And the winner is.....

Remember this chair that I started to refinish for the basement bathroom? 

 

And I was trying to choose a fabric to cover the seat? The owls had a lot of support. 

They didn't win out. I've been dragging my butt about placing an order with Tonic Living. Tonight after work I went for a run and found myself running past Designer Fabrics down on Queen St. I decided to pop in and look to see if they had anything that I liked.

They had some sort of colourful owl fabric, but it wasn't nearly as cute as the one above. I thought that it was the same as the Tonic Living one, and decided that I didn't like it (partly because the owls were printed on a creamy background, and I wanted white) and should choose something else. So I did. 

Thankfully I had my credit card with me. I always slip it in my pocket when I go for a run so I have some form of ID on me in case I get hit by a car. Or, you know, see something cute in a store window that I just have to buy.

So I picked up a half a yard of material, trotted home, pulled out my staple gun, and lickety-split had a finished chair on my hands.

I love how crisp and clean the the simple graphic pattern is. 

And here it is all folded up. 

Next up, painting the front door. It's starting to stick, probably from the raw wood absorbing moisture. Yikes!!

The hall closet doors

Well, the doors took a lot more time to finish than I expected. Not that the number of hours I worked on them was large, but I seem to have spent a lot of time procrastinating about finishing them. I'm so happy to have them finally hanging where they belong and not kicking around the house like they have been for the past couple of months. I was worried that the glass inserts would get knocked over and broken since they were just leaning against one wall or another.

Because the hallway is only 49" wide and the closet is at the end of it, we knew that narrow double doors would be much more functional than a single wide door. So the search was on. Since we were looking for a non-standard size,  new doors would have to be special ordered. Which seemed to equate to "very pricey".

We made a trip up to The Door Store to see if we could find something old, and really lucked out. The  doors that we found were about 16" wide each, apparently a very unusual size for them to have in stock. The guy at the store told us they had been used as sidelights, but we figured that we could fix them up and hang them as doors. And the best part was that they only cost about a quarter of the price that we were quoted for plain five-panel doors that would match the rest of the doors in the house.

I love the look of them; the glass inserts are really heavy glass with a beveled edge, the doors are made from solid oak and are faced with tiger oak, and they have a little mail slot on one side.

Since they'd been used as sidelights, they had a line of black crud all around the edges so they had to be refinished. Otherwise I would have been happy to just hang them, even though the colour wasn't precisely the same shade as our hardwood floor. I sanded the fronts of the doors down to remove all of the old finish, stained them the same colour as the hardwood floor, and put on three coats of satin finish polyurethane.

I wasn't interested in being able to see into the coat closet, so I had to figure out what to do with the glass. I though about lining it with fabric, but decided to frost it instead. On the weekend I took them out onto the porch and sprayed them with a frosted glass coating made by Excel. It's a special spray paint for glass and was really easy to apply. I put on about four coats before the can ran dry.

The glass is still a little more transparent that I would like, but it's does a pretty good job blocking colour from coats showing through the windows. After I finished the glass I had to reinstall it in the doors. When we bought them the windows were held in by a few flimsy nails, but I wanted to make sure that they were good and secure.

I got out my handy-dandy chop saw and cut quarter round to fit the inside of the window frame. A few nails (that I held my breath while hammering as I was terrified I would hit the glass and shatter it) and the windows were in. The quarter round gives them a good secure fit, but still allows a little bit of movement in case the wood flexes or swells with humidity in the summer.

All that was left was to wrestle them into place. I tried to get them up myself but it was impossible 'cause they're so heavy, so I had to wait for muscles to get home from taking Matthew to hockey practice (did I mention he plays hockey five or six times a week?).

I love how they look in place. It reminds me of the old style wooden telephone booths - like the ones used by the Beetles in A Hard Day's Night.

I still need to figure out handles for them. The doors fit snugly together and stay closed so we don't need anything that latches. I can't decide if I should put on round door handles, or small pulls, or glass knobs, or ......  Any suggestions?

The cabinets are in

It was an action filled weekend. I finished staining and varathaning the doors for the front hall closet and I frosted the glass windows. I also made a trip to our local Home Hardware and picked up  trim to hold the windows in place. When we bought the doors, the windows were held in only by a few nails. It made it nice and easy to pop the windows out to work on them, but it was definitely not secure enough for daily use. I'm hoping to get the doors back up on the closet tonight, so maybe I'll have some some pictures tomorrow.

And we finished the cabinets in the basement! I haven't managed to put anything away in them yet, but they're all ready to go. On Saturday, between hockey games, Alan helped me hang the wall cabinets. With a lot of sweat (and a little swearing) we went from this

to this. It may not look like much, but those suckers are heavy. And really tricky to position without snapping the tiny little, flimsy, plastic Ikea legs into pieces.

By this point it was about 10:30, the children were still underfoot, and we'd both had enough. We decided to call it a night and get the kids to bed.

First thing Sunday morning I got back at it, and unpacked all the cabinet doors and hardware. It was no small job just to get the packaging all opened and neatly disposed of. Once we started putting the doors in place, we realized that we'd bolted the cabinets together through the holes we needed to put the door hinges in. Grrr!! I hate doing things twice.

Back out came the drill, and we moved all the bolts up or down one hole to make way for the hinges. And just to have some photographic evidence that Alan really can wield a power tool (although in our house it's usually me doing the dirty work) I snapped a shot of him in action.

It was about this point that it struck me that I had forgotten to purchase handles for the doors.

So off I trotted to Home Hardware again. Thank goodness they're only a few blocks away - I seem to end up making at least two trips there every weekend. Maybe if they weren't so close I would be more organized. Ha! Who am I trying to fool. I'd just end up wasting even more time on the same number of trips. 

Anyway, I found some handles that I like well enough. The selection was small, but I really wanted to get the cabinets all finished, and it is only a basement, after all. Besides using my treadmill or getting something from the freezer, I don't plan on being in this room at all.

So here are the after shots - the light isn't great down there, and the room is narrow so it's hard to get a good shot. The grey post at the end of the run of cabinets supports the new beam we put in on the main floor when we took out the wall separating the old living room and hallway.

The white cabinet doors really brighten things up down there, and I'm so excited to have a lot of nice, clean storage to keep all the stuff that won't fit into my kitchen. Like my big pots, all my canning supplies, and the ginormous boxes of cereal that I buy from Costco to keep my kids fed. It's scary how they can consume three big bowls of cereal every morning. I have plenty of space to store it all now!

I haven't seen 4 am for years

Until today, that is.

Cal woke up just before 4, and spent the next three hours throwing up. Poor bub. It's now lunchtime and this is what I walked into the kitchen to see

While a 4 am wake-up is not ideal, it sure lets you get a lot done in the day.

Last night we dragged the Ikea cabinets down to the basement and I assembled the cabinet frames. I discovered that I didn't have the proper hardware to actually install them, though. Thinking I would save time, I ordered the cabinets online, and while they included the doors and door hardware, they didn't include the legs for the pantries, or the hanging rail for the uppers. So irritating.

This morning I sent Matthew and Alan out to Ikea  after Matthew's hockey game. I spent this time sanding the doors for the front hall closet. I took off all the old finish, but didn't bother sanding down far enough to get rid of all of the old stain as it was taking  forever. I'm using the same stain that we have on the hardwood floor, which is darker than the doors are presently stained, so it doesn't really matter.

Hopefully I can get a coat of stain on them this afternoon and then a couple of coats of varathane between tonight and tomorrow.

And now I'm off to tackle hanging the cabinets in the basement. Wish me luck!

A weekend with Allen

Nope, not that Alan.

I'm going to be spending this weekend with a handy little Allen key. This just arrived from Ikea.

Thank goodness for the staging area in the living room. I put a couple of sheets of masonite that the contractors had to protect the kitchen floor down, and I've been using it to work on so I don't have to worry about scratching the new hardwood. It served it's purpose well this afternoon with the delivery guys dragging the stuff across the soggy boulevard and tromping into the house with their muddy boots.

These are kitchen cabinets that are going in the basement in the play area. We have our extra fridge and deep freeze down there now, but have been using the small back room for storage. I want to use that room for my work room (you know, so I can actually buy living room furniture and have someplace to put it), so I needed to gain some storage somewhere else.

I ordered cabinets to go above the fridge and freezer, and then two deep pantries to go alongside them. Here's a shot of the current set up - the stairs coming down into the basement are behind the wall, and the door you can see off to the left is the bathroom. The bulkhead along the ceiling holds the main trunk from the furnace that distributes the heat to most of the house.

We planned this part out well - there are actually separate circuits for the fridge and freezer so we don't have any flickering lights when they cycle on and off!

And here's a shot from the other direction. 

The floors in this part of the basement are still just bare concrete. I'm not sure when (if) we'll finish them. We hadn't actually planned to finish this area of the basement at all, but then figured we may as well do it while the drywall dust was still flying.

In the end, I'm happy we decided to do it. We insulated the walls and ceiling, so there's decent noise blocking when the kids are playing downstairs. We also moved the big TV and the Wii down to allow us to enjoy a quieter main floor.

Anyway, I better get back to my real job so I can finish it up and then get started on assembling the cabinets. I hope by the end of the weekend I'll have some great after shots!

A little bit of Canadiana

This is what my living room looks like. We don't have any furniture in it as we put all our old living room furniture down in the basement rec room when we moved back into the house. And that's where it's going to stay since it was looking a little worse for wear.

So right now the living room is acting as a staging area for a lot of the home improvement stuff. The antique doors for the closet in the main entryway are leaning against the wall on the right waiting to be refinished, and the glass inserts for the doors are over on the left, waiting to be frosted. I think that they'll be my weekend project. 

But this week I've been working on this little folding chair that I bought at auction many years ago. It was in pretty rough shape, and it's  been hanging around in one of the closets on the third floor for almost a decade waiting for me to do something with it. I figured it was time. 

  

 

I was curious about the origins of the chair, so I did a little internet research.  Hourd & Company was a furniture manufacturer in London, Ontario in the early to mid 1900's. They manufactured folding tables and chairs and crokinole boards (image from here). 

It was recently discovered that Glenn Gould spent his entire career using a Hourd chair that his father modified for him. You can read about it here. This is the Gould chair and it's now on display in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre.

You can buy a mint condition vintage Hourd & Company chair of the same style as the Glenn Gould one on eBay right now for $10,000. No kidding. Here's the ad.

Since my style of chair has no Glenn Gould cachet, and apparently very little value (I found a set of four that sold at auction for $20 and I think that I payed under $10 for mine), I decided to go ahead and give it a complete makeover. A few of the joints were wiggly, so I used wood glue to firm them up. I then gave it a good sanding, a coat of primer, and three coats of Para Whitewash White in an alkyd so that it would wear well. 

And here it is all cleaned up.

Now I just need to find some fabric to cover the seat. I plan to put it in the bathroom in the basement, and I'd love to get some really bright, fun fabric to use.

I've been browsing the Tonic Living website. As you can see, I'd like to get something with an aqua tone in it to coordinate with the glass tiles in the shower.

I'm kind of partial to the owls. What do you guys think?

Glad it wasn't us!

I was a little disappointed this morning when Hurricane Sandy seemed to have died out and there was blue sky peeking through the clouds. I was kind of hoping for a storm-day to spend at home with the kids.

The wind in the night was sure exciting, though. At one point I was woken by a big crash and metal crunching, and got out of bed to check if it was one of the limbs overhanging our front porch. The huge, 100+ year old maples that line our street are getting quite straggly, and branches coming down in storms are a common occurrence. I couldn't see anything on the street and the limbs overhanging our house were all fine so I just went back to bed.

This morning, when we left for school, we discovered this in front of our next-door neighbour's house.

Miraculously, the hydro wires weren't pulled down and there didn't seem to be any damage to either roof. The ugly little black iron fence bore the brunt of the damage - but that's no big loss.

And now the kids appreciate why I make them scurry down the street on very windy days!