Four Day Weekend!

 I am very happy with the progress that we made on the house this weekend. Some of the projects have taken a lot longer to finish than others. The backyard has definitely been a long running project and I am sure it will be for a while. Over our four day weekend we ordered a dumpster and hauled off all the concrete from the backyard. Almost all of the concrete was from last April when we removed the swimming pool. It was a lot of work and thanks to all the help from our family and friends we got it done. The final total tonnage for the dumpster ended up being 9 tons. I can hardly believe that we moved that much concrete into that dumpster but we did.

While Geoff and our friends moved all that concrete, I stayed inside and helped my dad install our newly finished wall cabinets.  I cannot get over how great it is to have storage space again. Here is a picture of the two cabinets that we are using for all of drinking glasses. The plan is to put glass inserts in the cabinet doors and have glass shelves.

Also on the list of projects was a workbench in the garage. We are really bad about randomly throwing tools in places and forgetting where we put them. Having a place for all of our tools is definitely going to be a nice addition. I painted the wall the night before and in the morning we built a frame out of 2x4's and mounted those to the wall studs. For the top we screwed down a piece of OSB. We also mounted a shelving system. We haven't finished it yet and we still need to organize all the tools but its a great start.

The last two things we did this weekend were finally installing the baseboards in the guest bathroom and also adding two shelves to the cubby. We still need to add the actual top to the shelf and paint them white but we can do that another day.

How was your Presidents day weekend? Get any major projects done?

Refinishing a Sewing Table

A while back a friend of ours brought me a little table he found in our neighbors trash. Yup it was sitting out for trash day. Our friend knew I could probably do something productive with it so he grabbed it for me. The table turned out to be an antique sewing table. It looked like someone had started to strip it but then decided it was too difficult for them and gave up.

It looked pretty rough. After sitting in the house for a few months untouched I was thinking about just taking it to goodwill. While Geoff was in Houston for work I came up with the idea of using it as his nightstand in the master bedroom. Refinishing it would be a kind of birthday gift.

So I decided to take it completely apart and sand it down. I am really glad I did, this made it so much easier to work with. I sanded, cleaned and applied 3 layers of polyurethane to all the pieces.

The whole project took me about 3 weeks, working periodically at night. It should have only taken me a few days, but I was also repainting the master bedroom and all the trim in the house white (more on that later). I was a little busy trying to get all this all done but it was worth the effort.

It has been a perfect nightstand.

I have to admit that I am a little jealous of his new nightstand. It looks so great! I have about 5 other furniture projects left, this was a great start. 

Jewelry Organizer

Last year, I did a lot of projects and never blogged about them. No surprise to me. I just wanted my projects done and would move onto the next one. Or maybe I am just lazy about writing posts. Either way I have a few projects that I have finally decided to post about.

A couple of months ago my parents were getting rid of this old picture frame and I really liked the frame. I could not let them just send it to goodwill. so I found a place for it at my house. I decided to turn it into a jewelry organizer.

I took the frame removed the glass, the matte and cardboard backing.

Spray painted the frame a fun teal color. 

Pre-drilled holes for the hooks.

Hand screwed in each hook. This took a bit more time and muscle than I was expecting.

Once I had all the hooks screwed in, I hung the frame in place and organized all my necklaces. 

I have really liked the way it looks and it has been very functional.