quilled

Damn blonde dog got into a porcupine. Poor little thing. We're thankful for aunties Mags and Val for helping remove the pokey things. This was my first experience with a dog getting whacked by a porcupine and it was Molly's too. It's a good thing she's kind of timid around new friends because the quills didn't end up being lodged too far in there, indicative of a warning brush rather than a full-on swipe. Maybe she learned her lesson the first time? We hope so!

piano bench

My boss and his wife moved out of their house to do a complete gut and remodel right when we bought our house so we scored some rad stuff for freesies! Like this piano bench.

 

Before

Before

                                        

After 

After

This little friend obviously needed a lot of work. I sanded the top smooth, used wood filler to fill the inside of the top and other nicks. I had stain leftover from cirque giraffe desk and paint leftover from the blue bookshelf in the living room so this project took a few hours of active time and two days of drying time but was otherwise completely free!  I was using all of my paint brushes so I ended up staining it with a foam brush that I guess had been used with glitter at some point so it may have a little bit of barely-noticible glitter in the stain/varnish-oops!

blue roll-top desky, cabinet thing

We have a rad fireplace in our living room as seen in this post but it left this weird-sized space to the left. I had measured the space one day and two days later this baby showed up on craigslist and she's just the right width and height! 

 Before

She was in super good shape and the guy held onto her for me until I could get Val's boyfriend to meet me out there with his truck since my man works out of town a lot. I paid $100 and stuck her in the garage. Even though she was in good shape you may have noticed that she started off as oak and we already have more wood than we know what to do with, so I opted to stain her, over the course of four months (I know, I got lots of shit for that from my man). I used Minwax Ocean Blue stain and the water-based polycrylic finish. Val and I talked about her here, dubbing her "cirque de giraffe desk".This took a lot of sanding and since she was only my second staining job  after the red telephone table there are some spots that I could have gotten better, like in the roll top, but she looks great in the space! 

During 

After

This was a huge project that was perfect for our long Alaskan winter. She fits the space super well, stores our limited collection of DVDs and my art supplies. She adds some nice gentle contrast to all the wood and evens out the blue bookcase on the other side of the fireplace. 

closet re-do

Quick and dirty closet reno. Both bedrooms have double closets so that's rad but I never really learned how to organize/maintain my closet so it quickly looked like this:

Before

No worries though! I/ME/ALL BY MYSELF purchased 3 6' pine boards, sanded, painted and hung them. Okay so I actually hung them twice, we all know what happens when you don't check to make sure the brackets are screwed into the stud- durrrrr. Everything came crashing down, the pups and I were out of the house so nobody was hurt. 

After

There's a top shelf about 1 foot from the ceiling which I put shoe boxes with mementos and random holiday stuff on, it's out of the way and awesome. I'm 5'10" so the super high rod is perfect for me, gives my dresses room and I have two standard canvas shoe shelves hung from the rod. My pants and skirts are stacked on that second shelf. Seven canvas drawer/boxes hold clutches and belts, tank tops, scarves, tights and leggings, hats, and excess derby shit. My boots live on the ground with my derby bag.
I had the BM Super White paint, I re-used the original rod, spent about $30 on new brackets, the wood was $20ish, the canvas drawer/boxes were $5 each so $35. A place for everything. Pretty good!