Amusing MJ

Connection Corner Table

May 20, 2014 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

I’m finally posting about the project my friend Claire asked me to take on last fall, but because of scheduling and my brother’s wedding, I didn’t get around to starting it until late March. It was a multi-weekend project but we finished it up just in time for Easter (I told you I was behind on posts!). Claire works for our church and had this great idea for a welcome desk that meshed better with the personality of our contemporary service. So she and I talked through plans and decided that it should be about kitchen island size. So I went to my normal blog stop for plans and found Ana-White’s plans for this kitchen island. I’ve used Ana-White plans a few times before, most notably for this dining room table. I figured I could alter it a bit to make it work for us. You know, like putting in a shelf instead of the X for wine storage. (Not that I don’t like a glass of wine, but this maybe not appropriate for the church’s welcome desk). And we only really needed one drawer and no cabinet fronts, so I only used the plans really as a model for the base of the structure.

Step one is basically constructing the box out of ¾ inch plywood. We had Home Depot cut two sheets of the plywood in half vertically, and then once we got home we cut two of those halves (so one full sheet) into shelves and the dividers.

cctable10

I used my kreg jig on the inside of each of the dividers to secure it to the base, being sure to go ahead and put in pocket hole locations for assembling the top whenever we got to that point. Since I was winging it, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to use as a top for the piece yet, but knew I would want to secure it from the bottom, leaving a smooth top.

The next step was to add in braces between each section to give the backing something to attach to. IF you are going to be adding in a drawer or drawers, be very very sure everything is square. Otherwise you may have to take apart and reassemble several times… ask me how I know. Oh and here is where I will stop giving you advice on how to put in a drawer and tell you to find other sources… mine only kind of works. And that was after reassembling 3 times. It probably won’t be the last drawer I ever attempt to build, so I’ll let you know if the next time is successful. If you want more qualified instructions, I like Sandra’s tutorial about drawer assembly here. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves we aren’t ready for the drawer yet.

The back (front?) piece was a piece of ¼ plywood cut down to size and secured in using wood glue and an 18 gauge nail gun. From there we assembled face frames using 1x4s and 1x2s to create the pattern. One for each side and one for on top of the ¼ plywood we’ve just attached.

We knew for size reasons we didn’t want the top of the island extending out any further than the actual island, and I realized that I had a leftover piece of the ¾ inch plywood that would cover the top perfectly except for the top of the face frame that we’ve already cut, assembled, glued and nailed onto the front… that puppy was NOT coming off. But since plywood like that isn’t cheap, Claire and I came up with a more decorative solution of adding a piece of cove molding to bridge the gap between the top of the face frame and the front of the plywood on the top. I think it actually adds a lot of character to the piece, so I’m happy with the snafu. This is the point of the project where I started to get pretty rushed for time and somewhat frustrated with how long it was taking, so unfortunately I don’t have great pictures of this step. (you can see the gap in the picture below)

We did decide to add some heavy duty casters to the bottom of the piece to make it easier to roll out of Each caster has three long screws in it, since the fourth would drill up through the bottom of the piece. But we’ve moved this piece around quite a bit and they have held up very securely.

Next up we cut the shelves two for each of the outer sections and one for the inner section and secured those using the kreg jig pocket holes. Then it was time to attach the face frame to the open side and complete the drawer. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not going to even begin to tell you how to build a drawer because I messed it up completely, but there are lots of great bloggers out there who have successfully done this, so I highly recommend checking them out if you are adventurous enough to try it!

And because this post has gotten CRAZY long… I’m going to leave you with the dreaded Cliffhanger… tune in tomorrow for the second half of our adventure! (you’ll want to tune in… it involves an AWESOME herringbone addition!)

Filed Under: Wood

Minty Fresh and Clean Laundry Room

May 8, 2014 By amusingmjblog 2 Comments

This past week when we were updating the living room, I also got an itch to do an overhaul on our laundry room too. If you read my post a few weeks ago about things I would do the same and differently if I were house shopping again, you know that I have an upstairs laundry room and that I LOVE it. For someone who despises laundry as much as I do, it gives me the opportunity to ~~not have to fold my laundry ever~~, ~~hide my dirty laundry~~… nope there is no good way to say that… I just like being able to hide my laundry if people come over. Oh AND I showed y’all an awesome picture of the constant state of our laundry room.

YIKES.

Now you see why I had an itch to redo it? Want another before picture?

Yes that picture is about a month old, and yes that means I had Christmas cookie tins on my dryer at the end of March. As I tell my husband… BECAUSE I AM AWESOME.

First step in a complete overhaul of a junked up room like this? Cleaning it out.

What I really wanted in here were a few cabinets so that I could store a few things that wouldn’t be out in the open: extra kitchen towels, aprons and just some random things that didn’t really have a home. Since this is a kinda funny shaped room we figured out that we could put two cabinets from HD on the left hand side of the room before the ceiling started sloping down. Which had the added benefit of me not having to patch that hole leftover from an old alarm system box. So my next step was to tear out the shelves

These definitely left a few rough patches on the wall, but fortunately for me, most of those would be covered by the cabinets, but for the ones that weren’t I spread some patch-n-paint over the top of it so it wouldn’t show once it was painted.

Then I chose a lovely mint green color Celtic Gray from Behr paint. Its definitely green and not gray. I’m not usually a huge green fan, but decided we could be a bit adventurous in the laundry room. And I wanted it to be very calming and clean. Then the husband and I hung the cabinets as per the instructions on the cabinet box.

Do you see the bottom of the cabinets? The cabinets that we bought because they are supposed to hang like that? WHY DO CABINET MAKERS NOT PAINT THAT SPACE THE SAME COLOR AS THE CABINET?!?! Seriously?! I cut a piece of plywood and painted it white to match the cabinets and then nailed it up, but still… THAT IS DUMB.

We also switched out the florescent light for the Declan Light from Crate and Barrel. Brief sidenote… I LOVE new and unusual light fixtures, I DESPISE installing them, but I despise paying an electrician to do it for me even more, so…. I suffer. POOOOOOOR MJ.

I plan on painting the hanging bar white, but haven’t gotten around to that yet, and our laundry was piling up, so I’m living with the brown for now. I built the floating shelf myself, which I’ll post about next week.

The wire baskets came from One King’s Lane, but they don’t have them anymore (at least that I could find)

I don’t have a trash can in my laundry room, so we collect lint in a jar until it fills up and then throw it away. I had the jar on hand, but added the cute chalkboard tag which is a sticker (I bought those from Target on clearance for my brother’s shower, they came in packs of 6 and I LOVE them… I wish I’d bought more!).

And I love these little metal chalkboard tags that I picked up at the Frisco Mercantile, which is a local warehouse where people have booths. If you live in Dallas and haven’t been, they have a ton of cute things!

And just because I love them so much, here is a before and after shot for you!

laundrybeforeandafter

Filed Under: Laundry Room

White Mantle

May 7, 2014 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, when we painted the living room and hallway, I also decided to paint the fireplace surround. It was more like: the husband ran to home depot to pick up a light switch cover and this mantle painted badly with flat cream paint drives me CRAZY every time we are watching TV, wonder if I can paint it before he gets home (the answer to that btw is NO).

But since we already had everything taken down and moved to the center of the room, I went for it anyway. I used Behr’s Ultra Bright White (the base color) in Semi-gloss since that is what I had on hand. Since it is trim and I was using glossier paint which tends to show streaks, I used Floetrol as an add in. Theoretically it makes your paint less likely to leave brush marks. I’ve had pretty good success with it, so I use it. (That link is for a gallon, I bought a quart a while ago and still haven’t used it all up, so just buy the quart… but that will show you what the bottle looks like).

Here is my mantle in the middle of the first coat of paint. It is amazing to me how NOT WHITE it was. My baseboards already didn’t match this very well. They are whiter than this, but not BRIGHT white.

And after two quick coats of paint, the mantle was looking SO FRESH AND SO CLEAN! I like that it made the gray pop a little bit more. It did bring out the cream in the tile a bit more, but it doesn’t bother me.