Vintage Chair Makeover: Before & After

Oh, hey, blog. It’s been a while. We have a huge list of reasons we haven’t updated in a while.

• Roadtrip to Minneapolis
• Sinus infection
• Working a ton
• The flu
• A visit from Bradley’s mom
• Another sinus infection
• The flu again

We’ve been bad bloggers, but we know you’ll forgive us when you see what we have to offer you in return:

A concerned beagle in a turtleneck. You’re welcome, internet.

Bradley’s still getting over the flu, but he was pretty adamant about getting some work done over the weekend. We’ve been dying to wrap up this project for a while, and finally got everything together to get it done.

Way back in April, we found these two 1950s chairs in a thrift store:

It’s OK, you can say it: they’re fugly. But if you look past the orangey-brown wood and blue pleather, they’re downright sexy. At $6 a pop, we couldn’t pass them up. We nabbed both chairs and started tearing them apart right away (you can read the details here).

We stripped the chairs and did a happy dance when we found out they’re solid walnut. We decided to stain them a rich espresso to bring out the beauty of the wood. (Original post here.)

We found out at this point that the chairs were selling for way more than the $12 we spent on them. They were on eBay and etsy for as much as $300. Per. Chair. According to the stamp on the chair, they were made in the ’40s or ’50s by a pretty well-known furniture company from New York. And they’re in amazing condition — the chairs themselves are rock solid once you get past the ugliness.

We decided not to upholster them ourselves and risk damaging the chairs. Instead, we splurged on some that delicious brown calfskin pictured above. Mmmph. It’s so soft and lovely, we wanted to rub our faces in it. We splurged and spent $150 a half-skin. For anyone keeping track, our tab is up to $162.

This is where our little makeover came to a stall. Our upholsterer blew us off for months. Our project is small peanuts compared to the projects he usually gets, so we were on the back burner all summer long. Boo! Hiss! Last week, he finally called us back and we picked up our freshly upholstered cushions.

Bradley assembled the seats, while I squealed with delight at how the brown calfskin looks with the brown stain.

Ooh la la. It’s love.

The upholstery set us back 220 bones. Ouch. We weren’t expecting such a big bill, but this is the first time we’ve had something upholstered. We were happy not having to DIY in this case because we were terrified we’d screw up that gorgeous leather. Not brave enough for that one yet, peeps.

One thing that kinda bummed us out:

The upholsterer kinda scratched up the backs of the chairs. Blurgh. He left some pretty big gouges and messed up the stain in some parts. We were able to touch up the stain easily. The gouges are, unfortunately, permanent. We’d have to completely strip and re-stain everything, and we’re not willing to do that now that the leather is on.

Luckily, they’re not really visible when the cushion is on the chair.

Bradley tested out the chairs and gave them his seal of approval:

He flipped it around and gave it the old Vanna White treatment:

Ooooh. Aaaaah. We love how they turned out. The color of the calfskin gives the chairs such a vintage vibe.

Baby got back.

Baby got front, too.

We did have one issue that we’re not happy about:

It turns out the leather shop was wrong when they told us this leather was good for upholstering. It’s really, really thick and doesn’t have any stretch to it. The upholsterer didn’t realize this until he started working on the back cushion. The leather is really tight across the back and has a couple of big wrinkles in it.

We were a little bummed at first, but it’s not a dealbreaker for us. The leather will stretch a little with use, and it’ll look great as it ages. With the warm colors and the clean lines, we’re still totally smitten:

Total cost for this makeover? $382 for the chairs, leather and upholstery. We figure about $10 for the stain, stain pad and polyacrylic. So we’re coming in at $196 per chair. Not super cheap, but not crazy-expensive either for a solid walnut chair covered in calfskin.

What do you think? And, more importantly, where do you think we should put these puppies? Do you think we should keep them together or split em up? Right now both chairs are living in our guest bedroom. We’re not sure where they’ll end up, but we’re open to suggestions.

Front Door Facelift

Let’s talk about our front door. We can see it from the dining room:

And, man, it’s not pretty. At least not from the outside:

Gross, right? That’s a screen door with a net to keep bugs out — it covers up the gorgeous solid wood doors that are on the inside. But that’s not the only problem we have with our front entrance.

Someone tried to stop drafts from creeping in through the 130-year-old doors with weatherstripping foam and felt. Only they did it wrong. The wood doors barely close — we have to push them in and quickly lock the doors before they pop back out.

And, in installing the storm door, the pretty wood details were covered up:

We also hate how the storm door has basically become a home for creepy-crawlies:

We found at least 5 spiders hanging out in the doorway. Blurgh! And did we mention the dust?

No? Well feast your eyes, friends:

It’s a good thing we have 3 entrances to the house, because if we invited people in through this doorway, nobody would ever visit. Ever. And we’d probably never leave either.

Despite all the hideousness, our front door has a lot of redeeming qualities. Here’s what one of the two doors looks like when taken off its hinges:

Bradley looks so tiny standing in front of it…and he’s 5’11″.

Yup. Their size alone makes these doors awesome. And check out this doorknob:

It came with a skeleton key, but we accidentally broke it while trying to jam the door closed, Incredible Hulk style. Whoops. For the record, it’s really, really hard to find a replacement for an ancient skeleton key. Good thing we’re updating the locks anyway.

But before we get to that, we decided to permanently remove the storm door.

We were so geeked to see thing thing go. Especially when we started seeing the woodwork that had been hidden before:

Ooh la la, so purdy! One side was completely in tact. The other side:

…not so much. We were so bummed when we saw this.

To fit the stupid storm door on, someone chipped away some of the original woodwork. Luckily, we think it’s salvageable. With some creative use of wood putty, we think we can reshape the missing areas.

Once the screen door was gone, we vacuumed up all the dust and cobwebs. Then we insulated the gap between the inside of the house and the outside of the house with Great Stuff.

That grey thing Bradley’s standing on? That’s a solid piece of stone. It needs a little cleanup work, but it’s in great shape otherwise. It’s going to be beautiful some day. Not today, though. We have priorities.

Here’s Bradley putting the cast iron plate back in place:

Don’t be fooled — he makes it look easy, but that sucker is SUPER heavy. While Bradley worked on adding insulation, I worked on removing insulation:

I used a paint scraper to remove all of the foam weather strips from around the doorway. They were keeping the doors from closing properly. With the strips removed, the doors open and close easily. We’ll go back in and install new weather strips that don’t interfere with the doors opening and closing.

We had to shim the cast iron plate to make it level:

By shimming it, we raised the metal plate a smidge…and the doors wouldn’t close at all. Not even a little. Our next order of business was to make the door fit properly.

We took the doors off their hinges, posed for the pictures we showed earlier, and then used a circular saw to shave 1/8th of an inch from the bottom of both doors:

And here’s the fun part: when Bradley started sawing, the wood released an unmistakeable smell that caught us totally by surprise. Walnut. These doors are solid walnut. We stopped the saw and had a mini freakout right there on the street.

To get an idea of why we were so geeked, check out the price tag on these solid walnut exterior doors. And those are standard sized doors. Ours are way bigger, way older, and — if we do say so ourselves — way cooler looking. Hence the dancing in the streets.

While we had our walnut beauties off their hinges, we did a few minor repairs on the locking mechanism.

We also lightly polished the brass locks using steel wool:

If you’re a longtime reader, you know we have a serious aversion to brass. Gold metals are not our jam. But this door is an exception. We think the locks and doorknob are badass in brass and we’re leaving them that way. Here’s what the doorknob looked like before we scrubbed it with steel wool:

It’s pretty grimy looking, with a dingy green color due to aging. And here’s how it looks after we polished the raised surfaces:

Two tone! All of the raised edges are shiny orangish brass, and everything recessed is still greenish-greyish old brass. For comparison’s sake, here’s how the doorknob looks next to an oil-rubbed bronze lock:

We’re in love.

Our last task for the day was to silicone the spot between the cast iron plate and the stone.

We used black silicone so it’s not visible, but it will still keep water and dirt from creeping under the cast iron plate and into our basement.

It feels like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Whee! Here we go. This is what our front door looked like before:

And this is what it looks like after:

BOOM. Magic happened.

We’re not done working on the front door. We have some big plans to make this entrance even better:

• We’re going to replace the old glass with new double-pane glass.
• We’re going to paint the outside of the door a bold color. We have it picked out already, but we probably won’t paint until spring.
• We’re going raw on the inside. We’ll sand the inside of the doors to reveal all that walnut prettiness.

We’re already loving the way the doorway is letting more light into our dark hallway. It’s only going to get better from here. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. We’re going to start ripping apart our fugly kitchen this weekend. But before we do, we’ll share our before pictures. Warning: it’s gnarly looking. Stay tuned!

Painting the Dining Room

We haven’t been posting much because we’ve been working on the dining room nonstop. We’re really stoked to start demolishing rooms again — our favorite part of renovating! — so we’re hustling to get the dining room finished. Bradley finished plastering on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, we whipped out our paint brushes and rollers.

In case anyone’s wondering why it took us so long to plaster the walls, it’s because we’ve decided to do smooth, sleek walls rather than textured walls. We had to spend a lot of time making sure our plastering was 100% perfect because we can’t just hide the flaws under stucco or spackle. We also did trimless windows, which means we can’t just hide imperfections under trim. But all the work we put in upfront paid off, because we ended up with walls that are perfectly smooth:

Like a baby’s bottom.

On Saturday morning, we vacuumed all of the walls and floors to make sure no dust was left on anywhere. We scrubbed the brick wall to get rid of any lingering plaster and loose bits of mortar:

We love our raw brick walls, but we hate how much they shed. A few months ago, we tried a brick sealer for the walls upstairs and they’ve completely stopped shedding. We picked up another gallon for the wall downstairs:

What we love about this sealer is that it doesn’t look glossy when dry. It darkens the brick a little, but it doesn’t look like it’s been sealed or painted. And it stops the wall from flaking. Here’s how our brick looked after one coat:

Exactly the same as before, but better. We plan on using it on our concrete sills to protect them from stains.

We spent all day Saturday painting the brick and priming the walls. On Sunday morning, the room was ready for some color:

We went back and forth on a lot of colors for the walls. At one point, there were easily 30 paint chips hanging on the walls. The one we both agreed on was this:

SW6204 Sea Salt is a cool blue-green neutral from Sherwin Williams. We went with a low luster finish — it’s sort of a semi-gloss, but without too much sheen.

Before we decided on the color, we hung a paint chip in the room and checked on it at different times throughout the day. We loved how the color went from a subtle greige in the morning to a calm blue-green in the afternoon, and then finally a more dramatic green at night. We were a little panicky when we looked at the same chip in the Sherwin Williams store and it looked white. But that just goes to show you that paint color really depends on the lighting of the room.

Here’s Bradley getting the paint party started:

And now for the fun part — the before & afters. Remember how fugly this room used to be? No? Feast your eyes on this:

That’s how the same corner looks today. Boom! Not fugly anymore! Here’s the set of doors that lead to the basement (left), the front entrance (middle) and the living room (right):

The most obvious change in that corner is that we got rid of the basement door (we have another entrance outside). Can we talk about how hideous our paint color choice looks next to those orangey-brown doors?

We considered removing the doors completely because we like the open look, but we kind of need them. In the winter, we use the doors to direct heat to rooms that we’re using. For example, if we’re in the living room, we can shut the door to the hallway so the air has to flow into the living room. And when we go to bed, we can open the hall door and shut the living room doors (there are 2) so heat bypasses that room and flows up to the bedrooms.

Instead of getting rid of the doors completely, we’re going to replace them with something much more elegant. The door on the left will be a glass sliding door. The one on the right will be a glass pocket door that tucks away neatly into the wall when not in use.

While we’re on the subject of ugly doors, this is what the dining room entry used to look like:

And this is how it looks with our new door, trimless windows and concrete window sills in place:

We went with a basic door and hardware from Lowe’s. The little window above the door was a custom order from a local glass company (the same one we use to get our custom cut mirrors and glass for frames). It cost about $22.

We love how the crisp white looks next to the sea salt blue. It’s such a happy, beachy color.

We’re really happy with the way our windows turned out. The sills have some plaster residue on them that we need to wash off, but we’re really digging the way the textured concrete looks next to the smooth walls.

Here’s a project that we completely failed to photograph and share on the blog:

Bradley whipped up this cabinet one weekend while I was out of town. This is going to be part of the radiator cover that we’ll make next weekend. Check out the bottom shelf:

Routers are total eyesores, no matter how well-designed they are. So we decided to make a cabinet to hide ours — plugs, wires and all. Bradley built this cabinet with a plug-in on the back. Once we have the door on, we’ll never have to see that tangle of wires again. We can store things in the cabinet that we would use in the dining room but don’t necessarily want to see all the time (our pile of boardgames, for example). Gotta love functional built-ins!

If you want to see some more before pictures of our dining room, check out this post. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. Stay tuned!

DIY Cheat: Concrete Window Sill

Good news, peeps: we’re finishing off the last of our plastering today! We’ll be priming and painting the dining room later this week. We’re actually ahead of schedule right now because we found a shortcut for making our custom concrete window sills. (If you don’t remember those from upstairs, check em out here.)

In order to make concrete sills, you first have to make a mold. Then you mix up the concrete, pour it, thawp out the air bubbles and wait for it to dry. And finally, you clean them up a bit before installing them. We skipped most of those steps and went straight to the clean-and-install part with these babies:

Those are concrete walkway stones for yards and patios. We went to a local nursery and picked up 3 of them for $80. Each one measured 36″ x 24″ and they’re about 2″ thick.

These slabs are much more textured than ours because they were made to mimic stone:

We went for a super smooth, velvety finish in our DIY version. We’re OK with not having matchy-matchy sills throughout the house if it’s something interesting.

Another big difference between our DIY version and these pre-made slabs is the lack of rebar support. The pre-made slabs don’t have rebar in them, so they’re more fragile than then ones we made. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Since there’s no rebar, we can cut these suckers down to whatever size we want. We just have to be really careful while lifting and moving the slabs because they could easily break if we don’t distribute the weight properly.

We measured out our cuts and drew them on the slab using permanent marker. Then we cut it:

To make our cuts, we used a grinder and a circular saw, both loaded with diamond concrete blades. The slabs are 2″ thick, which means there’s no way we’ll be able to penetrate them with one cut. Instead, we first used the grinder to score the cut.

Then we went over the score line using the circular saw:

It helps keep the dust down if you hose the slab with water once in a while:

We ended up giving each cut 2 passes with the circular saw. The first cut was set so the blade cut one inch deep. the second cut was set so the blade cut two inches deep.

After each slab was cut down to size, we were left with 3 window sills that slid right in:

Each one sticks out a bit, just like the windows upstairs:

And we’re really digging the texture:

We sealed up the cracks between the drywall and the sill with painter’s silicone:

And that’s a wrap: we’re done with the window sills! We saved ourselves about 2 full weekends worth of work with our little shortcut. We also have enough left over to do the window sills for our kitchen, so our $80 spend was stretched to two rooms. Not bad, considering how much time it saved us.

We’ll be back later this week with updates on our dining room. We’re currently duking it out over paint colors, but we’ve narrowed it down to a couple of choices. Stay tuned!

DIY Tree Stump Side Tables

We just realized it’s July 30th. As in, almost August. Which means that summer’s more than half over. Boo! Hiss!! We thought we’d be renovating our kitchen by now, but we’ve had a pretty major setback in the dining room: we have to plaster the walls ourselves. Plastering is the bane of our existence. It’s boring and it takes us way too long to do it. But since our plasterer (who did a fabulous job upstairs) completely blew us off, we’re stuck doing it. Not easy when this is going on outside:

That’s why there haven’t been a ton of updates lately. We would show you a million pictures of ourselves plastering, but they all kinda look like this one:

Also, we’re frowning pretty much the entire time we plaster.

This weekend, we decided to wrap up a way-more-fun-than-plastering project. We finished our tree stump side tables.

This is the kind of project that we live for. You take something that’s essentially garbage and you turn it into something beautiful and functional. We also love that it’s super easy to make, doesn’t cost much and doesn’t require a ton of special tools. Ready for the step-by-step? Us too. Lets go.

First things first: you’ll need a tree stump. We found a pile of them by the side of some railroad tracks near our house. We picked out the two with the most interesting shapes, threw them in the back of our car and brought them home. Here’s what they looked like way back in January:

Next, you’ll have to dry the stumps out completely. This is arguably the hardest step because it requires a lot of patience. We put our stumps in our garage’s uninsulated attic for a few months. It’s 100+ degrees up there every single day, so it basically acts like a kiln and thoroughly dries out the stumps. If you don’t have access to an attic or a kiln, you can leave the stumps in a dry spot for a few months. Elevate the stumps on a couple of shims so air can circulate underneath. This will keep mold from growing on the underside.

How do you know when the stumps are dry? The bark will fall off really easily. If you can grab a hunk and easily rip it off, they’re ready. Which brings us to the next step: remove the bark from the stump.

We used a chisel and a prybar to remove the stumps in big chunks. You have to be careful not to damage the wood underneath the bark. If the stump is truly dry enough, it won’t be a problem. But if you find yourself having to jam or shove the prybar between the bark and the stump, walk away for a few days.

With the bark completely removed, we’re ready to level the table top. To do this, we need to get the stumps on a level surface. We swept all the dust off of a section of the garage floor and then checked to see if it was level. First we check it in one direction:

Then we checked it in the other direction:

And we were happy to find that it was perfectly level:

Maybe happy isn’t the right word. It looks more like he’s in pain.

Next, we need to figure out if our stump is level. To do that, we moved the stump to our level spot and then tested it:

Fail. Our stump was not level at all. So we have to plane our table top.

We used a planer and shaved off the side of the table that was too high.

If you don’t have a planer, you could use a belt sander…but it’s going to take you forever to level off your top. A planer gets the job done in minutes. This is how much sawdust we shaved off from just one table top in order to get it level:

Yeah. Don’t try this with a belt sander. You’ll go through so many belts that you’re better off buying a cheap planer instead.

Next, we have to remove the gouges that the planer left:

And that’s where a belt sander comes in handy:

We used 80-grit for this task.

It’s important to keep checking to make sure the top is level. Once the gouges are gone, we can flip the trunk on its side and start cleaning it up:

We used an orbital sander with 180-grit sandpaper. 180 is coarse enough to get any leftover bark off, but it’s fine enough not to completely strip the wood. Check it out:

We sanded only the bottom half in the picture above. The dust and grime are gone, but the neato bug trails and scars are still completely visible. A closer look post-sanding:

After sanding the trunks, we need to do clean up the cracks and crevices.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a tree some funky knots and cracks and textures. We think these are the things that give a tree stump table character. Both of our stumps had spots where the bark grew in big lumps and knots:

We don’t want to remove the lumps and knots — we just want to remove the fibrous bark and dirt that’s built up on top of them. So we used a chisel and a rubber mallet to gently pry off anything that seemed loose. After that, we cleaned this area with 80-grit sandpaper. We didn’t use a sander. Instead, we used a sheet of sandpaper and followed the curves of the stump.

We also had some deep cracks on the top of one table:

We cleaned this out by shoving a folded-up piece of 180-grit sandpaper into the crack and then wiggling it around to loosen dirt up. Then we used our air compressor to blow the debris out. (If you don’t have an air compressor, you could use a can of compressed air.)

With everything cleaned up, we were ready to give our tables something to sit on.

We decided not to do legs on our stumps because we like how low they are. Instead, we purchased 2 packs of furniture glides from Lowe’s.

They’re little discs with a nail on one end and a felt pad on the other end. They’ll serve two purposes:

1. They’ll keep our floors from getting scratched up.
2. They’ll elevate the tables off the floor just enough so that air can circulate under them.

That last one is super important because even if you dry your table for a solid year, it’s still going to have some moisture in it. And moisture means mold if air isn’t circulating. We used a moisture meter to check our stumps (Bradley borrowed it from work) and even though they pretty much baked in our attic, they’re still not 100% dry. Lifting the tables up a little lets them air out.

We carefully flipped our tables over and hammered 4 glides to the underside of each table. Also, we flipped them so our freshly sanded tops were on a soft mat instead of the hard floor. Highly recommend that if you don’t want your top to get scratched up!

Now we’re ready to seal these suckers up.

We moved the stumps to a work table and flipped them over so they’re sitting right-side-up. Here’s how they look all clean and ready to finish:

We love the texture in the knotted crack that runs down one stump.

We were originally debating between bleaching the stumps and then staining them white or staining them a dark espresso. After we cleaned them up, we decided that we liked them raw. So we used a water-based polycrylic to seal them:

Here’s how they looked after one coat:

The whole thing got much darker.

We love how the streaks are much more visible. The different shades of brown pop. We let the trucks dry for 30 minutes (timing varies based on the brand, so read the package label!) and then sanded the whole thing with 320-grit sandpaper:

After the first coat of sealer, you might notice that little fibers of wood stand up all over the stump. Kind of like tiny raised hairs. Don’t panic! This is normal. Basically, the wood is dry when you start painting so everything feels super smooth. The dry wood soaks up the wet sealer and plumps up. Sanding with 320-grit will smooth everything back down. Just take your time and don’t rush through the sanding — it’s really important to get a smooth finish or else the table will look kinda shabby.

Here’s how you check to see if you’ve sanded enough. Run the palm of your hand softly across the surface of the table:

Feel any snags? Keep sanding. Feel like velvet? Awesome. That’s what you’re looking for here.

We sanded every exposed part of the stump (we didn’t bother with the bottom), then gave it a blast with the air compressor to get rid of any dust. After that we gave it another coat of polycrylic. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We gave each stump 4 coats of polycrylic and sanded with 320-grit between each coat. It sounds like a lot more work than it actually is. The first coat and first sand is always the hardest and most time-consuming. The other 3 coats are a piece of cake. And remember, you don’t sand after the last coat of polycrylic.

We loved the color of the stumps after the sealer dried:

But we hated how shiny it looked. If you looked carefully, you could see brush strokes in the light. The shininess combined with the brush strokes made our stump tables looks less high-end / modern and more crafty / country chic. But we have one last trick up our sleeve to get rid of the shine and make these tables look fabulous:

The final step is to go over all visible surfaces with grade 0000 steel wool.

Check out the sheen on the side of the table:

We rubbed the ball of steel wool up and down (with the grain) the stump using moderate pressure:

Way less shiny:

Here’s another view. We used steel wool in one corner of the table top to show how it removes the way-too-glossy sheen:

See how it’s blindingly glossy all over but then there’s one dull area? That’s what steel wool does. It takes the edge off. Here’s how the top looked after we steel wool’d the entire surface:

The sides looked a lot better, too:

Annnnd that’s it. They’re done! Now we just need to make a sofa* to sit in between them and our living room will be in good shape.

Let’s talk money. We spent just under $10 on this project. We already owned the polycrylic, the sandpaper and all the tools. The stumps were, of course, free. The only thing we purchased were the 2 packs of furniture glides. And, just in case you’re wondering, for $10 we could have purchased one IKEA Lack side table. Yup. We like our tables better. Viva DIY!

We’ll be back soon with a few more projects to share, including a super-easy shortcut for our DIY concrete window sills. Stay tuned!

* Yes, we’re going to make our own sofa. We have a look in mind and have started planning out the details. Exciting!

I’ve Been Framed 2.0

We’ve already shared how we take existing frames and turn them into mirrors on the cheaps (read up on that here and here). Now we’re going to share how we make our own frames from scratch. We have a lot of stuff we’ve been meaning to frame and hang over the years, but we never got around to it. A few weeks ago, we found this in a thrift store:

Bradley had a nerdgasm. We scooped it up for $10, then chortled and mouth-breathed all the way home. This is the purchase that sent us into a frame-making frenzy. We had some solid oak boards lying around that we thought would be perfect for the job. It looks a little worn and aged — sort of like driftwood. Check out the texture:

We got a bunch of these from Lowe’s for $50, and that was enough to make 5 frames.

The wood was a little rough and had some splinters along the edges, so we started by sanding each board to take the grit off.

While I sanded, Bradley set up the table saw to cut a channel:

Think of a standard picture frame you’d get at IKEA or Target. If you take it apart, you have the frame itself and the glass, plus some sort of backing made out of cardboard or masonite. The glass and backing sits inside what we’re calling the channel.

Bradley ran the end through and then pulled it back out to see if the channel would be deep enough for both the glass and the backing to sit in:

We have more than enough room for everything. So Bradley went ahead and cut the entire length of board. There were some clingers left, so he used a chisel to slice them away:

After that, it was time to cut the board down to size.

We used a miter saw because we need to cut 45-degree angles for the corners.

We simply made a cut with the angle facing in (like the photo above). Then we moved the miter saw blade to 45-degrees on the opposite side and made the next cut. The angles on each cut of wood face in. Once the cuts were made, we could simply piece together the frame:

We have two short cuts and two long cuts. If you want a square frame, just make all the cuts the same. If you want a really long, skinny frame (for a floor-length mirror maybe?), just make the long cuts super long. This is the beauty of DIY frames — the possibilities are endless and the cost is low.

With our frame roughly pieced together, we marked each corner with a pencil:

We made a line to indicate the center of the joint. We didn’t actually measure it out — eyeballing it is good enough for our purposes. This is super important to do because it shows us where exactly we need to make our cuts with the biscuit joiner.

Each joint was also assigned a number 1 through 4, and we marked either end of the center line with that number. We’re doing this so we can take the frame apart and piece it back together later.

The next step is to make cuts with our biscuit joiner. For this we need biscuits:

Not the nummy tea-and-biscuits kinda biscuits, but little football-shaped wood chunks that hold two cuts together. (Sidenote: Bradley’s Dominican coworkers these “cookies,” which is beyond adorable.)

This is how biscuits work:

…except they’re on the inside of the wood. Not following? Lemme break it down for ya:

• Each corner consists of 2 pieces of wood butting up together.
• We make a slot in the butt of each piece of wood.
• We spread wood glue in each slot.
• We put the biscuit in one of the slots. It should fit so that half of the biscuit is sticking out.
• We butt the ends together so the biscuit sits halfway in one butt and halfway in the other butt, thereby joining them. BAM! Biscuit joining!
• Heh heh biscuits in butts.

This is the biscuit joiner Bradley picked up a few weeks ago at the Grizzly warehouse:

It’s a Porter-Cable. He chose it over the others because it has a few more settings than its rival Dewalt. It’s slightly more pricey, but also seems more durable.

See what Bradley’s pointing at there? It says FF. That’s the dial for setting biscuit size. We have to make sure and use FF-sized biscuits or they won’t sit in there properly.

We double-checked. Then triple-checked. And then we made our cuts:

Bradley dangled the piece of wood off the edge of our workspace, with the end he’s cutting facing him. He used his hand to hold it firmly in place. Later, Bradley said, “Don’t do it that way ever.” Why? Because the wood isn’t clamped and could move around. So there you have it: use a clamp, not your hand.

Next step: we line up the red line on the tool with the center mark we drew on the wood.

Once it’s in line, turn the joiner on and firmly push it into the wood. This is what the cut looks like when finished:

We made all our slots first and then moved on to the gluing stage:

We gave each slot a good schmear of wood glue. (Schmear. Always schmear, never smear. That’s the New York in us.) Then we popped the biscuit in the slot

And pressed the ends together. That’s it. We let our newly joined rectangle dry for a few hours. Once dry, we came back to tidy up the joints. For this, we needed wood filler and a putty knife:

A lot of people skip the filler step, but we think it’s worth taking 5 minutes to do. It makes the difference between a frame that looks cheap and a frame that looks fancy. This is what the joint looked like before filling:

We gave it a schmear of wood filler:

Then we pressed it in so it fills the crack:

And finally, we scrape all of the excess off:

Just say no to crack:

We let the filler dry for about 15 minutes and then sanded the joints to make them as smooth as possible:

The next step is crucial. Under no circumstances should one move to the finishing stage without first completing the hammy-posing stage. We take this stuff seriously, people:

Being serious all the time is exhausting.

We really need to lighten up. And learn to use auto-focus properly:

In case you missed it, Bradley’s fingers are doing kind of a weird Dumbledore thing (Level 5 nerd status achieved.) That’s because he stained our frames and didn’t wear gloves:

We felt like experimenting with the finishing, so we tried a few different stains on some leftover wood craps. White made the oak look pink. Black seemed too heavy. Grey looked chalky. So Bradley tried something new.

• First, Bradley stained the entire frame white and immediately wiped it all off. That way the white stayed in the cracks and gaps, but not on the entire surface.
• After that, Bradley lightly stained the surface brown. Emphasis on the lightly. If he used too much stain, it would stain right over the white in the cracks and defeat the whole purpose. So Bradley used a cheesecloth and barely dipped it into the stain. He also took care not to apply pressure at all. Just a light swipe of the cloth gently across the surface.

We really dig the result:

We ordered the glass and it showed up a week ago. Next on our to-do list? Cut mats with our new mat cutter:

Then we’ll be ready to hang up some art. Kinda. We still have to redo the walls in most of the house before we can hang anything. Minor details.

We’re spending our weekend plastering and working on tree trunk side tables, so we’ll be back with more updates soon. Stay tuned for more DIY dorkery!

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We weren’t paid, perk’d, hugged or high-fived for any of the brands we mentioned in this post. We do it just because.

Carpet Diem

The last time we really talked about our living room was way back in August 2011. It’s gone through a lot of changes since then:

• The living room was our makeshift bedroom until we could get the guest bedroom and office renovated.
• After we moved upstairs, the living room became a storage room. We closed the door and pretended the mess didn’t exist.
• Then we started construction on our dining room — which was being used as a makeshift living room — so we cleared out the living room and moved the couch & TV in there. That’s how it’s been for a few months ago.

Despite going through a lot of functional changes, the living room looks exactly the same as it did on the day we moved in. We’ve been trying to stick to our one-room-at-a-time rule so we don’t have construction messes all over the place, so up until Saturday morning this is how the living room looked:

Burgundy carpet. We’ve lived with this for 15 months, people. And we’ve survived to tell the tale.

This room and the adjoining hallway are the last two burgundy carpet strongholds, and we decided Saturday would be a good day to attack them. We’ve ripped out so much hideous carpet in this house that we’re basically experts. In fact, Bradley moves so fast when ripping that I can’t even get a decent photograph. Check it:

Step one: use a boxcutter to cut through the carpet from one end of the room to the other.

Step two: peek underneath carpet and gag.

Step three: cut along the wall if necessary (sometimes carpet is under the floor trim).

Step four: yank.

Step five: roll.

Step six: keep rolling while holding breath so as not to gag from the smell that comes up from underneath the carpet. (Kind of a mix of the subway, grandma’s attic and sour milk.)

Step seven: play Guess the Stain™ — fun for the whole family!

After that, it’s just a matter of rolling up the foam pad that sits under the carpet and yanking out 10 billion staples. While I yanked staples, Bradley removed the linoleum tiles from the main entrance.

Linoleum is typically glued to a baseboard which is either stapled or glued (or sometimes both) to the wood floor. We were really, really hoping for no glue. Glue would mean an increased risk of damaging the floors underneath and a lot more effort when we have to sand.

It definitely felt glued down. There was a lot of prying, groaning, cursing and more prying. And finally the baseboard came up enough for us to peek underneath:

The good news: no glue!
The bad news: someone went way overboard with the stapler. There were at least — and we’re not exaggerating at all here — a bajillion staples holding the baseboard to the floor. It took a solid hour to pry just that little bit up, and we had to break for lunch in the middle because it was so exhausting.

Here’s how it looked after I yanked the staples out:

Still ugly. But at least the nasty-meets-grimy combination of burgundy carpet and cheap linoleum is outta there!

The floors need to be sanded and painted, but we won’t get around to that until we’ve completely renovated the dining room, living room and hallway. This is what we’re going to live with for a while:

We’re OK with that. The floors were painted chocolate brown at some point, so we’re not worried about splinters or anything. And cool wood feels so much better under our bare feet than carpet.

There is one last remnant of burgundy carpet that we haven’t removed yet:

This is, by far, the biggest radiator we have ever seen. It’s super wide and super heavy. We will eventually have to move it to get the carpet out, but we’re not really sure how we’ll do it. We have two plans so far:

1. Make 7 or 8 beefcake friends at the gym and conning them into helping us.
2. Leave the carpet and just build a radiator box to cover the whole damn thing.

For now, we’re just happy to see (nearly all of) the carpet gone.

When we moved into the house in April 2011, we were heartbroken to find soft pine floors under the carpet. Now, we love them and can’t imagine covering them up with new hardwood floors.

There’s something really warm and comforting about rustic, beat-up, old flooring. It feels cozy. And even more important, it feels right for our 130-year-old house.

We have more updates coming up, including a 101 on making frames. Stay tuned!

Freshly Tanned and Freshly Pressed

Hey peeps, I’m back from the girls’ surf trip to Barbados and it looks like we have a bunch of new readers. Thanks for all of the great feedback on our last post. I was a little shocked when my phone starting dinging  nonstop at the beach with new comments, and I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to respond to all of you. I was busy surfing

We hope you’ll stick around and follow our progress on our 130-year-old fixer-upper. We have lofty goals and a limited budget, which is a recipe for either fun or disaster. I forget which. We have a ton of projects coming up that we’re geeked to share with you:

• We’re making frames from scratch and matting our own art.
• We’re attempting to make our super creepy basement slightly less creepy.
• Bradley installed a new entry door in the dining room while I was gone and I have after pictures to share.
• We’re finally finishing off those tree stump side tables.
• We’re ripping out the last of the fugly burgundy carpet, rolling it up and setting it on fire. Just kidding about that last part. Maybe.
• We’re making bedside tables so our bedside stuff isn’t sitting on the bedside floor.
• And our most insane project to date: we’re going to DIY our own surfboards. Seriously.

Thanks again for all the feedback and we’ll be back to posting regularly in a couple of days. In the meantime, check out the projects tab to see what we’ve been up to for the past year.

I’ve Been Framed.

ETA: we don’t get many trolls around here, but when we do, we refer them to our comment policy. Please check it out below.

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We realized a few days ago that we completely forgot to post about this frame we found in a thrift store several months ago:

It’s from the same shop where we found our lighting fixture. If we’d had more time to look around, we’re pretty sure we would have walked away with much more. That place was a vintage goldmine. It seems fitting that we walked away with a gold frame. It’s 24″ tall x 35″ wide, and we paid $15 for it.

If you look closely, you can tell that this sucker is plastic. Flip it over and you’ll see a barcode and a sticker:

I didn’t know they made plastic frames in Italy, but that just made it seem so much more fancy. Right away we knew we wanted to paint it a fun color and turn it into a mirror for the half-bath we’ll renovate eventually.

We picked up a can of Valspar’s avocado spray paint in satin finish.

We were really intrigued by the can. We’re loving all the new spraypaint cans that companies are coming out with — they have triggers or super-wide buttons so you don’t get finger fatigue after every coat. Our verdict so far? Rustoleum’s trigger can is our fave because we like the way it’s held and because there isn’t much overspray. Valspar’s is OK. We like the twist cap and the big push button, but there’s so. much. overspray. It seemed like half the can ended up on our grass. We didn’t love it. And we downright hated the color:

As soon as the first coat was down, this is how we felt:

We were thinking the green would be fun and cheerful and cute. Instead, it looked bland and blah and boring. It’s less avocado and more pea soup. It’s just not us. At all.

I hopped in the car, made a beeline for the hardware store and returned with this:

White. Gloss. Made for plastic.

We felt so much better after the first coat of white.

Oh, and while we’re reviewing spraypaint cans here, check out the overspray from our can of Krylon Fusion:

We didn’t love the can itself (finger fatigue happens), but we loved the results. The paint dries fast and looks fab.

The back of the frame sits really close to the wall so you can’t see behind it when it’s hanging, but we gave the flipside one coat of white just in case:

And here’s how it looks now:

While Bradley worked on another frame project, he called up a local glass cutting company. I mean, literally. Here he is on the phone while sanding a frame:

He doesn’t get any I find his multitasking fascinating:

He ordered 4 pieces of glass and 1 mirror, all custom-cut. Once the mirror arrives, we’ll be ready to hang this beauty.

Cost breakdown:
- 24″ x 35″ frame = $15
- White spray paint = $6
- Custom cut mirror = $15

Total cost = $36

We’re big fans of DIY when it comes to frames and mirrors. They’re way overpriced in stores. For price comparison, check out this very basic 30″x25″ framed mirror from Home Depot. It’s similar in dimensions but it’s boh-ring, and it costs a whopping $264. Our total cost of 4 cuts of clear glass and 1 mirror was $37.37. Boom.

If you’re ordering custom glass, we have a few tips to share:

• Go local. Just look under “glass” in a phone book or Google. You can save on shipping and your order is less likely to arrive broken.
• Get clean cuts. That means the glass company scores and cuts the glass, but they don’t polish the edge. Companies charge more for polished edges and bevels — but neither really matters since you won’t actually see the glass edge in the frame.
• Paper your mirror. We talked about this in our last post about DIY mirrors. To keep your mirror protected, paper the flipside after you frame it.

More updates coming up. Stay tuned, peeps!

Vintage Chair Update

By the time this post publishes, I’ll be in surfing in Barbados with a group of girls. Life is good. Bradley’s holding down the fort while I’m gone. I’m guessing that without me constantly nagging him to take a couple of hours off, he’s going to be crazy productive. I’ll be back to help him in a week. In the meantime, check out our progress on those modern chairs we scored at a thrift store.

Here’s what they looked like on the day we found them:

We stripped off the fabric and stain to give these babies a clean start. Once naked, we were ready to give our chairs a makeover. The chairs are solid walnut, so we thought this extra dark walnut stain would look nice.

We used a staining pad for the first time:

Usually we use cheesecloth or rags when we stain something, but we decided to try out a staining pad. We loved it. It soaks up the stain much more than the cheesecloth, so we didn’t have to keep dipping into the can. It also didn’t drip or dribble as much. We’re definitely going to stick to pads from now on. We highly recommend them.

What we don’t recommend is using flimsy latex gloves with industrial strength stain. The stain ate right through the latex and got all over Bradley’s fingers. We switched him over to a pair of heavier orange gloves for chair #2.

We started inside because it was raining, and quickly moved outside as soon as it stopped. The stain isn’t super stinky, but there are definitely chemicals that we don’t want to breathe in too much of. Once the stain dried, we gave the chairs a coat of water-based polycrylic finish:

This stuff dries superfast, which is awesome. The oil-based stuff takes forever to dry, so finishing is more of a pain. Once dry, we lightly sanded the surface and gave it another coat. We followed it with another round of sanding and a third coat.

We’re in love with the color. It’s so much better than the hideous orangey stain that they had before. Check it out:

That’s the before. And here’s the after:

Mmmpph. So much better.

After a lot of thinking, talking and whining, we’ve decided not to upholster these chairs ourselves. Why? Because we decided to splurge on leather instead. We’ve never upholstered anything and leather is too pricey to screw up.

Bradley picked up a bunch of samples from a leather supplier in NYC, and we narrowed them down to these 5:

The yellow shows up as a mustard in our photos, but it’s really more of a sunshiney yellow. the white on the bottom is heavily textured, which we loved. After seeing the swatches against the wood, we narrowed down our choices even further.

Both of us wear a lot of super dark denim — the kind that comes with a tag warning us not to sit down light colored upholstery because dark denim bleeds. So we got rid of the white and the off-white leathers and were left with these:

We’re considering two color palettes for the living room: 1) red and teal and 2) yellow, grey & white. That’s as far as we’ve gone with figuring out what we want to do with the living room. We probably won’t work on it until next year, so we haven’t put much thought into it. Either way, we loved how bold those colors look against the dark walnut stained chairs.

But then there’s the brown. Leather looks so classic, so supple, so gorgeous in that shade of brown. It makes us swoon. Also the brown is calfskin and it’s so frikkin soft that we want to rub out faces in it.

The leather for both chairs is going to cost about $150. That’s more than we were initially planning on spending, but we’re OK with that. They’re so well-made that we think they’ll outlive us. We want to get them done right — quality material, quality workmanship — so we won’t have to worry about reupholstering them for a long time.

We took all of that into consideration and decided to go with the brown leather. We’re willing to bet that brown would age much more gracefully than the yellow or red — think cracks and wrinkles. And if we change our minds about a red and teal living room in 5 years, we won’t be stuck with red leather chairs that don’t fit. Brown is a nice neutral that we can live with for a long, long time.

We picked up our leather a couple of days ago, so the next step is to drop our chairs off with the upholsterer. He’s in Queens, and it’s kind of a haul even from Brooklyn, but we’ll take care of it soon. We’re so excited to see how our chairs turn out.