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The dodgy picture below is of the thermometer on our deck at 8:45pm! 30C! And tomorrow the mercury is suppose to rise to almost 40C!!! And what's weird, or at least compared to the east coast of North America, is that the heat of the day out here is between 3pm-5pm!
Anyways, 3 cheers for our window air conditioning unit!
As per usual, I get ideas in my head about how easy something is going to be and as usual, it’s not! That’s how this weekend’s projects played out. As mentioned above, Mike & I set about this weekend adding a new finish to the new/old spare bedroom bed frame, staining our new-to-us bench and staining our kitchen/dining room table and chairs. On Friday when I was writing my first ever post, I was full of confidence and for some bizarre reason thought that this all this work would somehow only take maybe 3 or 4 hours on Saturday morning! Ahahaha!!!!! Oh, how I live in a fantasy world!!! We ended up sending 6 hours on Saturday and another 5 hours on Sunday working on all our projects and will be doing touch up work in the evenings for the next 3 nights! Here’s how it played out:
Saturday morning came and we were up & out of the apartment by 9:30am ready to tackle our projects! My father-in-law Mark kindly lent us the use of his garage and equipment for the weekend as otherwise there would not have been any way us to do all this work. And being the novice that I am at both blogging and diy projects, I forgot to take ‘before’ photos so below is a random collection of nearly completed, and in the case of the bench, completed projects!
The bench was the easiest project to complete – a bit of light sanding with the electric sander and 2 coats of outdoor stain et violà – a new bench! We’re quite pleased with how it turned out and it now coordinates with our little teak table & chairs that also find their home on our deck. The second project that Mike diligently and painfully worked on on Saturday was the sanding/grinding down of the previous layers of paint on the cast iron bed frame. Typically you can spray paint directly on to previous layers of paint, however, there were a number of deep nicks and scratches covering the frame so we smoothed it out as much as we could and on Sunday Mike went to town with the white satin finish spray paint and the bed frame turned out really great! Now, for the last project and the one that was the most time consuming and in the end turned out completely the opposite from my original plan! The table and chairs! I wish I had remembered to bring my camera with me to the garage on Saturday but as I forgot it this lengthy description will have to substitute.
In the course of THREE hours I managed to sand only ONE chair! 1 chair in 3 hours! Why? Well, the manufacturer of this table set had coated the whole thing in very durable sealant. And in order to apply wood stain, the stain must be applied directly to wood…so obvious yet so difficult to achieve! Once that labourious task was finished, I began staining the chair I had so carefully sanded…well, there were nearly tears…as I was applying the stain, very noticeable blotches started appearing on the seat and the stain colour itself was making the chairs look like they belonged at some run down country/western themed family restaurant! It turns out that the blotches were the result of wood glue that had likely been split on the chair during its assembly – awesome! The new stain colour was too dark to sand down so after some contemplation on Saturday night, we decided to spray paint the table & chairs the same white satin as the bed frame. It has not yielded nearly the same look I was hoping to achieve (aged, dark wood table) but it will make the table look like new and should brighten the apartment up.
On Sunday we spent another several hours in the near 30C/85+ F heat spray painting our hearts out! And I have to say we did a great job on the whole! The bed looks great and the table and chairs look fresh and new. Below are a few of the pictures I took on Sunday, when I remembered to bring my camera! More to follow with the final products!
The newly stained bench!
The table before we went crazy with the spray paint
The table nearly done!
Here's a shot of the foot board and 3 of the chairs.
Well hello!
So I’ve caved, I’m finally going to give the world of blogging a try. I read a lot of blogs and enjoy them all thoroughly and have finally decided to create my own online repository for things I like and any happenings in my little world as I live far from my family and many of my friends out here in Seattle. I’ve never been good at keeping at diary or journal so who knows how well I’ll be able to hold this together but here goes!
Weekend projects – part 1
I have a number of weekend projects lined up for my and the hubs and he is no doubt pumped…
The first of the projects is the refinishing of a bed frame I bought off of craiglists for $75 (photos to follow). We have a double bed in our spare bedroom for guests in the last several months have had the privilege and delight of receiving visits from Jane, my parents, my sister Beth and her friend Angie and Amy. While the current bed frame has served us well, it’s a bit of the wonky side of life and takes up quite a bit of space in the room. Both the new and old bed frames are relics of days gone by – the old frame has a nice Bed knobs and Broomsticks feel to it and I do like the warm feeling the brass adds to the room but its wonkiness is getting to be a bit much. The new frame is an old hospital bed, actually I don’t know if it was ever used in a hospital, but it does look like one you see in an old black n’ white movie and is made of cast iron. I really like it’s simple lines and it is considerably less bulky than the current one. The new frame will be getting a fresh coat of white spray paint and as neither of us have ever spray painted before – fingers crossed – it turns out nicely!
The second project is the refinishing of our kitchen/dining/junk-collecting/catch-all table! Its current colour is that rather unpleasant early 1990s yellow/blonde oak – yuck! Moreover, no matter how much I wipe it down, there are permanent grey streaks from god-only-knows-what that became caked on there during my husband’s bachelorhood. We will be changing the table from beechwood blonde/yellow to a rich light brown and staining the chairs a darker shade of brown to create some contrast. My inspiration for this change comes from a picture of our table I found online and of course now I can't find it to save my life!
And the third project is staining a wood bench we just inherited from my friend Tracy. She no longer had use for the cute bench at her new place and we knew it would find a good home with us.
So, a big weekend ahead! And the weather here is suppose to be lovely 26-28C/mid-80sF! And top it all off, on Sunday on I have Skype date with the lovely Sarah! Yay! :)
