First steps to reclaiming my living room

When we moved back into the house we put our old living room furniture down in the basement along with the couch from the sunroom. This left us with no furniture for the living room. If you recall, it's been functioning as my workspace and looked like this

I can't stand it anymore!

It actually doesn't look quite as bad as that now. The old white shelves are gone, the chair is refinished and ensconced down in the basement bathroom, the picture is hung by the basement stairs, and the hall closet doors are in place. We're tripping over the ladder in the front hall now, but hopefully I'll manage to finish painting out there this week and then we can put that away, too. Along with all those cans of paint.

So the last big hurdle to reclaiming my living room is this dresser that I got from a neighbour who was throwing it out.

 It's solid wood inside and out. It's in pretty rough shape, but there's nothing wrong with it that a little elbow grease can't fix.

It has beautiful details on the bottom of the front and the legs.

This weekend I put in a couple of hours sanding it down. Since I planned to paint it, I didn't have to get through all the stain, but it needed a fair amount of elbow grease to remove all of the flaky finish. After I finished sanding I gave it a coat of primer. I always use Para SuperStick because it's heavy duty and works for oil to latex conversion. For some insane reason, when we moved into the house we painted through with all oil-based paint.

It's amazing how even a coat of white primer is enough to bring out the detail on the bottom of the dresser that was overlooked when it was a dingy wood finish.

Then it was on to a coat of paint. At Christmas time last year I redid Cal's room, and painted his current dresser (which this one will replace) and desk bright red. I love how cheery it makes his room look, so I decided to paint this the same colour.

 Two more coats to go, and then the dresser can be moved up into Cal's room. I repainted the pulls on his old dresser like the ones found in this Etsy shop, so I'll swap those for the ones that used to be on this dresser. I have a bit of work to do on them as they got banged around when we had all the furniture stacked in his room this summer.

I can hardly wait to get this dresser done, and my living room cleared of all the construction debris. We planned to order new furniture right away, but we've been so busy with work, house, and kids that we haven't had a chance to shop. And since both of us are submitting grants in March, it's unlikely that we'll have much time before then. So the old furniture will be brought up from the basement and we'll live with it a little longer. It's sure going to beat what I've been living with for the past two months!

Cooking with Cal - Pepperoni rolls

Our furnace conked out yesterday, and the furnace guy was supposed to come after he finished the job he was on. Unfortunately, he didn't finish until 1:30 in the morning. So things are a little chilly around here this morning.

What's a girl to do? Turn on the oven and start baking, of course!

Whenever I start to bake, my little kitchen buddy joins me. This boy loves to eat, but he loves to help cook too.

We decided to make pepperoni rolls. We first had these in West Virginia, where they're the state specialty. There's a whole website dedicated to them here. I chose a recipe and we got to work.

And the finished product was, how shall I put it? A little like a brick? They're tasty enough, but you could use them to bludgeon someone to death. Not that I have that on my mind....

We also whipped up some brownies and I have two loaves of whole wheat bread ready to go in the oven. The kitchen is nice and cozy now, even without the furnace.

I hope the furnace gets fixed today. It's not supposed to be terribly cold this weekend, but I'm not sure how much of this my waistline can take!

Post edited to add that the bread was by far the best whole wheat that I've ever made. The recipe can be found here.

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!