Sofa Table

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm very accident prone. I broke my toe by running into a box. I've sprained my ankle while pulling my pants up. I also walk into door jams quite often. My sensory perception is just a bit off.

My living room is rather small. For about 9 years I have had a lovely coffee table in front of my couch. I got it when my cousin moved from Detroit to Chicago. I bought the couches, coffee and end table from her. Well I finally got tired of hitting my knee on this table.

Here are some shots of the coffee table. Look at those sharp corners!

Now here's a photo of just two of the injuries that I've suffered recently from this coffee table.They are small and healing but it happens ALL THE TIME.

I decided that with such a small living room and such large furniture it was time to get rid of the coffee table. Right now it's just chilling in our spare room but it will probably be retired to a corner in the basement soon.

I wanted something though to put drinks on if someone is sitting on the couch and that's when I found console tables and sofa tables online. What I really want is just a long skinny thing behind the couch. It was much easier to just make one than go out and buy one.

I went to Lowes and bought a 6x1 board and had them cut it to the length of my couch which I measured before I went to the store. In the lumber area I found these awesome table legs for only $2.99 each. I bought 6 of those because I knew with a table so long I would need legs in the middle to provide support. After assembling it, I was very happy I did that because they really helped it go from wobbly to pretty good.

The legs were a little tall so I cut 3 inches off each side of them to make them the right height. Then I broke out my awesome new drill and drilled some holes and screwed the legs on! After that was done I put some wood filler on over the screws to hide them, let it dry and then sanded it lightly.

 

 You can see that I did a pilot hole so the screws would sit into the wood and be even and smooth. Also if you look closely you can see where I started to drill a hole but moved it over about an inch. 

 Good old Elmers wood filler works great. I used it for the kitchen cart as well.

 Here they are covered.

Next was time to stain it. Originally I wanted it to be a nice deep rich wood looking color. However, I'm cheap and lazy. I had left over black stain from my kitchen cart that I made and I figured I would just use that instead of letting it dry up and go to waste.

It turned out perfect! So far I'm happy with it. It really opens up the room  not having the big coffee table there.

Kitchen Side Table/Cart

It's finally complete! The kitchen side table/cart is done. I have no idea what to call it. Island? Cart? Table? Who knows.

I've been in my house for 10 years now and I have had this dishwasher that I don't use. It is not hooked up to a water line, it is a portable one that requires pulling it into the middle of the kitchen and attaching a hose to the faucet. It's a pain, it's loud and to be honest it's been so long since I tried it that i'm not even sure if it works. So for 10 years I've hand washed dishes. I never got rid of it because it is a great counter top next to the stove. I use it all the time. The downside is I'm losing a lot of valuable storage space being taken up by the actual washer.

After doing lots of research I decided to build my own table/cart. I could not find one in a store that would fit in that area. I did my measurements and I went to Home Depot and Lowes and bought the wood. I bought 6x1 pine boards. I bought higher quality wood for the table top but for the legs I just used basic 2x4's.

The nice thing about Lowes is that they will cut the wood for you. Typically 1 or 2 cuts are free and any after they charge you for. I went on a slow day and the man was nice enough to not charge me for the cuts. I had the wood cut into 5 pieces for the table top and then the 2x4s for the legs. The cuts were rough so I took them to my dad who had a good table saw and was able to cut them to more precise measurements.

Then came putting it together. A lot of the blogs and directions I found on here required tools I did have to do pocket screws. We did not go this route and just did a base for the table top and then attached that to the legs. I was lucky enough that my father helped me out a lot with this. After cutting the wood to precise measurements he then assembled it for me!

I then went and bought small boards for the shelves and just glued them down. I also bought wood filler and filled the seams of the table top and also where all the screws were. Sanded that and then was able to stain and paint it.  Word of advice, before you put the shelves on, paint the wood! Painting it after the fact was a bit of a pain.

Here are some photos!

New projects coming up

I've been fairly quiet lately with home projects. However, I will have some new projects and blog posts soon.

A while ago I blogged about wanting to build a kitchen cart to replace my portable dishwasher that we never use. The table is almost complete! It is a combined effort between my father and I. I do not have access to wood cutting tools so after I bought the wood and had it cut to a rough size that I needed, he cut it to a precise size and also helped assemble it.

This past weekend I added to two shelves to it and started to stain it. I hope to finish painting the rest of it this week if the weather holds out and have it done by the weekend! I was able to use my new sander and it worked great.

Once this project is done, I have a few others I want to start on. First is a skinny behind the couch sofa table. Currently we have a coffee table in front of the couch. It is a glass table with a metal frame. Despite having this table in same place for about 9 years, I walk into it often and end up with bruised or bloodied knees. My space perception is terrible. Yesterday I hit my knee quite hard and just said I'm done. I can't take this anymore!

The plan is to make something to go behind the couch so when people are over they have a place to set their glass and I can also decorate it a bit. It should be fairly simple to build.

The project after that is repainting my nightstand. I've had it for as long as I can remember and it's in rough shape. A good sanding and coat of paint should spruce it right up. If that goes well, I may also tackle an old dresser that is in our basement and bring it up to our spare room.

Those are my summer projects, along with continuing to update and maintain our yard.

Painting the Kitchen

The end of June will be 10 years that I closed on my house. I cannot believe I have lived here for 10 years all ready. I lived in the house for over 6 years before I really started caring how it looked or did many updates to it. That is mostly in part due to lack of money but also I just didn't know what I wanted, how to do it and also I had someone else there who didn't do much around the house to help or motivate me to want to improve it.

2011 is when I finally had the freedom to start making the house the way I wanted it. The first thing that I did was paint my kitchen. This is long before my blogging days and before I really did much in regards to do it yourself so the pictures I have aren't great. They were taken with a poor quality Blackberry phone camera and not the best lighting or angles. I also didn't take good before photos so I'm going to try to look through old party photos to show what the kitchen looked like.

I knew I wanted a good red so I went to Home Depot and bought two samples. I painted squares on one part of the wall to try to figure out what red I wanted. It was my first time painting with a dark color. The best advice I can give is after the first coat, don't freak out with how uneven it looks. The second coat makes it look much better and evens it all out.

I have also learned to take your time and be very careful with taping off and going around the trim. Since this was one of my first projects I did NOT take my time and here it is 4 years later and I still look around and see spots I need to touch up. Red that bled through the tape, a spot on the ceiling or places where the tape wasn't totally straight. When you're doing such a dark color you're able to notice EVERYTHING.

Here are some before photos. This first one is from a party but it shows how there also once was wallpaper up as well.

Here is where I was trying out the two different reds. I opted for Behr Gardenia. I used their Paint and Primer in one paint. 

 

You can see I did tape off a lot but I still had a lot of touch ups to do. 

These are just the beginning photos of my kitchen redo. It has taken years and is still currently in progress. The red against the cabinets is not a look that I like.

 

So that is my updated kitchen painting photos. This was done in 2011 as I mentioned. The reason I decided to do this blog today was the "On this Day" thing on Facebook showed these photos and I figured even though it's an old project it's worth blogging about, especially since it was the first thing I really did.

I will try to do another one soon with the cabinets. That was the next thing I did in the kitchen. It really made the red look better. 

Curb Appeal - Front Porch

It is important to have nice curb appeal for your front house. It's most important if you're looking to sell your home because the first thing potential buyers see is the front of your home. I have no intentions on selling my home at this time but do hope to move in the future (5+years maybe). This means I have plenty of time to work on adding curb appeal to my home!

My last post I mentioned some of the updates I have done with the landscaping. Now that spring is here I try to do a little bit of yard work every weekend. This past weekend consisted on mostly just trimming branches and cleaning up a bit. I have two very large pine trees along my driveway that drop a lot of pine needles but also have low hanging branches. On Sunday I spent a lot of time trimming these back so they are not hanging on my car when I park in the driveway or so people are not walking into them when coming up the driveway.

On a bit of a whim, I bought a new welcome mat for the front door. The old one was ruined last summer when I was stripping paint off the front door before I repainted it. It was also about 9 years old so it was time for a new one. This one I saw at Target and fell in love because it just seems so colorful and happy.

The front of my house and the porch is lacking color and decor so the welcome mat helps. I also made a small flower planter this weekend. I've been wanting to add flowers to the porch or even right in front of the porch but planters can be so costly! I try to be frugal but my taste tends to run expensive. Some of the planters I've seen out that I like are $50+! I'm sorry but I'm not spending that sort of money on a planter.

Instead I went out and bought two cinder blocks for approximately $1.09 each! I bought a can of spray paint for $4.98 and sprayed them so they aren't just dreary grey blocks. Then I bought some flowers and potting mix and put them on the porch! I think it turned out fairly well. I need to do a quick touch up on the bottle of the blocks with the spray paint but I like the overall look.

I am thinking I may buy two more blocks and do the same thing and put it on the ground in front of the porch as well. Looking at this picture you can see a bit of the brick is crumbling in one area on the porch. I hope that having flowers in a planter will help hide that a bit. You can also see part of the welcome mat by the door in the photo.

I'm debating what to do with the chair. I could probably get it powder coated to cover the rust. When I had my big Newfoundland dog, Hobie I would sit on the porch in the chair and read and he would lay on the porch with me. Now that I don't have a dog, I feel odd sitting on my front porch. I'm considering removing the chair but I'm not sure if I should replace it with some sort of decor or just leave the front porch free of clutter.

Once I figure out exactly what I plan to do with the porch I will take more photos! Until then, that's my small update on curb appeal!

Spring time means yard work!

Two years ago I ripped out all of the shrubs in front of my house. They were the ugliest things ever. Around the same time I was doing that, a good friend was having her home demolished and rebuilt due to a fire. She was kind enough to let me come and take some of her cement blocks and also flowers from their garden that were going to to tramped on and ripped up.

We spent a long day digging up lilies, tulips, hostas and ferns and then replanting them at my house. They looked great the first year and also last year. This year they haven't all come up but I've decided that I want to add a few more. I'm thinking about some black eyed susans. I haven't gone to by them yet so I will update once I do this. 

Here's a bit of how it was before, after and now:

 As you can see in the second picture, my mailbox is on the railing of my front porch. Originally it was on the house but the mailman refused to deliver my mail after a while because I had a loose railing. I moved the mailbox to the front railing and removed the hand rail to go up the steps. The problem with this is that the mail would always get soaked if it was raining. Yes it has a lid on it but 9 times out of 10 it didn't close all the way with the mail in it.

Last weekend when I was adding the new fresh mulch, I installed a new mailbox. It's a regular type of mail box that you would see at end of your driveway if that is how your city did mail. I like this one so much more and I'm excited to also decorate it for the holidays and whatnot.

As you can see from the picture above, I have a second layer of blocks and added some fresh mulch. The mailbox is in and now I have a lot of clean up to do. Tons of pine needles are all over. I'm not sure if I will get to it this year but I have a large area next to the driveway that has pine trees that need to be trimmed, leaves that need to be raked and possibly mulch put down there.


Stay tuned for more photos later this spring/summer with more flowers and not just boring old mulch!

Small updates

I haven't been working on any big projects as of late. My last post I mentioned wanting to build a kitchen cart. That is slowly in process. I bought wood from Lowes last week and had them cut it down to size. However, one of the boards was really warped and not flat so I need to buy a little more.


Back in 2007 I came home from school one Saturday to find my bathroom was completely gutted and torn apart by the guy I was dating at the time. He wanted to redo the bathroom because we had a few loose tiles. This turned into, no tile, no drywall, no tub, sink, toilet, etc. Then it took forever to be put back together again. To the day he finally moved out, he never completed it. Long story short, this was a BIG issue and I won't get into all the drama there.

One of the random things left undone was a little cubby (best way to describe it) that he tiled instead of just doing flat dry wall. I never knew how to grout so it just sat there ungrouted. Once I discovered SimpleGrout the pre-mixed grout that I used for the kitchen floor I realized I could finish up some of the grouting in the bathroom! I had a little left over so I did that this weekend. I did not have enough to complete the project but it's amazing how much better it looks. I may hate how my bathroom looks due to the drama that it took getting it there but one day it will be 100% finished and I will be happy. Here is a quick during and after picture of the grout.

I started to grout before I took a picture so I snapped a quick one after I had started. This was a bit more difficult than the floor just because of gravity. Small pieces kept falling and pushing it into the cracks was a bit more time consuming but it went pretty well. I still have to do the top part and the sides of the cubby, along with a small strip of tile near the tub.

The other small update this week is I bought a new kitchen table! My kitchen is very small and I don't have a dining room so finding a kitchen table the right size has been difficult. The table that I have been using for the almost 10 years I've been in my house was actually there when I moved in. It always worked but was never my style and since I've been doing updates it's been looking more and more shabby and out of date. I think it's from the 90s. Little things like changing your table can make such a difference in looks. You don't always have to spend a lot of money or do big repairs to give your room a makeover.