Making Furniture From Found Materials

Some time ago, we found this old piece of barn wood:

And it made our hearts sing.

The aged grey tone. The weathered and worn grain. But most of all, the realization that this piece of wood is completely one of a kind. Nowhere on this planet is there another piece of wood that’s exactly like this one. Not even this other piece of barn wood we found to go with it:

Each piece is a unique thumbprint.

They’re so different, but close enough in look and feel that we were inspired to make a set of nightstands for our guest bedroom.

Here’s a rough mockup Bradley did on the back of a piece of MDF while working on another project:

The nightstand will be a basic white box, no back, sitting on four little legs, with one drawer set into it. The drawer will be made from the raw piece of barn wood. The rough sketch above shows a handle, but we’ve decided not to have hardware. Instead, we’ll make a little cutout in the face so you can pull out the drawer with a finger. That will help keep the focus on the gorgeous wood face with no distracting hardware.

The juxtaposition between clean white cabinet and raw, grungy drawer face will — there’s really no other way to say this — look mad hot. We love the way clean elements look when contrasted with raw elements. It’s a look we’re trying to carry throughout the house with our brick walls and rafters butted right up to our textureless walls and trimless windows. We think the nightstands will fit right in.

That’s our plan, man. What do you think? We’ll share the step-by-step instructions for DIYing a set of nightstands in a couple of weeks. We can’t wait. We’ve been stashing all of our bedside stuff in trays on the floor…for the past year.

It’s getting old fast.

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!

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!

—

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.

Getting Gorgeous: New Walls For Our Dining Room

Greetings from rainy, grey Brooklyn! We just got in from rainy, grey Pennsylvania last night. We spent our rainy, grey weekend finishing up the insulation and drywall in the dining room. It was actually a two-weekend project. We started last week by installing some temporary fixtures to the dining room doorways:

The dining room is smack dab in the center of the house. Here’s a floor plan:

Even though we leave the windows and door open while we’re working, dust manages to find its way everywhere. We found ourselves dusting pretty much every day, especially in the kitchen. Dust even managed to get upstairs in the hallway and guest bedroom. How? No clue. But it was getting to be a bit much to keep up with. We found these tarp zippers at our local hardware store for $10 a pop:

Basically, they’re a zipper with a heavy-duty adhesive on one side. We stapled some plastic over the doorway leading to the hall and to the kitchen. Then we taped the plastic to the wall and floors to completely seal up the openings. After that, we taped the zipper to the plastic, unzipped it, cut a slit from top to bottom, and we have a plastic doorway:

It looks a bit like a Dexter kill room, but it works like a charm to keep the dust out. We did this for two doorways: the one leading upstairs and the one to the kitchen. We didn’t bother with the door that leads to the living room because dust wasn’t really getting in there to begin with.

Once we finished dust-proofing the doorways, we settled down for a nap on our ginormous radiator:

Not hammy enough? Here ya go:

We dragged the radiator out of the way and saw what was going on behind it:

All together now: ewwwwww…. Luckily that’s not mold we’re looking at. It’s crusty old wallpaper.

It’s the 7th or 8th different wallpaper pattern we’ve found in this house. We’ve lost track at this point. Either way, there was a whole lot of fugliness going on back there. And here’s what we found underneath the radiator:

A giant pile of dust and animal fur. Again: ewwwwww. That picture pretty much sums up why we’ve decided to make radiator boxes. We’re designing them to fit in with the overall look of our house and building them ourselves, so they’ll be more fancy-schmancy than the frumpy radiator boxes we’ve found in catalogs.

Speaking of frumpy, check out what the radiator did to the floor underneath:

We have a little patching and sanding to do. But first, we’re building walls. We started by removing all of the trim:

We talked about it a little in our last dining room post, but we’ve decided not to save and reinstall the old wood trim. The room feels so much more open without it. Once the trim was out, we built our walls.

This wall was, by far, the hardest:

Each rafter was slightly different, so the drywall had to be precisely cut to fit against the ceiling:

It was a bit like Tetris.

We were so geeked to tear down this old doorbell:

We’re guessing it was added in the ’60s or ’70s, and we’ve always hated the way it looks. So we’re replacing it with this:

It’s a small bell. Kind of a tiny version of the giant school bells that we had in our elementary schools. We haven’t installed it yet, but it’s going to look much more subtle than the giant creme-colored box it’s replacing.

Another thing we were super geeked about:

Saying buh-bye to that hideous floral wall border. We’ve been living with that ugliness for over a year now and covering it up was a happy-dance-around-the-room kind of momentous occasion. We may also have shouted “See you in hell, wallpaper!”

Check out our new, ugly-free walls. So fresh and so clean-clean! And so tall-tall, too:

To give some reference to the height of this room, Bradley’s just a bit over 5’10″. The room has always had taller-than-average ceilings, but we added about a foot when we exposed the rafters. With fresh, untextured drywall and no trim, the entire room feels so much bigger.

Here’s Bradley screwing in the last bit of drywall:

And, finally, here’s how the room looks now:

We love how the clean walls make the raw elements in the room pop. The rafters look so much better jutting out of a textureless wall:

And the spot where the rafters meet the brick looks so much better:

It’s finally starting to look more urban loft and a lot less country tacky.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can wrap this room up, though. We’re currently planning out how to replace the entry door:

It’s an old, solid wood door that would look great if we sanded and painted it, but we’re not going to keep it. It’s about half an inch thick and has the thinnest piece of single-pane glass known to mankind. Seriously. We might as well have a Kleenex separating us from the elements. This thing is doing nothing to keep us warm in the winter. So we’re shopping around for new doors. It’s not as easy as it sounds — all of the doors in our house are so old that they’re not standard-sized. Boo! Hiss! We might have to make or order custom exterior doors for the dining room and kitchen.

We have a lot of updates for you guys this week. We’re running in high gear right now so we’ll be posting more frequently. Whee! In our next post, we’re going to talk about our plans for the dining room doors:

That’s coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Our Tax Refund Dollars at Work

A few weeks ago, we received our tax refund. And it was the Biggest. One. Ever. Apparently when your employer forgets to change your tax info from NYC resident to way-out-in-Pennsylvania resident, that’s what happens. We hemmed and hawed for a while about what we could spend it on. We briefly considered cashing it out in pennies and making a Scrooge McDuck vault in the basement, but that didn’t work out so well when Peter Griffin tried it.

So we scratched that plan and allocated our funds to 3 things:
1.    The dining room do-over
2.    New kitchen cabinets
3.    Plane tickets for next year’s vacation

Let’s back up for one sec with an update on what’s happening with the upstairs renovation. We’re soooo close to being done with the actual renovation and almost ready to move on to the styling phase (a.k.a. the fun stuff). We still have to seal up both sides of the brick wall in the hallway and paint the trim in the office closet. After that, we’ll build some furniture and bring in the accessories to get those rooms totally finished.

It’s going to take only one weekend to paint-and-seal upstairs, but when we woke up on Saturday, we weren’t feelin’ it. Luckily, Bradley had already ordered everything we’ll need to insulate and drywall the dining room as soon as our tax refund showed up. So we moved all the furniture out of the room and got to work.

Here’s a refresher on what the dining room looked like when we moved into the house:

All together now: ewwwwwwww. The only thing that’s staying is the huge radiator, but we’re going to cover up its ugliness by making a radiator box. Sort of like putting a bag over its head.

Anyway, we’ve already done most of the dirty work in the dining room over the past few months.

We demolished the brick wall and exposed the ceiling rafters.

We sanded the floors.

We got an old-school wood stove so we don’t have to rely on oil for our heating needs.

We installed a (much less hideous) ceiling fan and track lighting.

We replaced the single-pane windows with new ones.

We’re going to beat the ugly out of this room.

With the demolition part of the job pretty much done, we’re going to jump right in with building things. On Saturday, we started building a wall.

We started by making sure there was no power running through the outlets, and then ripped off all the trim.

We had to make a decision on whether or not to keep the woodwork in this room. The cool thing about it is that it’s original to the house. But that’s about all it has going for it. We think that the thick-and-clunky trim weighs the room down. It makes the big windows appear smaller and the 11.5′ ceilings appear shorter. And, most importantly, this look is just not “us.” So we decided to get rid of the trim and go with the same look we started upstairs — trimless windows with concrete sills.

Once the trim was down, we started insulating. This room is completely un-insulated, so we’re basically hemorrhaging heat all winter.

We screwed foam insulation directly onto the plaster to add an R-value of 5. At the bottom of the wall, we noticed that the trim had damaged some of the bricks. Bradley mixed up a batch of cement and patched those spots.

He recently made a door for a fancy apartment in SoHo. When he went to install it, he noticed there was a big collection of old bricks that the apartment owner had removed during her renovation.

They were in great shape and each one was stamped with EMPIRE on one side, so we assume they were made in the Empire City a long time ago. The owner was getting rid of them, so Bradley gladly took them. This way we can have some old NYC brick in our home.

With the foam insulation complete, we taped the seams and sealed the gaps with Great Stuff.

Then we took off the basement door and framed it. That way we can cover it up and it’ll be like the door never existed.

We’ve always hated the way this corner looks. The doors aren’t the same height, which looks odd. Plus, there’s outdoor access to the basement, so this door is redundant.

Now you see it….now you don’t.

Next, we framed the wall for even more insulation.

Fiberglass insulation is my jam. I realize it makes me sound completely insane, but I love insulating. There’s something really satisfying about the click…click….click of the staple gun. And, as long as I wear long sleeve shirts, I don’t get the dreaded itchies that everyone complains about.

Bradley had to do a little electrical work for this wall, so I happily took over the insulation duties. Here’s what it looked like by the time I finished:

The fiberglass insulation has an R-value of 19. Combined with the foam insulation, we’ve brought the R-value of our wall up to R24. From R0. We’re going to be nice and toasty next winter.

You can see Bradley’s electrical addition poking through the insulation. He wired the wall we can install two swing-arm sconces. We saw this baby in the Restoration Hardware catalog and fell in love:

Source

We love the old-school look and the ability to swing the lamp where ever it’s needed. We don’t love the price tag, because this is a really simple DIY project. And our version will hide the cord behind the wall for a much sleeker look. That’s still a few weeks down the road. Right now, we’re building walls.

Fast forward to a few hours later:

And that’s what our dining room looks like today. We’ve got more framing, insulating and drywalling to do, but we think it’s already looking so much better in here.

The most noticeable difference is how tall the ceilings feel without the hideous wallpaper border along the top. We’re not really sure how that trend became so popular 20 years ago, but all it does is make the room feel smaller. Good riddance.

We’re still in the wishlist stages of planning out our dining room. Here’s what we’re thinking:

• We’re already considering a warm blue-grey for the walls.
• We’ll build a wall-to-wall built-in bench with storage compartments under the seat. This would make some seating for…
• The dining room table we’ll build from some reclaimed spalted maple we recently acquired. (The guy told us we could have it for free if we removed it from his property, and we gladly did.)
• That basement door we covered up? We realized that’s a ton of wasted space under the staircase. We’re going to turn that into a coat closet. More on that when we renovate the hallway.
• We’ve decided to leave the brick wall raw, but we need to clean and seal it. That sucker sheds more than both of our dogs combined.

That’s what we’ve been up to, peeps. We’ll be back soon with updates. What’s going on with you? Any DIY projects in the works? Are you putting your tax refund to good use?

DIY Floating Headboard

March and April are going to be big furniture-making months for us. We’re kicking it off by sharing our rules about making furniture:

1. Make it cheap.
2. Don’t follow trends.
3. Use local / salvaged / recycled / re-purposed / leftover materials as much as possible.

Those rules are totally connected. If we make furniture out of salvaged materials, it ends up being cheap. And if we ignore the latest trends (which will inevitably go out of vogue in a year or two), we end up with something that lasts a lot longer. We won’t feel the itch to replace it the next year with the newest, latest, hottest trend.

That means 1) it doesn’t end up in a landfill, 2) we’ll save money in the long run by not constantly buying replacements and 3) our house won’t feel dated every 2 or 3 years. Good for the environment, good for our wallets, good for our image. Make sense?

A couple of weeks ago, we built a headboard that we think meets all 3 of our rules. We went with a clean, modern design, and used only materials left over from other projects. (Even if we had to go out and buy materials, we’re looking at about $20 worth here. (We’re cheap and proud.)

Here’s how the finished product looks:

Oh, I’m sorry. You were expecting a decent picture of a made bed with fancy linens. Yeah. It wasn’t happening this morning, folks. We’re still feeling beat up from this weekend’s project (more on that soon), and we had to drive to Brooklyn. So what you’re seeing are really awful “after” pics from this morning that I had to snap in the 2 minutes I had in between grabbing my camera and running out the door. (Anyone else hate this whole Spring Forward time of year?) We’ll take better “after” pictures when we get back from Brooklyn.

The dimensions are 63″ wide x 22″ tall x 1.5″ thick. We painted it a glossy white to match the dresser and to keep it neutral for the teal bedding we plan on buying later on.

The design is pretty simple. It’s basically 2 layers of MDF — a flat piece on top of a “frame”. When complete, the 2 layers look like one thick, solid piece but they’re really hollow. And the headboard is floating — no legs and no visible hardware. We think it looks much sleeker that way. It’s floating because we built a French cleat into the frame:

Source: cat-thesis.blogspot.com

Bradley learned about French cleats from his French boss. Tee hee! It’s a pretty simple way to hang heavy things like cabinets or shelves or headboards. Basically two pieces of wood or metal are cut at 45-degree angles so they “lock” together. One end gets screwed into the wall. The other end gets screwed into the headboard. To hang the headboard, you just set the headboard against the wall and slide is down so the 2 pieces lock together. Viola! Floating headboard!

We started by gathering materials and making cuts.

• 3/4″ thick MDF in the following cuts:
  • The flat/solid front: 63″ long x 22″ wide
  • 3 long strips for the back: 63″ long x 3″ wide
  • 2 short strips for the back: 16″ tall x 3″ wide
• 1/4″ thick x 1.5″ wide strips of pine (need to be longer than 63″)
• Wood glue
• Screws + small nails
• Wood putty
• Paint + polyurethane

Then we jumped right in and made our French cleat.

We cut the long edge on two 63″ strips of MDF so each side has a 45-degree angle. The piece on the right is going to be the top piece of our frame. The one on the right can get set aside for installation. This will all make more sense once we get to the end of the project. Just roll with it for now.

Next, we attached the MDF pieces together.
This would be so much easier to describe if we had taken photos of all the steps, buuuut our camera’s battery died. We suck at blogging lately. Regardless, this step is way easy and should be pretty easy to follow. Or not. Who knows. Roll with it some more, k?

• Lay the flat piece of MDF down.
• Line up the strips of MDF along the top, bottom and sides to make the “frame.” Make sure the top piece is cut to a 45-degree angle, with the angled side facing down.
• Use wood glue to attach the frame to the flat piece.
• Nail the frame to the flat piece for good measure.

After letting the wood glue dry, we had this:

FRONT: the flat piece

BACK: the “frame”

OK, fine, we didn’t really have that. What you’re seeing in those pictures is what we had after the next step. But you get the point: flat front, frame back. You can’t tell in the picture above that the top piece of our frame is cut to a 45-degree angle, but it is.

After that, we glued on our edge binding.

Edge binding 101:

• Smear glue along MDF edge
• Set wood strip on top of glue
• Tape wood strip to MDF to hold it in place
• Let dry for 24 hours

This is the same as what we did for the cabinet. Basically, we’re gluing on a thick, fancy veneer along the edge of the headboard. This hides the exposed seam from the 2 layers of MDF and makes the hollow headboard look like one solid piece.

After the glue dried completely, we used a router to clean up the edge-banding.

See the little edge poking out at the bottom? We need to get that off. There are a bunch of different ways to do this — saw, dremel, sandpaper, etc — but we went with shaving it off using a router.

Then we cut our grooves.
The grooves on the face of the headboard can make up pretty much any pattern. Horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, grids, etc. We did a really simple design with 2 horizontal lines and 2 vertical lines. We drew our pattern in pencil on the front of the headboard.

To cut the grooves, we used a saw with the blade set to a really shallow depth. Bradley lined up the saw blade along the edge of the headboard to show me how shallow the cut would be:

We’re not taking out much. Just enough to make the pattern visible from across the room. To cut perfectly straight lines, we used a circular saw, a saw fence and a couple of clamps:

Bradley clamped the fence to the headboard, and carefully ran the saw along the edge. Then he moved the saw fence and cut the next line. You can see 2 groove in the picture above. And all 4 grooves in the picture below:

The next step is to make our seams disappear.
This step takes some time, but we think it’s worth it to end up with a piece that looks more high-end. This step really makes a piece look crafted as opposed to crafty.

Our goal is to completely blend the edge-banding in with the MDF. Without seams, the headboard would look like one solid, thick piece. With the right finishing, it might even looks like a solid piece of wood which is waaaay fancier than cheapie MDF. That’s what we’re going for here.

We smeared wood putty along every seam on every visible surface of the headboard. We let the wood putty set for 24 hours, then came back and sanded everything to a smooth finish.

Here’s a trick to see if you’ve sanded enough: close your eyes and run the palm of your hand back and forth over a surface. If you feel even the slightest bump or dimple, keep sanding. You want a completely smooth, even surface before moving on.

Next step: painting.

We used some leftover white oil paint and a paint roller.

We kinda regretted using the super cheap paint roller we had lying around instead of going out to buy a special cabinet paint roller. Why? Because each coat left us with this:

The orange-peel texture of doom.

We didn’t think it would be a big deal since we always sand in between every coat of paint. (That’s the trick to getting a velvety-smooth-and-totally-not-textured finish.) This roller was super textured, though, and it was a huge pain in the butt.

For starters, we used an oil-based paint so it took at least 24 hours to dry each coat. Then sanding took forever because each coat left so much texture. We actually ended up having to sand so much that we took off too much paint. This meant laying down even more coats of paint. We were stuck in the paint-dry-sand cycle for days. And after all of that, we still had to polyurethane 2 coats to get a glossy finish. Not. Fun.

Finally, we hung our headboard.
Remember that other 63″-long piece of MDF we cut to a 45-degree angle earlier? This is where it comes in. We started by cutting it down to 53″ and making sure it still locked perfectly into the headboard frame:

Then we mounted it to the wall. We made sure it was perfectly centered in between the two windows:

We also obsessively leveled that sucker to make sure it was perfectly straight and then screwed it into studs so it’s really sturdy:

Then we just set the headboard against the wall a few inches above the cleat, slid the headboard down gently and the 45-degree angles locked together perfectly.

And that’s it. We’re done!

If you look really closely you can still see a little bit of an orange peel texture, but it’s really not noticeable unless you’re looking for it.

We love how it sits tightly against the wall. It weighs itself down against the cleat so it doesn’t slide around at all.

We love the way it looks when the bed is made. It’s simple, clean, modern and — best of all — cheap. We like how it doesn’t stick out too much because we definitely don’t want it to be the center of attention in this room. We’re planning out some nightstands that we want to be more of the focus. And there’s a console that we’ll build sometime after that, but we need to build a hanging cabinet for the office first…

Lots of furniture-making coming up — stay tuned!

Hallway Cabinet

Remember that huge built-in cabinet for the hallway that Bradley’s been working on since before Christmas? Well, it’s fiiiinally done. The painting and installation took a few weekends, but the as soon as the paint cured, we put this sucker to work.

We won’t go into the details of how the installation went because the whole process was a long and complicated pain in the butt. Tools were thrown. Curses were muttered. Fist were wrenched. And, somehow, Bradley ended up jamming his finger and now has to grow out a (seriously gross) black fingernail. If anyone’s interested in the sexy, nerdy art of cabinet-making, we’re making a floating cabinet for the office. We can do a from-start-to-finish instructional post on that puppy. (And, um, the next cabinet won’t take 3 months to make — we promise.)

Here’s a shot of Bradley screwing the cabinet into the wall:

The silver stuff up top is the insulation. No more drafty hallway!

I’d love to share the color of the yellow paint we got for the inside of the cabinet, but I can’t:

Apparently a lot of colors are being discontinued from the Valspar lineup, and this yellow was one of them. The Lowe’s employee who mixed our paint told us she had to eyeball it. They ended up wasted 4 gallons of paint because the color was off — too mustard, too buttery, not bold enough, too bold — but finally, we ended up with a color that we were happy with.

It’s was like sunshine in a can. Whatever the color is, we’re smitten. We’re even considering doing a yellow-white-and-grey bathroom to match.

Here’s how the cabinet looks fully installed:

Notice the massive gap along the wall and ceiling?

That’s because the cabinet is perfectly level and the walls aren’t. The trick to taking a cabinet and turning it into a built in is painter’s silicone. Check out how it looks after:

We’ll eventually paint over the silicone with the same grey as the cabinet and walls. That way the silicone will completely blend in and become invisible.

We splurged on some really fancy hardware for the insides. It took a little finagling, but we adjusted the hardware so the doors line up perfectly with the panels on the sides.

Here’s how the sides look before we put the doors on:

And after the doors are one:

We got a bunch of white baskets from Lowe’s to keep stuff organized:

And that’s it! Our 3-month-long-pain-in-the-butt cabinet is complete.

We’re determined to get caught up on all those projects we never posted about. If we don’t, we’ll keep getting heckled by our friends and family on Facebook (way to lay on the guilt, guys!). So coming up tomorrow: our super easy DIY headboard. Stay tuned!

Our 2-Hour $0 Salvaged Materials Bed

In our previous Brooklyn lives, we lived in an apartment that was just a wee bit over 500 square feet. We didn’t have much storage. Or, to be more accurate, we didn’t have a single closet in the entire place. Seriously. No closets. All we had were 3 wall-mounted cabinets in the kitchen and a little under-the-sink storage. It’s pretty amazing what can pass as an apartment in NYC.

We had to get a little creative without storage solutions, so one of the first purchases we made after moving in was the IKEA Sultan Alsarp:

Source

The slatted base lifts up to give a whole lot of storage space underneath. Smart! We also loved the fact that the bed is slip-covered. The white fabric you see on the base is actually velcroed on. We loved how we could just slip it right off and wash it whenever we felt like it. ….until we actually washed it and it shrank and fell apart.

Reading instructions: we suck at it.

Al’s skirt didn’t last through one wash cycle. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed IKEA, but still loved the bed. So we marched on down to our local IKEA and asked where we could find slipcovers for old Al. And that’s when FAIL #2 happened: Al doesn’t have replacement slipcovers.

One slipcover comes with the bed, and that’s the only slipcover you can have. For the rest. of. your. life. There was much gnashing of teeth and wrenching of fists, and in the end we vowed never to shop at IKEA again. (That didn’t last long.) But, because we hadn’t been pooped on enough yet, FAIL #3 happened a few days later:

Under Al’s slipcovered skirt is a foam padding. We were planning on DIYing a slipcover to go over it, but someone decided to shred the padding instead:

The foam padding had been chewed on, clawed at and torn off. And the evidence of little bits of yellow foam found in his whiskers both proved his guilt and the dog’s innocence. After that incident, our plans to sew a slipcover got tossed out the window.

We were going to reveneer the entire bed and make it super fancy, but when we took a close look at the bed, we discovered that it was literally coming apart at the joints. Another FAIL. We’ve lost count of our FAILs at this point.

Morale has been kinda low ’round these parts. With the crappy weather and the never-ending cabinet project, we’ve been moving pretty slowly. So, to stir things up a bit, we did a freestyle project. One that involved no planning, no over-thinking, and — best of all — no money. We woke up on Saturday and decided we had one day to build our bed with whatever we could find. It took us 2 hours.

We started by gathering materials.

We salvaged the slatted frame from our IKEA bed. It’s in perfect condition and made from a very durable steel. We also found these five blocks of wood in our garage:

Those are leftover pieces from a big oak beam. The big ones are 9″ cubes and the smaller one in the center is about 4″ across. They’ve been stained and sitting around for a long time, and we thought they would be perfect legs for our new bed.

Those are the only 2 elements of our super modern / minimalist bed: the slatted frame and the beam legs. Plus a few screws to hold it all together. Really. That’s it.

With our materials ready to go, we set up our table saw with a dado blade:

The kerf of a standard blade is 1/8″. Kerf is, oddly enough, not a word that Bradley made up to mess with my head. (I had to take it to The Googles.) It means the width of the saw cut. With a dado blade, you can change the kerf to whatever you need. Our saw has a maximum kerf of 3/4″, so that’s what we set it to. Here’s some kerfing in action:

The stink-face is an absolute mandatory when using a table saw.

Basically, using a dado blade lets you take out strips instead of fine lines.

In no time, our blocks had matching grooves:

Next step: sanding. This is what the blocks looked like after a quick run with a belt sander:

Ignore the nosy dog in the background.

Our initial plan was to stain or paint the blocks. But covering up this gorgeous wood felt wrong:

We loved the distressed look. How some parts have a blackened pattern and others are completely bare. We decided to roll with it and see how the bed looked with naked legs. If we hated how it turned out, we could always paint them later.

The assembly took about 15 minutes. First, we put the legs in place:

The four big blocks are the legs, and the small block in the middle is support for the middle of the bed. We ran out of felt furniture pads, so we improvised with some extra rug pads we had lying around:

We cut those into 8″ squares and slipped them under the legs that sit on on wood floors. That way they won’t scratch up the paint. After that, we plopped the frame right on top:

And, finally, we screwed the frame to the legs to hold everything together:

We don’t want the screw head sticking up at all, but we didn’t have a countersink bit with us. We had to improvise. Bradley drilled his pilot hole with a small drill bit. Then he used a much bigger drill bit to make a countersink.

The trick is to gently drill away a layer without going all the way through the hole. That way you end up with a cone-shaped hole for the screw to sit in:

See how the hole is wider at the top and smaller at the bottom? That’s how you get a screw to sit flush against a surface instead of sitting on top of the surface:

Bradley put 2 long screws into each leg. We picked up the bed and moved it across to room to make sure it was sturdy, and it was. So we vacuumed the rug, moved the bed back and dropped the mattress on top. Here’s what our bed looks like now:

You can’t see the frame at all from a normal vantage point, so the bed looks like it’s floating on beams. From underneath, you can see the slatted frame:

We’re on the hunt for deep teal bedding right now. With the right duvet, the frame shouldn’t be visible at all. And we’re hoping the natural wood legs will really pop against a bold color. Check out that streaked wood:

We love the way those legs look against the jute rug.

Our next big task is to make bedside tables. Right now, we’re using some trays to keep our lamps and bedside messes contained.

We picked up those lamps at Target a few weeks ago. We wanted something simple and neutral enough to work in any room. That way we can move these to the living room later if we want. We’re just starting to get a feel for the kind of textures and colors we want in this room, so we might get some other lamps for this space down the line. Right now, we’re digging ‘em.

We’re also digging the white dresser in the funky angled corner:

We’re not sure if we ever shared after pictures of that sucker in use. So far, the paint hasn’t chipped a bit even with daily use. The secret is all in the polyurethane — two to three coats, sand in between!

There you have it. We made a bed in 2 hours. It felt so good to sleep in a “real” bed last night. Just having the mattress up off the floor really helps make the room look more finished. Our guest bedroom is finally starting to come together. We still need to:

• Get some new bedding.
• Build a couple of night stands.
• Do a quickie IKEA-hack console table.
• Hang some art.
• Get some color in there, pronto. Love neutrals and all, but this room is pretty boh-ring without color.

We’ll be back soon with updates on the never-ending cabinet and a couple of other small projects. Stay tuned!

This is the cabinet that never ends.

Yes it goes on and on, my friends.

Bradley started working on it after Christmas, and it’s still not done. And, since I’ve been swamped with projects at work that have me working weekends and holidays, this cabinet has been 99% Bradley work. He’s been out in the (unheated) garage in sub-freezing temperatures every weekend trying to get this thing finished. I’m pretty sure he’ll cry tears of joy when this project is over, because it’s been quite an ordeal.

Did we mention this is the first cabinet Bradley’s ever made?

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Bradley’s painting that sucker as I write this. We’ll install it next weekend. Before we get into cabinet talk, check out the floating shelves Bradley made for the office closet:

They’re cut to fit our funky, angled corner.

It’s currently our catchall for whatever doesn’t have a home at the moment, but eventually this closet will be storage for all those office supplies and paperwork we don’t need on a daily basis.

Now on to the big cabinet project…

Our bathroom has zero storage, so the plan is to make a big cabinet to hold towels, extra toiletries and Costco-sized packages of TP. (We talked all about it in this post from August.)

(Yipes, remember when that hallway looked like a tornado went through it?)

Since this is going to be a custom built-in, Bradley started by taking measurements and drawing plans. This is what he gave me to photograph:

Yeah. I don’t get it either. So I asked Bradley for a better explanation of what he was planning, and he gave me this:

Still don’t get it? Me neither. Here’s the gist of it:

• The cabinet will go from floor to ceiling (just over 9′ tall)
• It’ll have 3 doors.
• It will be built mostly out of MDF to keep the cost down.
• The outside of the cabinet will be plywood (more expensive than MDF, but also much more sturdy).

Bradley put together a shopping list and we headed to Home Depot to get our supplies:

This was right after our spending freeze ended, so Bradley was on cloud nine.

We went with birch plywood for the outside of our cabinet. The plan was to stain it white — that way we could stain it and get a bleached-white wood look. We got back home, and Bradley immediately started making cuts:

The inside of the cabinet will be made entirely out of MDF. MDF is not the sturdiest thing in the world. It’s fine for shelves, but the edges need to be reinforced. Bradley’s plan was to do solid wood edge-banding using some 3/4″ thick poplar. Solid wood edge-banding — I had no idea what this meant — is basically gluing a strip of wood on the face of the cabinet. Like a thicker, fancier veneer.

This is how Bradley did it:

1. He used a table saw to cut 3/4″ wide x 1/8″ thick strips of poplar.

2. Then he cut a strip down to the size of the MDF shelf. He left a little extra room on the ends.

3. He smeared glue along the front-facing edge of the MDF.

4. Then he placed the poplar strip on top of the glued edge.

5. And he applied masking tape to hold the strip tightly in place.

6. After that, he used a wet paper towel to gently wipe up excess glue. He let the glue dry for 4 hours in a warm room. (He dragged each shelf into the house, let it sit by the fireplace, then dragged it back out to the garage 4 hours later.)

7. Finally, he removed the tape and sanded the strip down flush with the MDF.

Part of the reason this cabinet took so long is that there are so many edges that needed to be faced with wood. After a few days, though, things started coming together and we had something that resembled a real cabinet:

Or two cabinets, rather. Bradley built it in two separate sections that can be taken apart. That way, we can carry this beast upstairs a little easier.

Bradley picked up some hardware to install shelves inside:

Then he went through the long process of making each shelf:

It’s hard to believe how much time actually went into each and every shelf. Cutting, gluing, cleaning, drying, sanding. We definitely have a better appreciation of how much work goes into custom cabinets.

Here’s Bradley putting on the doors:

And here’s how the cabinet looks when the doors are open:

And here’s how it looks when the doors are closed:

No visible hardware! We decided to go with European hinges so the hardware is all concealed inside the cabinet:

Bradley ordered these hinges through his source at work, but they sell something similar at Home Depot & Lowe’s.

Once the cabinet was ready for finishing, we dragged it upstairs to the master bedroom:

We removed all of the hardware and prepped the cabinet for painting:

As Bradley removed each hinge, he labeled the hardware and its coordinating slot:

That way we just just pop each hinge back in place and not have to worry about readjusting each one all over again.

Next up: staining our doors:

Bradley got this white stain through his finishing supplier from work. Here’s how it went on straight out of the can:

We’re not sure if it was the cold weather or just the brand, but this stain was super thick and gloppy. Right away, Bradley thought something didn’t feel quite right, but he kept going with the door:

This is how it looked when he finished:

Blurgh. It was definitely not the cool, bleached wood look we were going for. And it was super streaky and blotchy in some parts. So Bradley decided to thin out the stain and try again.

He mixed the stain with lacquer thinner and gave it another shot:

It was a huge improvement as far as color goes. This is more the white-with-wood-grain that we were looking for. But it was still really streaky. And — here’s the weird part — the streaks ran sideways.

You can barely make it out in the photos, but the streaks weren’t running with the grain of the wood. There was something funky going on with the wood itself. Whatever it was, we decided to put the kibosh on the staining idea and went with Plan B: paint.

We loved the way our white-on-the-outside / teal-on-the-inside dresser turned out, so we decided to do something similar for the cabinet. The outside will be the same soft grey as the hallway walls. But the insides will be a super bold, super cheerful yellow:

I. Love. Yellow. I’ve been trying to talk Bradley into yellow paint pretty much from the moment we signed the papers and got the keys. Bradley’s a little color-phobic. Maybe it’s from years of living in NYC where everyone wears black and grey? After months of showing him Pinterest photos, I finally convinced him that a bright yellow, white and light grey bathroom would be crisp and clean and refreshing. So we decided to paint the cabinet to tie the bathroom and hallway together.

To save time — this project has already been going on for a month now — Bradley decided to use the spray paint gun instead of rolling on the paint. This has the added bonus of zero texture. The cabinet will look super sleek by the time we’re finished.

Here’s how it looks today:

We’re so close to wrapping up this project. Can’t. Wait. Here’s what we still have left to do:

1. Sand the inside and shelves with 320-grit sandpaper
2. Install the cabinet in the hallway
3. Give the insides and shelves 2 coats of polyurethane
4. Paint the outside of the cabinet and the doors grey
5. Give the outside of the cabinet and doors 1 or 2 coats of polyurethane

And then we can finally start using the cabinet. This means we can move a bunch of stuff out of our bathrooms and they won’t be disaster zones anymore. And that means we can finally — finally!!! — show you some more rooms in our house. We’re super geeked because we’ve been dying to share what the rest of our house looks like. But we’re also mortified because our bathrooms are gross and hideous.

We’ll be back with the big reveal on the cabinets next weekend. And, now that our big, overwhelming, time-consuming cabinet project is done, we’ll be back to updating more regularly with more small projects. Stay tuned!