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.

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.

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!

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.

Tree Stump Table Update

We’re spending this entire week getting caught up on posts that we kept putting off. Remember our tree stumps? We first posted about them in January when we found them by the side of the road:

We laid out a simple plan for these babies. We would keep the stumps outside until they dried and then the bark would magically fall off one night while we slept. Then the stumps would sand and stain themselves, maybe grow some fabulous legs, and turn into a couple of gorgeous tables for our living room. The whole thing would take, like, 4 weeks, tops. Yeeeeah. That’s not exactly how things worked out.

The stumps took a solid 6 months to dry. Not 100% completely and totally dry, mind you, but just dry enough to take the bark off. We checked on them every few weeks to rotate and flip them, but they were still very wet and the bark wouldn’t budge. Even after they dried, the bark didn’t exactly fall off. We had to remove it with a hammer, a chisel and a prybar.

Here’s Bradley demonstrating how to work a hammer:

What’s that? Not hammy enough? No worries, we have more:

Don’t really use a hammer like this. Ever. You’ll take a hand off. Or poop your pants from the intensity of it all. Here’s what the hammering really looked like:

Not nearly as exciting, but less likely to smash the trunk to smithereens. First, Bradley would gently tap-tap-tap the chisel in between the bark and the wood.

Then, when the chisel was jammed in there pretty deeply, he would switch to the prybar and “peel” the bark away:

Most of the bark came off in big chunks. Once removed, we saw this on the wood underneath:

Insect trails! The bugs that lived under the bark of these stumps are long gone, but they left this amazing pattern on the wood. We still have to sand the stumps, and we’re not sure if the pattern will survive. Maybe if we’re careful and don’t sand too much, we’ll be able to preserve some of it — but we’re trying not to get too attached either way. The stumps are pretty rough looking right now:

They’re also too wet to sand. The bark dried off, but everything underneath is still really fresh and wet, which means they need even more time to dry.

Two weekends ago, while I was out of town, Bradley moved both stumps up to the attic of our garage. How he got these heavy bastards up a ladder by himself, I can’t figure out. The attic is completely uninsulated and the temperature up there easily reaches 100+ degrees every day. This will basically bake the moisture right out of our stumps. Bradley checked in on them yesterday and they’re coming along great. We’re giving them a few more weeks to cook and then we’ll turn them into side tables. Can’t. Wait.

Dressing Up Our Patio

It’s officially spring in our back yard.

To celebrate, we invited over our neighbor-friends to make S’mores over the first fire in our firepit. The only problem? We had nothing for them to sit on. Four hours before we were expecting 2 adults and 2 kids to join us for dinner, our patio still looked like this:

The good news is that we work really well under pressure. We drove to Target to scope out what they had going on. We ran to Lowe’s to do a little price comparison, and then back to Target where we walked out with a flatbed full of stuff. We drove back home and assembled everything. And then we died of exhaustion:

OK, not really. We seize any opportunity to ham up a photo.

We started by picking out the loveseat. They had matching side tables and other stuff, but we don’t like things to be too matchy-matchy. Instead, we found coordinated side tables that we liked. After that, we picked out the pillow:

We couldn’t pass on this cute little tealight lantern in the same blue:

To add a punch of color, we went with an umbrella in a bold orange:

We didn’t go into the store with a color scheme in mind, but we walked out with some pretty well-coordinated purchases. This is the beauty of Target. It’s really easy to throw a scheme together. We just picked a main piece that we liked in a neutral tone. Then we found an accessory we liked in a color that coordinated well with that neutral. After that, we just picked a couple more pieces in colors that either matched or contrasted with the first accessory. Easy peasy!

On the other side of the fire, we have the 2 Ariondack chairs that we finished last summer. (We snagged them at Home Depot on sale, then assembled, stained and sealed them ourselves.)

In the middle is a little glass table that we picked up at our local hardware store. And the beverage bucket on top of that was something we found at Lowe’s last summer, but didn’t have a reason to use until now. (It was eventually filled with ice, sodas and brewskies.)

We also picked up a little something-something for our porch.

To celebrate spring, we’re going to eat as many meals outside as we can. So we picked up these two wicker chairs and a table. The chairs barstool height, so every time we sit on them, it feels like we should have a margarita in front of us.

We picked up another tealight holder for the table. And we also added this cute porcelain milk carton vase from CB2. Our friends Zac and Cathy had these vases as centerpieces at their wedding in Florida. We flew back with several of these in our suitcases all the way back to New York. They’re awesome! The flowers, of course, courtesy of thee huge lilac bush in our yard. We’re currently putting them all over our house and loving the natural air freshener.

Soooo…if we were on the reader end of this post, we’d be wondering how much all of this stuff cost. Here’s a tally of (and some links to) everything we purchased:

• Loveseat
• Pillow
• 2 side tables
• Lantern
• Umbrella
• Umbrella base
• Outdoor dining table
• 2 wicker chairs
• Tealight holder
• Kid-friendly plastic dinnerware: 6 plates, 6 bowls, 6 glasses
• Galvanized white round silverware caddy

The grand total: $625

Not bad for the amount of stuff we got! Everything except for the plastic dinnerware and the galvanized caddy were on sale, so we saved about $150 off of the regular price. And we went from having just a couple of Ariondacks to having a full set of patio furniture and a new outdoor dining setup.

What’s next for our patio? We’re considering replacing the two Ariondacks with a couple of matching chaise lounges. We just ordered all of the supplies we need to insulate and drywall the dining room, and we’re about to be suuuuper busy with that. We might need a place to go pass out at the end of each work day! The Ariondacks are really comfortable, so we’re not sure if we’ll splurge on the chaise lounges this year. We’ll keep you posted.

In other news, we’re still stripping the stubborn lacquer and stain from those 1950s chairs we recently scored. Stay tuned for some more updates from the home front coming soon!

Thrift Store Find: 1950s Chairs

Hey peeps. We haven’t updated in a while, but it’s for a good reason — we’ve been off surfing in the Dominican Republic. We’re back (with tans!) and we’re ready to kick this house’s butt. We split up and conquered two projects this morning.

Bradley leveled and set all of the stones in our firepit patio:

Here’s how it looks now:

We’re lighting our first fire tonight — geeked! While Bradley worked outside, I painted the trim in the office and hallway.

We also have to share the new office rug and the hallway runner we picked up on Friday. More on that tomorrow after the paint dries.

We grabbed lunch at a local brewery after we wrapped up our projects. On our way out, we noticed two chairs in a thrift shop window and we had to go inside for a better look.

These babies are a little dated, and the upholstery leaves a lot to be desired. But look at those lines.They’re 1950s fabulous.

They’re also well-built, really sturdy, surprisingly comfortable to sit in. At $5.99 a pop, we couldn’t pass them up. We threw both in the back of the car and drove home.

They’re not much to look at now, but we’re going to tear them apart and they’ll be reincarnated as something much more stylish. Bradley’s done some light upholstering for work — benches mostly — so we feel pretty comfortable trying our hand at this.

We have a lot of thick fabric laying around from old projects sitting in our garage. We dug around and narrowed our choices down to these two:

A black, grey, orange and off-white fabric from IKEA.

Or a black and off-white fabric, also from IKEA. This is the one we’re digging more today, but we’re not 100% sold on it.

We started by removing the cushions and stripping off all of the fabric.

There was a lot of staple removal. We had some painful flashbacks from when we removed our carpet last year.

By the time we finished, we were left with some plywood covered with foam. The back piece was in good shape:

The bottom cushion was super gnarly:

The foam had basically turned hard as a brick. It looked awful and it smelled even worse. Bradley used a scraper to remove it from the plywood:

We’re not sure what chemicals could be in the foam, so Bradley wore a mask. I’m not sure where my mask is, so I stood by the door and held my breath for as long as possible. My middle name is Danger.

After the de-foaming came even more staple-pulling:

The fabric store had already closed, so we didn’t have time to buy new foam or batting. That will have to wait for next weekend. Instead, we did a test patch to check stain colors. Bradley sanded the arms of the chair:

Then he swiped on a bit of black stain on one arm:

And brown stain on the other:

You can’t see much of a difference between the original brown and the new brown, but they’re completely different. The original stain is an orange-red. The new brown is more of a rich espresso — it makes the wood look like walnut. The black hides the wood grain a bit too much, so we’re leaning towards brown for now.

We’re going to sand and stain both chairs tomorrow. We’ll get to the lacquering and upholstery part next weekend. We have a little more trim to paint in the office, and once that dries, we’ll share pictures of our sweet new rugs. Stay tuned!

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!

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!

Erica’s DIY Dresser

New York is full of it’s-a-small-world-after-all stories. We’ve randomly meet people who know people we know. And bumped into people we went to high school with 10 years ago and 1,250 miles away. That’s the kind of completely chance connection I had with Erica from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

I ended up freelancing at a boutique advertising agency in Manhattan and partnered up with Erica. And then found out we lived on the same block in Brooklyn, just a few buildings apart. What are the odds?

Anyway, Erica and her hubby Alan live in a new nabe now. And they’re busy cuteing up their place for the arrival of baby Max. (Yeah, I made up a word, what of it?) One of Erica’s DIY projects was to gussy up a Craigslist dresser for the nursery. Check out her results:

Frikkin’. Awesome.

I’m currently having a love affair with the color yellow, and those drawers literally made me squeal. Erica decided not to go the boring drawer liner route. Instead, she picked up some (brilliantly mix-matched) paper from Papersource and used Mod Podge to DIY drawer liners.

Bradley and I are coveting this pattern:

We love the way the colors pop against the teal. And that teal? Swoon. Even Bradley swooned and he hates anything that isn’t black, grey or white. (You can take the boy out of New York…)

The best part? Our heads are swirling with ideas for our next dresser. Time to start scouring Craigslist. Thanks, Erica!

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You can read up on Erica’s DIY dresser here. And, of course, all images are sourced from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

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P.S. Our February / March To-Do List is up. Check it out!