grand total of $200 in gift certificates to my local big box hardware store, which just covered the sink. Since I didn't order it until Christmas day, I'm pretty sure it's in Pennsylvania as I type this blog. But fear not gentle reader! It is on its way.

I wanted to expand my counter space. So I started by building some custom cabinetry to support the countertop out of scrap wood. Apart from the dowels and the trim, everything else was scrap from either my house or my parents. 

Step one! I needed something akin to a table leg, but with a bit more pizazz. When my house was built it had this funny little half wall to separate the entry way from the living room. Three large turned posts were installed between the top of the half wall and the ceiling to give it an architectural detail that screamed "Mid 60's." Some previous owner ripped them out and put them in the attic. 

This has been languishing with the Christmas decor and the insulation for years!

Well it was exactly an inch too short. It also had some wicked damage from the not so gentle handlings of whoever pulled it from it's original home. So I grabbed some leftover wood from my closet build.

Leftovers. Not green and fuzzy like the ones in the fridge though.

I pulled a Jesus, and made the leg one inch longer by building a box around the bottom of the leg, hiding the damage. I threw on some quarter round along the base that was leftover from my intense battle with shoe moulding in the closet, and painted the whole thing blue.

According to the Rehab Addict show I just watched on Hulu, this is called "sistering in" the post. I had no idea that I saw her do this ages ago and subconsciously stole the idea. Thanks Nicole.

And I thought I took a picture at this point. 

Apparently I didn't.

So. Moving on. I taped down some craft paper in my kitchen, along all the shoe moulding, took all the doors off of the bottom cabinets, sanded everything, and wiped it down carefully.

Protect.

And then I set up my crock pot, electric griddle, paper plates, plastic cups, plastic cutlery, tons of shelf stable food like bread and peanut butter, and prepared to be unable to use my kitchen for a while. I protected my kitchen table with one of those vinyl on one side felt on the other red checked picnic tablecloths.

And serve. 

And then I painted. Somehow painting everything blue really did make my horrible countertops look even worse. I really can't believe I lived with urine yellow counters for that long. 

It's so empty in here. Almost like I'm moving. 

At this point, I cleaned up and threw a Christmas party. And then Santa came and brought me gift cards. And I ordered a sink. 

And then I started demo. I tore off the counters on the stove side of the kitchen, and begun building the cabinetry to extend the countertop.  The shelf is a piece of scrap from my dad's house. All the one by twos are from his scrap pile. All of the facings are scrap from his pile or mine. I started by building a shelf, with cleats on three corners.

Cleats! Not for baseball though. 

 I created a facing for the front and the back that was L shaped, and then drilled holes in the tops.

Those are the tops. Yes they are. 

The fourth corner of my shelf was held up by the neat little leg doodad that I had made. We cut a curve in the shelf and a slot in the doodad, and slipped it in. Then I crammed a shim or two in the slot to make sure it was good and tight, and not going anywhere. This is an idea I got from watching Rehab Addict. Thanks Nicole. And btw HGTV didn't pay me to write this. But they should.

Before paint and trim

I used some dowels and the L shaped facings to create a neat area for vertical storage of things like cutting boards and cookie sheets. Plus it's got this adorable trim that I left stained instead of painting it for a little pop of personality. 

Pop!

I added a set of dowels in the middle because this cabinet is deeper than most of my cookie sheets.

Three levels of dowel security.

So here we are, waiting for my sink to arrive, so that we can cut some countertops and get stuff installed. If you had told me that I would get a Christmas bonus in October, I would have told you you were insane. Even after we got the email about it, we didn't believe it until we had wandered into each other's classrooms comparing notes on said email and run into someone who had spoken to an administrator. It's a Christmas miracle. But I still have a lot of work to do. Let's see if we can bring in this project on time and under budget!

Let's all try to help a little cause, even a miracle needs a hand!

Oh yeah, did I mention I got a neon pink hard had with Handy Mandy in silver glitter on it for Christmas? That happened. Tune in next time for pics.

Closeted

Closets in houses built in 1965 are small. Frankly I have no idea how they expected a man and a woman to share the master closet in my house and have any measure of marital bliss. I as a single person had filled it to capacity all on my own. If I had to share it with my boyfriend, well, it would not be a pretty sight. So out of curiosity I went to some online closet organization something or other, and put in my closet measurements. Here's what I designed.

I'm overpriced!

This was on the order of $300. Which is ridiculous.  Plus it looks totally flimsy. So. I decided to build my own. I started by building a shelf unit. 

This took me a weekend.

It's very sturdy, and I bolted it to the wall, making sure I went into a stud for good measure. Small children could reasonably climb up the shelves to look for their Christmas presents without it toppling.  Not that... I ever did that... or anything.

Moving on. 

Next, I cut the existing bar into two pieces and installed it at the appropriate height for the top bar.  I turned the sagging bar so that it was arching up, instead of sagging down. Then I held it firmly in place and screwed it into the shelf brace so it would be straight. Ok, I had help. My big strong manly boyfriend operated the power drill while I used my wimpy girl muscles to hold the bar.

There's a block of wood to secure the bar to, because there's not a stud there. 

Next I installed a newly purchased lower bar high enough that clothing won't drag on the floor, but low enough that clothing from the top bar won't drag on the bar. My bars aren't quite at standard heights, because my shelving unit is only 6 ft high. 

Yes. I have out my drill and my impact driver. I'm too lazy to change bits every two seconds.

The bar sits just below the shelf. Total coincidence. 

And then I had the big stuff done.

Yay! Time for clothing!

Except the shoe moulding. I had removed all the baseboards and quarter round to get the shelving unit right up against the wall. Now I cut the baseboards to fit right up against the sides of the unit. I cut the quarter round on a miter so that I could fit it around the shelving unit. When the quarter round goes all the around the unit it looks really cool and built in. 

Like it's been there forever!

And voila! It's all done. I tried to get you guys good photos, but it's really hard to take photos in a closet.

I doubled my hanging space! Huzzah!

TV stand, Take 2

Remember when I made that TV stand? You know, this one?

She saved me!

And I said it was too small? Well, I always had this bigger piece in mind. It's a dresser that i got from my grandmother's house. It was sitting in the garage under various odds and ends. So I drug it home and took it apart. No reason something like that shouldn't be put to good use.

Where are we? I've been in that dusty garage for so long - oh, we're in… another garage?

Then I proceeded to sand every surface down to the bare wood, discard two of the drawers (not really, they're going to become bookshelves) and make a huge pile of sawdust. This piece was excellent quality and really in good shape, so I decided to stain most of it.

Notice the huge piles of sawdust on the floor? Got tracked all through the house too. 

I got a can of navy blue spray paint at Bart's Barn, and took a crack at the hardware with it. It ended up looking kind of black in the pictures, but it's a gorgeous deep navy blue. Trust me on this. And then I painted the uprights and the shelves mustard yellow. Insert shelves, drill a hole for cords in the back and Voila! TV stand.

Ready for movie duty, sir!

Here, have a cute picture of my furry sidekick for good measure.

I've pretty much finished up my closet makeover. I'll try to get that one on the books soon. For my next trick, I will do a kitchen makeover for under $1000. Hopefully. Here's a teaser trailer. 

Look it's a plan! She's finally learned to make plans and not just design in her head!