So the first step in turning this zone into a flowerbed was digging everything up. We left the bushes and the rose, but after more discussion today, it looks like the rose will need to go too, despite its awesomeness, because it’s in a really awkward spot. Anyway, last Saturday we spent a couple hours digging everything out, and marveling at the vast number of earthworms in my yard. Today, we started the very tedious process of sifting all the dirt to get random bulbs, rocks, and roots out of it. I also took on a tiny triangle to the right of the path, which used to be full of random grass, and today I dug it all out.

Turns out digging up a flowerbed involves finding strange objects… like a railroad spike, a Spirograph wheel, a beer bottle, a plastic washer, the biggest earthworm ever (no seriously, I’m talking seven inches long, the thing was like a snake), and speaking of snakes, two six-inch long brown snakes, which I’ve discovered by Internet were probably either worm snakes or earth snakes- both totally harmless, and interestingly, live on earthworms. Tasty.

So there’s a lot more sifting in my future, and then we get to do the fun part, picking plants! I’ll try to actually take pictures for the next few steps.

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.

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.

What I have is a circular saw, drill, and a nearly endless supply of paper to draw plans on. Plus wood filler for when things go awry. Not that things ever go awry for me! So I drew up plans for a very wide, very deep bookcase with shelves about 3″ apart. I didn’t even consider trying to make drawers that big – that seemed like asking for trouble, and shelves are all I really need – I’m perfectly happy to shuffle through papers on a shelf instead of slide them out. Anyway, this plan required 3 large pieces of plywood, cut down to approximate size by a nice guy at Lowe’s. I got nice plywood for the sides, and less expensive ply for the shelves, since no one will see the actual surface of those. The top is a chunk of leftover countertop from the kitchen, which has been leaning against a table in basement for the past year, along with its twin. I’ll come up with something to do with that one someday, I’m sure. The chunk of countertop actually determined the size of the structure, because I didn’t really want to cut it, and I couldn’t make it deeper, so my files are 25.5″ deep and 42″ long. Definitely big enough to hold my large sheets of paper and art.

So I cut all my pieces to actual size, and then sanded them all down smooth with my palm sander (love it). Then I attached shelf supports to both sides and the back – with glue and screws, since the plywood isn’t very thick, so I didn’t really trust the screws alone.

Then I screwed and glued the sides and back to the bottom. And right after taking this picture:

realized the back panel was on upside down, which meant the shelf supports were all in the wrong places. So I unscrewed it at high speed before the glue set, flipped it over, and re-screwed and glued it on. Whew.

Then I painted. Latex paint has a tendency to “block” – that is, stick to paper that’s set on it, even months after it’s “dry.” So I decided that the sides and back of the files would be painted, but not the shelves. Once I’d painted, I attached the top with some corner brackets (this involved lying inside the box on my back and drilling overhead in a tiny space – very fun). Then I slid the shelves into place, moved the flat file next to my desk, and loaded it up!

It’s working perfectly, and the cats are even enjoying having a bigger spot to hang out next to my desk.

Now you have to print the t-shirt. So you research all the places online that’ll print a t-shirt. Just one, not a batch of 20. And you realize that that one t-shirt is going to cost about $20. And that seems like a lot for just one t-shirt, even if it’s the shirt you made.

So then you think, hey, screenprinting, that can’t be so hard, can it? And hey, I like new crafty skills. And hey, an excuse to buy new craft supplies, that’s kind of cool too. And hey, Speedball has an intro kit for just $30. (Anyone rational, at this point, has realized that for $20 you can get the shirt without any complications, and now you’ve spent $10 extra and given yourself a ton of work to do. I am not rational, by the way.) And A.C. Moore sells shirts for $2.50 when they’re on sale. So now you’ve got a shirt and a screenprinting kit. And for $2 more, you have a design on a transparency. Which is how you transfer it onto a screen, but if you want a screenprinting tutorial, this is not the place, there are some awesome ones online. I will say – 30 seconds in sunlight worked perfectly for exposure time.

And then you print a shirt. And immediately wash it out (did you know screenprinting ink has to be heat set? This is my favorite feature, because when your print is terrible, you can just wash it out and try again.) And then you print again. And wash it out again. And then you print again, and this time you really mean it, and hey, it works! So you iron the shirt, one of the few times you ever iron anything, because yay heat-setting, and then you take a blurry iPhone picture of it:

And then you wear the shirt to a juggling festival and it rocks. For only $34.50 and five hours of your time.

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.

I bought cushion foam from the guy in town who has this huge foam warehouse and will cut pieces to size for even little jobs like mine, then brought it home and wrapped it in batting so the corners aren’t quite so square:

Then I sewed the covers for the pillows – you have to make the covers around 3% smaller than the foam so the covers aren’t baggy when you sit and compress the foam, so getting the foam into the covers is kind of a wrestling match – but I defeated it eventually, and then hand-sewed the last seam. I’d considered zippers, but long zippers are expensive, and I’m not really thinking I’ll be taking these things off a lot, so the half hour it took to hand sew the last seam is something I can repeat if I need to.

Then I found three coordinating fabrics for throw pillows, and made those. And now I have a complete banquette, which looks like this:

Only now it has a table in front of it, and it’s awesome.

The left-hand side is hinged so you can lift it for storage – I’m not going to put anything I need regularly in there, but maybe my boxes of extra glasses and silverware will end up there. So I bought a continuous hinge, also known as a piano hinge, and cut a section of wood to the same length as the hinge. Then I cut a long 2″ strip off the back edge of my piece, so I’d be attaching that strip to the frame, and then use the hinge to connect the main lid to the strip – otherwise, the hinge would attach directly to the wall, and sheetrock isn’t meant to support weight like that. With all my pieces the right size, I sanded the front edge, and then screwed the pieces all together. This would’ve been a lot simpler with a helper, since holding a 4-foot-long piece of wood in place while you screw a hinge in (with something like 30 tiny screws) isn’t as simple as you might hope. But in the end, I had a fully-constructed banquette.

I haven’t painted it yet because it’s been ridiculously humid here, and since the kitchen is open, I’ll have to barricade the cats into a bedroom while the paint dries. So I’m waiting ’til the weather shifts and my paint will dry in less than a day.

So that’s one side of the banquette framed. Then I built the other side in a similar way, though I needed more cross-pieces since I didn’t have the drawer box, and I wanted to make sure it’s stable for the lid that’ll be hinged. There was a moment where I had this cool structure and I thought for a moment about how cool it would be as a cantilevered bench. And then I remembered that I am not an engineer, and I want to be able to actually sit on this thing:

So I kept building:

Once I had a solid structure, I cut the sides to size and installed them. The drawer end is pretty obviously not square because of the slope of the floor, but I figure you’ll only notice it if you’re really looking. I hope. The lid in this shot isn’t attached at all – I was checking the overhang and working out what lengths I need.

Speaking of lengths – have a size reference:

So that’s my stopping point for today!

First step to any electrical job – turn off the breaker. In this case, right after doing that, make sure the refrigerator isn’t on the same circuit, because that would mean I had to work fast. Turns out this circuit only has four outlets on it – the two that need removing, and the two counter-height ones to the left of the sink. Awesome.

Then I unscrewed the outlet covers, unscrewed the outlets, and unscrewed all the screws that held wires to the outlet. Then I went into the basement and pulled the wires down. Well, mostly. There was one that just would not come, so I abandoned it in the wall – there’s no electricity to it anymore, so it’ll just sit there until some future homeowner opens up the wall to do something.

Then I connected the wires in the basement so the circuit still carried electricity to the counter-height outlets, and put the connections into a junction box so they’re not exposed. Then I flipped the breaker on and checked the outlets to make sure they worked, and indeed they did.

Actually, I skipped over a step – when I’d made the first connection in the basement, I decided to test the circuit so I could fix it if I’d messed something up already. So I flipped the breaker on and clipped my circuit tester to the wires to see if the little light would light up. Except for how my circuit tester has a bit of metal like a pen clip on it that I was touching at the time. I got a pretty impressive buzz up my arm, and I dropped the tester really fast. At least I knew the circuit worked. I was a bit more cautious for the rest of the electrical process, too.

Anyway, with the wires and outlets out, the final step was patching the holes – even though they’ll be behind the banquette, it just seemed wrong to leave the gaps open. This is what the wall looked like after patching (I didn’t bother repainting – I’ll do whatever touchups are needed when I’m painting the banquette):

I also took the baseboards off so I could butt the boards right up against the wall, which is why the wall changes color right there. Conveniently, that also exposed the sheetrock screws – telling me where all the studs are.

So I started looking at banquette seats and how to construct them. There are lots and lots of different methods, but it’s basically making a box and attaching it to the wall/floor somehow. Of course, I decided I wanted to complicate mine by having it be L-shaped, having a drawer on one end, and a piano-hinged lid on the other side for more storage.

Once I had a pretty good design laid out, with measurements to make sure it wouldn’t narrow the traffic flow through the doors, I went to Home Depot and bought nearly $100 of wood, which a really nice guy there even cut into my required sizes (largely so it’d fit in my car, which won’t hold a piece of plywood that’s 4′ x 8′. Here’s my car with a lot of wood in it:

Oh yeah – I bought a new car in February, and it can hold way more than my previous car. It’s awesome.

Anyhow, I got home with all the wood, cut the first few pieces to the right lengths, and got ready to start installing them, only to realize:

If you squint, you can see that there’s an outlet on the back wall. There’s another at exactly the same height on the half-wall too, and they were both exactly at the height I wanted to attach a 2×4 as the back support for the banquette. So this stalled me out for a while, as I tried to decide what to do: move them down a few inches, trapping them behind the banquette once it was built? Hire an electrician to move them all the way to the ends of the walls where they wouldn’t be behind the banquette anymore? I hadn’t planned for this project to involve electrical. So I stopped. For… more than a month.

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).