Tag Archives: Ana White

December 28, 2011 · 5:25 pm

Liquor Cabinet

If you know us, you know we like our booze we like to build furniture (no joke, I’m writing this while sitting at our favorite bar having a beer. I swear I don’t have a problem). You probably think it’s been forever since we posted about our last build, this dining room buffet…and you would be correct. But honestly, as it has been getting colder here in Indiana, the prospect of hanging out in our “shop”, aka our 85-year-old uninsulated, unheated, one car garage has lost its appeal. So, this project was completed in small steps when one of us could bear to be out there.  Let me tell you, painting in the cold is not fun and actually pretty difficult (cold paint doesn’t exactly go on as smooth as you would like), but we finally finished it and moved it inside, so I have to share the details!

This plan was loosely based off Ana White’s Benchmark Storage/Media Tower plan.  The bones are basically the same, but we added a few details to make it more functional for us and our boozy needs.  Here are a few pictures of the process :)

Beginning to build the frame:

Frame built, ready for some shelves. I will note that Bryan ended up using plugs to fill all the pocket holes, which makes the interior look SO nice!  You can kind of tell where the holes used to be if you look verrrrrrry closely along the right edge of the interior of the left side (that makes no sense, right? Oh well…just take my word for it…there used to be holes and now there aren’t. WOO!)

Some details added with the router:

And a close up of the details:

Pretttttty huh?  We used a combination of routed edges and premade quarter-round molding to bulk up the top and hide seams along the joints for a more finished look.

We also altered Ana’s plans a little by adding a slotted rack on top for stemware.  We had seen similar features on bar cabinets at Crate and Barrel and desperately needed to clear some glasses out of our kitchen cabinets, so this was the perfect solution! Bryan figured out how to build this on his own and it turned out great!

After everything was assembled, we gave it the same paint treatment that we used on the buffet  - a coat of white paint and then a coat of dark ebony stain wiped off after application (you can read about how to do this here).

We were sooo happy when we finally got to move this thing out of garage and into our dining room!

Here’s a close up of the stemware holder, with the perfect amount of space for our stemless (i.e., favorite) wine glasses underneath.  Heck, we even have Kilroy’s shot glasses….cause we’re classy like that :)

The second shelf will hold miscellaneous bar items.  Right now, it holds a marble wine cooler, a lone wine glass that wouldn’t fit up top, and a decanter of Scotch. I love scotch. Scotchy scotch scotch. Here it goes down…down into my belly…yum yum yum.

I really hope at least some people picked up on my SUPER obvious Anchorman quote up there!  If not, here’s a scene from one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen:

Moving on…the bottom portion of the cabinet features a glass door and plenty of storage for our prestigious liquor collection.

I know you’re all super impressed by our selection.  I love how the Patron is the only straight-up liquor we have down there…the rest is weird blended stuff (Baileys, Skinny Girl margarita mix, etc).  We just have trouble keeping any inventory cause we drink so much, cause we’re too cheap to buy nice liquor, for some unknown reason. Oh well!

Anyways, hope you enjoy.  Now that it’s getting super chilly, we’ll have to re-evaluate our house-related goals for the winter.  I think I’ll post a New Year’s Resolution-esque list on here in the next couple days, to keep us accountable :)  Happy New Year everyone!

xox,

katie

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November 4, 2011 · 2:13 pm

If you have to do laundry…

You might as well make it as easy on yourself as possible, right?  That’s what we were thinking when we built this project (again, slightly modified from Ana’s Laundry Basket Dresser plan).

To preface this project, let me just say that our “laundry room” is in actuality a dark corner of the unfinished portion of our basement:

Lovely, huh? It’s bearable since I try to consolidate all our laundry into one day a week, but the biggest pain was that there was no storage space for things like laundry baskets, dirty clothes, and detergent bottles.  You can see in the picture above that I had all my detergent, fabric softener, etc just sitting on the washer.  I later moved them to the dryer since our washer is top-loading, but with the top of the dryer covered in bottles I had nowhere to fold or put laundry. Dilemma.

To give some perspective, this is NOT a big space.  Here’s a picture we took after closing on our house but while the previous owners were still living there.

As you can see, there’s barely enough room for one person back there, let alone any storage. The old owners had a wire rack to hold things, but that still didn’t solve my “lack of flat space to fold” problem.  We also had an awkward space directly opposite the washer/dryer underneath the stairs leading to the basement.

The previous owners had a drying rack there, which we don’t own (if I can’t put it in the dryer, it’s probabbbbly not gonna get washed by me. Just saying’…).  So, we decided to use our new crafty skills to build something functional for that space.

Enter, Ana White.  This chick has literally helped us in so many ways, so Ana, if you ever read this, THANK YOU!  The original plan from her website yields a result like this:

So smart!  Since we don’t have THAT much laundry between the two of us, we opted to adjust the plans a little to create a shelf for storing all those pesky bottles.  Here’s a shot during the preliminary stages of building (the piece on the far right is the bottom).

It was actually a pretty simple project to build.  Bryan had the idea to attach casters on the bottom, so it could be wheeled in and out of the space under the stairs (we use the rest of the space to store painting supplies and other random things).  He also was able to reuse parts of an old Target desk from my apartment that didn’t quite make it through the move unscathed (think white particle board laminate) to make a smooth top and trim pieces.  Here is the laundry cart fully assembled, in the middle of getting a coat of paint:

And here’s the final product!

I feel like I should admit that I never actually iron clothes.  I have an iron, and I thought it would be appropriate in this picture (and I suppose you COULD iron on this if you wanted to), but I won’t use it. Sorry.

Anyways, you can see how the top shelf is perfectly sized to fit all laundry accessories:

And there’s space for two laundry baskets:

(We opted to just use scrap wood to hold up the top basket, as opposed to the metal “L” brackets used in Ana’s plan).  You can also see the wheels in the lower left-hand corner of that picture, which makes it easy to move around.  But, I plan on leaving in right where it is 99% of the time, since it’s hidden and out of the way.

That’s it for this project!

xox, katie

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October 25, 2011 · 11:36 am

Dining Room Addition

Despite many of the recent posts, we ARE still building a bunch of furniture in addition to keeping the Goodwills of Indianapolis in business.  This post is about the latest addition to our dining room…this buffet!

Here’s a quick synopsis of how we did it [although the details might be a little sketchy because (a) Bryan did most of the building, not me, and (b) we’ve been working on this over the course of a couple months].

This was another build off Ana White’s website, but we made quite a few changes since we found that some of the measurements were a little “off” (could have been her error or ours…who knows).  Regardless, we tried to stick to the plans as much as possible and fake it when things didn’t work out quite right.

The nice thing about Ana’s website is that you get the entire cut list (i.e., what boards you’ll need, how many of each board, how long to buy/cut the boards, etc) right at the beginning of the plan, so you too can leave Lowe’s with a car looking like this:

We followed the directions as best we could and eventually went from this:

To this:

To this (big jump where I wasn’t around to take a bunch of pictures…oops!):

We got a little too confident early on and decided to stain the top (and one of the doors) before we really should have.  We later decided that we wanted to do an antique glaze-type finish on everything except the top (more on that below) so we stopped after that door on the right.

Once we had the basic structure built, I got to do some painting.  First, I gave the entire thing (except the top) a coat of the SAME old semi-gloss white that I use for everything in my house (our violin shelf, our dresser makeover, the bathroom stripes, and trim/staircase touch-ups).  Yeah…and we STILL have some left, even after using it on another recent project that will be coming soon to the blog!  Here’s the piece after a couple coats of white:

You can see I taped around the top to avoid getting paint on the surface we wanted to keep stained (to match our dining room table).  After that, we decided to see what would happen if we put stain on top of the paint and then immediately wiped it off. The look we were going for was something similar to our kitchen cabinets:

So, I held my breath (not wanting to ruin the buffet that we had, at this point, spent over 2 months working on), and did this:

Yikes. I was scared. But, I wiped it off with a clean rag and actually loved the result! I never worked on an area bigger than that space above, because I didn’t want the stain to have time to soak in and get too dark.  After doing most of the buffet, I took this picture which is a pretty accurate depiction of the glazed look we ended up getting: 

(Note: I hadn’t done the wine rack in the middle, which is why some of it still looks very white).  Here’s the buffet after I finished the staining:

The last thing to do was give the top another coat of stain.  My favorite thing about this project was that, when we stained the top the first time, we noticed that somehow we had ended up with fingerprints on the surface.  They aren’t totally obvious so I labeled them for you :)

At first, we were BUMMED about this (the same way we’re bummed about anything that makes us look like the rookies we are when it comes to this stuff).  We talked about sanding the entire top down, restaining, etc.  Then our friend Kevin came to town for our wedding and pointed out that it made it super unique and very much “ours”.  After that, we of course decided to leave it.  The second coat of stain didn’t cover them up, thankfully.

We finished it off with a coat of satin polyurethane (you can see in the picture above how much of a difference it makes as far as letting the wood grain show through) and some oil-rubbed bronze hardware, and this baby was finished! Here it is all decorated with empty picture frames (just waiting for those wedding pics!)

And, just as a point of reference, here’s the best shot I could get of the entire dining room. And yes, I moved the two chairs on the far side of the table out of the way to get the picture.  I thought I was being sneaky ‘til I noticed the chair and how visible it is awkwardly in the kitchen entryway. Oh well, too lazy to take another one…the secret’s out!

xox, katie

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