Chair Rail, Yes It's DIY!

Before I get started telling you guys all about our latest DIY project, I want to share a quick "before" picture with you. That way, at the end of the post, you can really appreciate what a difference a little bit of DIY-TLC can make in a single room.

 

This is one of the two back bedrooms in our house. Please ignore all of the crap that the seller never bothered cleaning up, and try to concentrate on how boring and ugly the room is.

The right-side "purple" bedroom

When we first saw the house, we had to look past how cluttered and boring everything was to see the true potential of the spaces. We knew right away that we wanted the house, but we also knew that it was going to take some work to really make the spaces look unique and beautiful. Paint and blinds helped, but there was more to be done.

Before we had the house painted, we decided that we wanted to have the two back bedrooms multi-colored, and that we would use a chair-rail to split up the walls. So we picked out colors we thought would look nice together, marked a level pencil-line in each room (with the help of a laser-level gifted to us by my husband's best friend), and told the painter to have at it.
Then, we crossed our fingers and hopped to hell it wouldn't look too weird and messed up. But when we finally saw the results, we couldn't have been happier. It looked amazing!

The left-side "Blue" bedroom

But wait, you say. You had the house painted professionally? That's not DIY! Well, you're right, we didn't DIO. But there's a reason for that. The house needed to get painted before we could move in, and we were on a fairly strict time-line. We needed to be out of our apartment by July 31st, and neither of us really had the time to dedicate to painting. Besides, the professional that we hired not only did the painting, but all of the prep-work too. You know, patching and sanding and mudding and all of that not-so-fun stuff. I was very happy that we hired this particular job out (even though I originally wanted to DIO), and he did an amazing job. As you can see.

I know this blog is about DIY though, and I promise, we're getting to that point. Okay, now that the paint was on the walls, it was time to put up the chair-rail, and at this point, we were committed to the project. Unless we wanted to have that lovely white gap showing between the paint-colors... Uh no. So we picked up some chair-rail, and got started. Te chair-rail was actually a gift from my uncle, a contractor, who had some left-over from a job he had done recently. He was even nice enough to drive it over to our house, since the 16ft lengths wouldn't exactly fit into either of our cars.

Our first priority was getting that stuff cut down to size, so we took some careful measurements, and got started cutting. It was a little tricky, because we had some odd angles to account for, and ended up having to cut some really tiny pieces to fit our unique space. My advise? If you've never done chair-rail before, try to start in a room that's pretty much square, since you're already going to have to cut mitered corners, and compound angles are just going to be confusing at first. We started in the purple bedroom, which was more or less sqaure.

Once we had all of those pieces cut and dry-fitted (we held them up on the walls together to make sure that they would pretty much fit), we moved onto the blue bedroom. It was trickier, but eventually we got everything cut and ready to paint.

See all those tiny pieces?

We then laid everything out in the garage, where it could be painted and dry undisturbed. It's really nice to have spaces (like the garage) to work in. It's a nice change from painting things out on our 3rd floor balcony, and hoping that we didn't drip on the neighbors!

We had a lot of left-over paint from doing the house, and the chair-rail got one coat (it was pre-primed) of the same color that all of our trim was painted. This way everything will be matchey-matchey. Now all that was left to do was to attach it to the wall. In exactly the right spot. And have it all be level, and pretty... No big deal, right? Right...

Out comes the laser-level again, this time to line up exactly where we want the top of the chair-rail to go. We didn't need to mark the wall, since the laser line was plainly visible, and we could just line the top of the rail up with that. Then I held things in place while my husband came along with the nail-gun and did his thing. A few times, I was even brave enough to try my hand at using the nail-gun!

The trickiest bits were those tiny weird corner-pieces, and when it came time to figure them out I was very glad that we got a chance to practice on the big squared corners in the purple room. Don't know that we would have been able to get everything sorted otherwise. But we did, and everything ended up on the wall more or less where it was supposed to go.

We did end up having to fill a couple of gaps, where small pieces didn't quite meet-up. But that's what caulking is for. And to be honest, we had to caulk anyway, to cover-up the nail holes.

And really, that was it! Chair-rail, easy DIY. Okay, maybe not easy, but totally DIY. I promise you, if we could do this, you can do this. It just takes a little bit of patience, and the willingness to end up with something that doesn't necessarily look 100% professional. Because guess what? It's not. You did it yourself! And it'll look beautiful:

Adventures in Grape-Squishing

Hey, remember last time, when I mentioned that we'd been grape-squishing? Well, now I'm going to tell you guys all about it.

It all started a few Fridays ago, when my in-laws went to a pick-your-own-vineyard and came home with 165 lbs. of grapes. Yes, 1-6-5. That's... a lot of grapes. So what were we to do with all of those grapes? Make wine, of course.
My in-laws have been making wine longer than I've been a part of the family (which, admittedly isn't that long, but still, it's traditional at this point). Every fall they acquire grapes, squish the juice out, and let it ferment into something alcoholic and delicious.

For the last several years, this squishing has taken place in their basement. The set-up was... precarious at best. There was a car-jack involved, and a cross-beam named Roderick that butted up against the ceiling... and yeah, it wasn't good.
So last year, my husband and I built them a wine-press. A real wine-press. Based off of the design of a commercial wine-press that a friend of theirs had purchased for lots of $$.

okay... so we're still using a car-jack.

The basic design is simple. There's a wooden frame that supports a car-jack, that holds the actual press. Inside the big green bucket is another (Home Depot) bucket with lots of holes drilled into it. Grapes go in the inside bucket, pressure is applied and juice comes out the bottom. The big green bucket has a spigot installed in the side so that the juice can be moved to yet another bucket. You can't make wine without a lot of buckets, apparently.

Okay, so once you've got your press all set up, you add grapes. 165 lbs. of them if you've got!

All the classiest vintners use kitchen pots.

Then, like I said, it's time to squeeze. We made a set of inter-locking pegs that would fit between the car-jack and the grapes so that we could continue to add pressure even as the grapes got squished down. Once your pegs are in place, you squeeze.

Here you can see our peg system in action.

I wanted to cut dovetails on the pegs but... meh, you can't always get what you want. What comes next? Well, uh, more squeezing. And then? Even more squeezing. If you've got a lot of grapes (and we do), you're going to have to do a lot of squeezing. We did about 2 batches of white grapes, and another 2-3 batches of red grapes. If you've got a spigot installed into the side of your big green bucket (which I highly recommend), your grape-juice can pour right out into its permanent home. In our case, some fancy food-grade buckets which will house the grape-juice while it ferments.

Happy little grape-juice

All there is left to do is ferment your grape-juice and make it into delicious delicious wine. But that, boys and girls, is another show.

What do you do with the left-over grape mash? It composts really really well, so go ahead and dump it into your compost heap... if that is, you don't mind a massive fruit-fly infestation. If you're not a fan of fruit flies, then you're probably going to want to throw the mash out. Sorry.
And speaking of flying pests, if you're squishing grapes outside over the summer (or even in the early fall), be prepared to entertain some of these guys:

Yes, that's a yellow-jacket, and yes, there were a lot of them.

I think that about wraps things up for today. We had a lot of fun grape-squishing, and in about a year (give or take a few months) we'll have some wine! Hey, I never said this was a quick process. Alright, stay tuned next time for our October installment of Librarian's Corner. What am I going to be reading/reviewing this month? Who knows! I sure don't! So come back on the 21st and find out!

Happy Squishing!

We (finally) Made a Table!

So, remember waaaay back in April, when I said that we were going to be making ourselves a kitchen table? Well, we finally finished it! And yes, it's really taken us 5 months to finish it... But you don't want to hear a lot of excuses about how we're both super busy (two jobs, blah blah blah, grad-school, blah blah blah), or how we don't have our own space to do wood-working, or anything like that. You guys just want to see pictures, am I right? So, let's get to it.

We made Ana White's Sewing Table to be used as a kitchen table in our tiny apartment kitchen. We thought it would be perfect because the table has two leaves that can be folded down (if we need more floor space), or popped open to eat at (if we need more surface area). Considering we have a fairly small kitchen, I figured this would be the perfect multi-use table. And I was right.

 Here you can see the table open and shut. See how much space I have/save?

 The whole project started with one full-sheet of plywood that we had cut down at the lumber yard.

Yes, I know our plywood isn't the best quality. I'm okay with that.

We then cut it down further to make the pieces that would make up the center frame of the table. Once those pieces were cut, we assembled them.

This is half of the middle of the table...

And that's where we ran into some problems. Things didn't quite... come together the right way. I blame our crappy table-saw. We measured carefully and sanded well, but we were off a bit, and nothing was quite square when we put it all together. Grr. No worries though, we fixed it up with our super-sophisticated clamping system.

A come-along and 2 50lbs bags of flour.

Once we had everything squared away (ha, see what I did there?), it was time to paint. We had gone back and forth on the paint color a few times, but finally settled on a deep, rich, TARDIS-like blue that made us both happy.

For the painting, we were able to bring our table home and paint out-side on our balcony, so things progressed a little more quickly. Once all of the pieces were painted, we attached the leaves with cheap hinges we picked up at the local big-box hardware store.

I have to admit that it did take us about a month between assembling and painting the table until we got around to making the legs. I don't know why, because this turned out to be the simplest step in the whole process, but we took our time getting to it.
Once we finally did make the legs though, we just attached them to the leaves with more cheap hinges and we were pretty much done.

Oh, except for attaching castors to the bottom of the table so that it can easily be rolled around our kitchen (we've got linoleum).

At that point, all that was left to do was to put some of our bowls and cook-books into the storage compartments, and have breakfast!

Okay, that might have been dinner, but you know what I mean.

I love my kitchen table! It's got storage, so I can keep all of my cook-books right in the kitchen, and I can also store some of my smaller kitchen appliances that I don't use very often (like the ice-cream maker and the crock-pot), so that they don't take up much needed counter space.
I also love that it's blue, which is my favorite color.
And most of all, I love that we made it ourselves! And it was easy.

If I could start the whole project again, would I do anything differently?
    Yes, I would invest in a better quality plywood. We picked up a sheet of construction plywood for $25. With a lot of sanding and a coat of paint, it looks beautiful. But for $25 more, I would get Oak or Maple plywood next time and save myself a lot of sanding.




So that's it, our much awaited kitchen-table (at least, I've been waiting for it for a long time). What's next, you ask? That's a good question, I say. I don't know what's next. Right now we're shopping for some nice kitchen chairs, but I don't think we're going to make them.
I'm not sure what our next wood-working project will be, but I'm open to suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments, and let me know what you think we should make!

Project Sunday 4-6-14

We had such an intense Project Sunday this week that I haven't even had a chance to write about it until now, but here we go!

Woo! Project Sunday! We started off the day with a trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see their amazing special exhibit Samurai: Beyond the Sword, which was amazing! And if you're interested in checking it out you can find all of the information right here! I don't have any photos (because you're not allowed to take any in the special exhibit space), so if you guys are curious, you'll just have to see the show for yourself! But I did get a few quick pix of the mummy, who's finally back on exhibit!

Horus

While the DIA was fun, it wasn't really much of a project, but don't worry we did plenty of that! After the museum we stopped at home to pick up our jig-saw and headed out to my parents house to do some chair-repair (doesn't that just sound cool?).

Lets see if you can spot the problem here:

Yeah... My parents have had the same kitchen table and chairs for over 15 years now. They've held up pretty well, but every once in a while, something needs to get fixed. This time it was one of the chairs that had broken, cracked in two places. But luckily, it was a pretty easy fix, only requiring a total of four trips to the local home-improvement store.... That was sarcasm.

No, I'm kidding. Well, we did take four trips (total) to Home Depot and Lowe's, but it really was an easy fix. We simply took the broken particle-board base out of the chair, and made a new one. All we needed was a jig-saw, a hammer-tacker and a pencil. And well, a drill didn't hurt.

Then we just put everything back together! Easy and quick. Well, maybe not so quick because we kept getting distracted by other little projects that needed doing around my parent's house. Like, re-stringing some blinds that had broken, and re-attaching some slats that had come off of the deck's built-in bench... When my husband and I show up with a box of tools, my parents can always find something that needs fixing or replacing. It's one of the things we love about them.

After the repair work, my parents treated us to dinner at our favorite pizza place. We were supposed to do some cleaning and straightening when we got home, but we were just too pooped. It was a busy day, with lots of running around, and lots of fun. And I got to use a jig-saw for the first time (it was fun!).

So that's it, our Project Sunday in a nutshell. Oh yeah, and apparently we've been hired to re-do the floor in my parent's garage? Stay tuned!



How about you guys? Did ya'll do anything fun and exciting for your Project Sunday? Or did you have a relaxing weekend? Tell me all about it in the comments!

Oh Yeah, We Built Night-Stands!

So, remember that SUPER SECRECT project I've been babbling on about for ages now? Well, it's done! They're all done! What are they you ask? Why, night-stands, of course!



 

This one's mine :)

Now, I don't have a picture of it (I should, really) but up until now I've been using an empty box as a night-stand, and I cannot tell you how many times I've knocked the damn thing over trying to turn my alarm off and had all of my things go flying. Grr. Very frustrating.
So  way back in December my husband and I decided to rectify this grievous error by making ourselves a pair of matching custom night-stands. Easy, right?

Well it was actually pretty darned easy, just a bit time consuming, but I'll get to that later. In the mean time, let me should you how we made that gorgeous night-stand from this pile of wood:

 

 

Now we absolutely have to give credit where credit is due. The original plans for this night-stand come from the amazing and talented Ana White. The night-stands are adapted from her Narrow Cottage End Table plans. But wait, there's more credit to be distributed.

When I first had the idea to build our own night-stands, I immediately consulted with my personal friend, Google. And he recommended a blog called Attempts At Domestication, where they were hard at working building their own night-stands. They had already done the hard work of adjusting Ana's plans to fit a night-stand instead of an end-table, and as you can see we borrowed extensively from their design. (We adjusted the height and such, but really... we're thieves, plain and simple). We also took to heart their suggestion of investing in a pocket jig and well, we couldn't have made this project without it, so thanks!

Okay, now back to our project. We had a pile of wood all cut and ready to go... so what to do net? Assembly, of course! We busted out or brand new Kreg Pocket-Hole Jig (at ~ $40, easily the most expensive part of the project, but totally worth it), and got to work!

First up, we put together the pieces that would become the sides of the night-stands. As you might be able to tell from this picture, we opted to make both night-stands at once. This is because we both needed night-stands, and because we're very lazy people. I knew that if we didn't make both at once, that second stand would never get finished.

Ta-Da, sides are assembled!

Next up was to put the entire "base" of the stands together. This includes the sides & back, and the drawers.

 

This involved a lot of clamping, and much use of our (by now) beloved Kreg Jig. It wasn't super easy and seemed to take a lot longer than it actually did, but we eventually got the base of the night-stands fully assembled.

We opted not to go the drawer-slide route, and instead just tacked a piece of scrap plywood onto the bottom of the stand to serve as a drawer runner. It actually worked pretty well (after a coat or two of some candle-wax) and was certainly easier. Considering how small our drawers are, and the fact that so far I've just got my kindle and my glassed in mine, I'm pretty happy with that decision.

The next step (that we actually did first, shhh!) was to put together the tops. Again, our Kreg Jig was invaluable here. It allowed us to assemble boards flush to one another without any screws or nails showing at all.

Look Ma, no screws! Well, none that you can see at least.

I realize that for some reason, I don't have a single picture of us assembling the drawers themselves. Weird, because I'm usually fairly obsessive about documenting every step, but what can you do. I promise you that we did in fact build drawers. Here, you can see them in this picture:

 

There's everything drying off in our storage space after receiving a first coat of paint/stain.
Now I should mention that one of the reasons that this project took us ~3 months to finish is the fact that we don't have a good work space in our apartment. My husband has a nice "shop" area, but it's at his parent's house. Which meant schlepping over there whenever we wanted to work on these. Add in my husband's full time job, my two part-time jobs and the fact that we had a VERY cold and snowy couple of months, and well... you can see how things just took a bit longer than we were expecting.
So when it was finally time to paint and stain, we jumped at the chance to take our night-stands home and work on them (we've got a small balcony and a drop-cloth, perfect for this task).



Our beautiful stained night-stands :)

The whole project took a bit longer than we wanted, but the cost came in at about ~$75, and that's for both night-stands. I actually have a break-down of how much we spent on each block of wood, but I don't want to bore you more than I already have. The Kreg Jig was ~ $40 and worth every penny. And I didn't document this very well, but I think that we spent about $20 on paint, stain and polyurethane. All in all, a pretty cheap project, and certainly a lot cheaper than buying night-stands at a place like Art Van (where we got our amazing, but very expensive bed).

So that's about it, our night-stands. We're thrilled to have them, and we both had so much fun making them that we're already onto the next project! I won't keep you guys in the dark this time though, I'll go ahead and tell you that we're using another Ana White design to make a kitchen table for ourselves, since we uh, still don't have one. So stay tuned for that!



Painted, stained and assembled with matching drawer-knobs.
And don't they look beautiful with our anniversary art hanging over them?

So what have you guys been working on lately? Any cool DIY projects? I'd love to hear all about them in the comments!


And P.S. Go check out www.ana-white.com and www.attemptsatdomestication.com both amazing blogs, very inspiring and well worth the read!

Project Sunday 3-2-14

It's been yet another busy Project Sunday, and so I'm going to keep this very short.

Just wanted to say that our crossbow racks have been made and hung up, and they look fabulous!

And here's a close-up of my husband's crossbow on its new rack:

In case you didn't know, we're a little strange

Happy Project Sunday!