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.

Dining room update.

First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:

Heh heh. What a guy.

Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:

This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.

We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.

Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.

Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.

The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.

The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:

That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.

In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.

We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.

We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:

Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:

Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.

The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.

We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:

And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.

There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:

The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.

While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:

It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.

It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:

We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:

It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:

We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.

It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.

We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!

DIY Cheat: Concrete Window Sill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’re really digging the texture:

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

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

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

DIY Tree Stump Side Tables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we checked it in the other direction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We used 80-grit for this task.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we’re ready to seal these suckers up.

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

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

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

Here’s how they looked after one coat:

The whole thing got much darker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the sheen on the side of the table:

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

Way less shiny:

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

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

The sides looked a lot better, too:

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

Burning Ring of Fire

We weren’t planning on renovating the outside of our house until we finished up the inside, but last weekend’s amazing weather had us jonesing for an outdoor project. So we got a head start on the yard reno and made a fire pit.

Neither of us has ever done anything like this before. We didn’t really plan out this project. It was just something we decided to do when we woke up on Saturday. “What a nice day. …let’s make a fire pit!” Yeah. We’re nuts.

We have big plans for our back yard. What we currently have is a rectangle of patchy grass, gravel, cement and perennials randomly bordering the fence. What we want is a functional space — a vegetable garden, a compost pile, a stone patio for BBQs, some chaise lounges. So we’re basically going to split the yard in half. Everything in the picture above is going to be scrapped and replaced.

We started by removing some big stones from the end of the yard:

This may have been a decent-looking stone patio at one time, but it’s pretty haggard now. The stones are in good shape, though, so we’re going to reuse them.

Next up, we had to set our fire ring.

That’s a heavy-duty ring of steel that we picked up from a local metal fabricator. It cost $54. I made coffee while Bradley centered the ring between the fence and the cement walkway. Then he started digging:

Bradley used a shovel, a level, and a rubber mallet to set the ring into the hole.

Ta-da! We have a fire pit! We went to Home Depot and picked up some treated lumber, a rake and a tamper.

Then we stopped by a local nursery and ordered a pallet of stone and some gravel. They delivered it the next day. All of our materials cost about $300.

We spent Saturday framing the stone patio.

On Sunday morning, the nursery delivered the stone and gravel. We also ordered some weedkiller fabric so nothing will grow in our stone patio.

We also picked up some hardware to bolt the lumber together:

After that, we started carting in the gravel:

One of us brought in the gravel and the other tamped it down.

After that, we brought in the stones.

We started with the big stones we pulled from the yard. Then we added in the smaller, new stones to make a grid.

We basically had to play Tetris with the stones.

We had to use a grinder to cut a few pieces.

Here’s how it looks now:

It’s obviously not finished. We still have to level each stone and fill in the gaps with gravel. It’s going to take another weekend to wrap up before we can start making s’mores.

We’re already talking about building an L-shaped bench, a concrete coffee table and some huge planter boxes for the patio. We’re not sure if the rest of this side will be stone or something more cost-efficient, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, we’re just glad to have something useable in our yard.

We’ll wrap up this project over the weekend if the weather cooperates. Stay tuned for that, plus some updates on other small projects we’ve been working on. Happy spring, everyone!

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!

DIY on a Dime: Make Your Own Framed Mirror

I’ve been remiss. I said I’d update soon and I didn’t. But at least I have a great excuse: life happened. We’ve still been chipping away at the house slowly, and now I have over 700 pictures to sort through and several projects to write about. Procrastination leads to heartbreak, kids. With that in mind, let’s jump right in to our mirror project.

Here’s what we made:

That’s a new 18″x28″ mirror hanging over the dresser in our guest bedroom. It took us $13 and an hour to whip that sucker up. (That time can easily be cut down to 5 minutes — more on that later.)

We’ve been scoping out mirrors in shops and online for a while now. The general consensus: holy crap, mirrors are so overpriced! Even the more affordable mirrors at Target didn’t seem worth the cost — the frames seemed so chintzy up close. Besides, we try to avoid buying cheap made-in-China stuff as much as possible. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but in this case, it was cheap and easy to DIY.

First step: make or get a frame.

 

We happened to have this raw handcrafted hardwood frame left over from an old project. We were originally planning on framing some art, but never got around to it. It’s been sitting in our garage for months now.

We love how raw wood helps make a room feel warm and cozy, so we decided not to paint or stain our frame. We also decided to skip the polyurethane because this isn’t really something that will rub or scrape against anything.

This is what happens anytime I pull out the camera now:

That’s what I get for giving her a treat to sit still for the camera. She sees the camera and assumes there’s food behind the lens.

The frame has a deep channel in the back for the glass to sit in. Basically just like a normal frame you’d buy in a store, except it’s unfinished wood. There’s also no hardware to hold the mirror in place and no way to hang it on a wall. We had to create a backing and install hardware — that’s why it took us an hour to make the mirror. To cut that hour down to 5 minutes, all you have to do is go to a store and buy a frame you like. Seriously.

Second step: get a mirror. 

Since our 18″x28″ frame was a custom-made piece, it’s not a standard size. That means we couldn’t march on over to Target and buy a mirror to drop into it. Instead, we had to get a mirror custom cut to fit our frame.

To do that, we simply measured the channel on the back of the frame — subtracted 1/8″ all around to compensate for the wood swelling and shrinking with the weather — and called in an order to a glass shop. It was ready to pick up the next day, and cost about $11.

Third step: drop the mirror into the frame.

If this was a store-brought frame, we would be done by now. We could just snap it all together, hang it, and stare at ourselves for the remaining 55 minutes.

But since, we didn’t go with a pre-made frame, we still had some work to do.

Step four: make a backing for the frame.

This step is going to be different for different frames. The general idea is to make something that holds the frame and mirror together. Store-brought frames usually have some kind of cardboard backing and then some hinges that snap / flip into place. For our frame, we decided to do some thin wood strips that would sit on top of the mirror and nail into the frame.

What we needed were 4 strips of wood that would sit flush with the frame. Bradley measured and cut those. Here’s what it looked like when he finished:

You might notice some small wood chips on the grey back of the mirror in the pictures above. Stuff like that can actually chip the paint, ruining the reflective side of the mirror. To make sure that didn’t happen, we used our air compressor to blow the dust off. Then we cut a protective surface to make sure it doesn’t get any dust on it later on down the line.

Our mirror came wrapped in a sheet of heavy brown butcher paper. We set that on top of our frame.

Bradley scored the paper along the edge of the frame — basically he used his thumb to trace the edge of the channel on the backside of the frame. Then he carefully cut along the edge using a boxcutter:

If you do this, make sure your knife edge goes into the wood frame and not along the mirror. Otherwise, you’re headed to Scratch City. After that, you can peel away the cut paper and leave behind the paper that’s going to protect the mirror:

Next: nail everything together.

The order from bottom to top goes like this: frame, mirror, paper, wood strips. Easy enough. We used finishing nails (they have tiny heads) and gently hammered them to attach the wood strip to the frame.

It helped to drill pilot holes using a really tiny drill bit, but we didn’t take photos of that for some reason.

Finally: figure out how to hang that sucker.

We went with a simple picture hanger clip that we had lying around. We centered it and drilled a couple of pilot holes (carefully, because the drill bit could go right through to the front of the frame!), then used some small screws to hold it in place.

Ta-da! We have a mirror:

To hang our mirror, we found and marked the center spot above our dresser:

We checked to see if there was a stud in that spot, and there wasn’t. So we used a special wall anchor to hang our frame there anyway:

The blue anchor on the right is what we usually use. When you screw into it, the little ridges flare out and help hold the frame up. The green one on the left is a different variation that we like even more.

That fold down the middle is a hingle. When you drill a screw through the big hole on the right, the entire left side folds up. This turns the anchor into an L shape that helps hold up the frame even without a stud. It works great for hanging heavy things. We’ve found that it’s way less likely to pop out then the standard flaring anchors.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use anchors:

Drill a small pilot hole. Pop the anchor in it, pointy side first:

Gently hammer the anchor into the wall so it sits flush against the wall:

Use a drill to put your screw into the anchor:

Done!

We hung our mirror on that nail and made sure it was totally level. Here’s what it looks like now:

Photobomb!

Yep. Still there.

The light wood coincidentally matched the wood we used for our DIY bed frame:

And both of those match the set of trays we’re currently using to hold our bedside stuff until we build night stands:

It was completely unplanned, but different elements in the room are starting to visually reflect one another. Happy accident!

We’re pretty geeked with how our new mirror looks. And it cost $13 since we only had to buy the mirror and hardware. This is cheaper than comparably sized mirrors we found at IKEA, Target, West Elm and Pottery Barn. And for the price point, it’s of a muuuuch higher quality. Best part: nobody else owns one exactly like it. (Eat that, cute-but-cookie-cutter IKEA mirrors!)

We definitely plan on making more mirrors for our house. We don’t want all our mirrors to look exactly the same, so we’ve been brainstorming some ideas on how to get a different look.

• Hit the thrift stores to get cheap, pre-made frames.
• Find an old-fashioned frame and spray paint it so it looks new. Black, white and silver are all good candidates, but we’d also love to do something really unexpected like bright yellow or deep teal.
• Build a giant frame from the beams we salvaged from our demolition. We have tons of really neat 130-year-old wood sitting around in our garage. Everything is really darkened and greyed and a lot of it has a funky striped pattern because of lathe strips. We’re imagining an oversized full-length mirror that sits on the floor and rest against the wall.

We have a lot of rooms to fill and a lot of mirrors to build. We’d love to hear what you think. Have any ideas you’re willing to share with us?

Stay tuned for a ton more updates this week. We finished a few projects and started a few more. Coming up next: our $20 DIY headboard. It’s sleek, it’s modern, it’s super effing easy to make!

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!