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The back wall of the kitchen has been looking a little lopsided for a while, with a big piece of art on it that’s centered to the table, not the wall:

That’s because I’ve been saving the space to the left of it for a clock. But I hadn’t found one I liked, so I outsourced the problem to my family by asking for a red kitchen clock for Christmas. And that is exactly what I got from my eldest sister:

It even has a fork and knife as the minute and hour hands! Totally awesome. And it takes up that blank spot on the wall perfectly:

And there’s Dante, photobombing my shots as usual. Anyway, that’s my most recent tiny update to the kitchen.

I have a lot of art. This is what happens when you’re an art major – you end up with a lot of art, and not enough time/space/money to hang it all on the walls. Which means I have 3 separate portfolios full of pieces that I want to keep, but don’t have room for. And most of it’s on paper, which mean storing it flat is the optimal solution. So I started looking for flat files – things like this:

That beautiful 5-drawer flat file? Costs nearly $700 dollars. A metal version costs more. I do not have $700 to spend on flat files.
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I’ve been very quiet, but it’s not because I haven’t been doing anything – though the house is fairly stalled at the moment. I got distracted, see, because I wanted to design a t-shirt. And that’s all fine and good, but once you design the t-shirt, then you have to print it, and if you’ve ever read “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” you have an idea how this is going to go.
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This is going to be the short version because I have to pack tonight, but: the banquette’s done!

I painted the whole thing – primer and two coats of the same paint that’s on all the wood trim in the house. Then installed shoe molding, and caulked the gaps where stuff didn’t quite meet perfectly.

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So the last post had the basic frame and sides of the banquette built – now I just had to cover the sides and put the tops on. It turns out I did this in the wrong order – I should’ve attached the tops first, because then I could’ve screwed it in from below, hiding all those screwheads. Luckily, I’m painting the whole thing, so I’ll just spackle over them all. Anyway, I cut the right-hand section to size, sanded down the front edge so it’s a nice smooth curve instead of a sharp edge, and screwed it in. That was the simple side. (more…)

Having eliminated the pesky electrical outlets, it was time to start building. I started by screwing a 2×4 into the studs at 15″ high – this’ll support the top, and gave me a level line to match, since my floor is definitely not level. I’d already created a drawer box, so I screwed that to the 2×4, with a scrap piece left over from the kitchen to make the spacing come out right. Then I just created a front frame with two long 2x4s and 3 shorter ones, which I screwed to the perpendicular wall and the drawer box’s other side. This is hard to explain in words – let me sum up with a photo: (more…)

So I thought about the banquette occasionally for more than a month, always stalling out on the need to call an electrician and get the outlets moved. And then I realized that I didn’t actually have to move the outlets – I could just remove them. And that’s something I felt pretty confident I could do. (more…)

Way back when I was designing the kitchen, I thought it would be cool to have a banquette seat in the corner where the table is. I really like booth seats in restaurants, and my parents have a long banquette seat in their kitchen that works really well. Also, banquettes take up less space than chairs, since you don’t have to leave space to slide them back – and space is something I haven’t got a ton of in the kitchen. (more…)

Here is the much-delayed final result of the desk refinishing project – it’s been done and in use for more than a month now, and is holding up perfectly, as well as being much easier to clean than the painted top was.

It even goes with my dining chair, with the half painted/half wood look happening. Maybe I should replace the lid of my art drawers, too (the ones to the right of the desk).

Note for the future: when painting objects white, consider that maybe a highly-used piece of furniture might not wear well with a white surface. My desk has been looking less and less nice recently – also, I evidently exude paint-thinner from my wrists, since the paint had actually completely worn away in the two spots at the edge of the desk where I rest my arms when typing. I needed to repaint at the very least, and I’m not prone to repeating mistakes. My new plan: strip the paint and ancient varnish, stain the top dark, and re-varnish.

Conveniently, I got a sander for Christmas! So I started with a chemical stripper to get the paint off – this is what it looked like after two rounds of stripping:

And then another round of stripping to get varnish off, followed by a wipe-down with mineral spirits:

The varnish wasn’t really coming up, so I decided to switch from chemical to mechanical: my new sander!

Look at that – it works! I used 80-grit paper to get the varnish off, then shifted to finer grit papers to get a final finish of 220-grit.

And then I vacuumed everything in the room to de-dust before starting the refinishing process. I did this whole thing in the studio because I really have no way to get my desk down into the basement alone, so there was a thin layer of sawdust on the entire room, despite the sander’s integrated dust-collection system. Once everything was dust-free, I did a first coat of the same stain from the bookcase project:

Tomorrow, I’ll do a second coat, and then it’ll be time for varnish.