Tag Archives: build

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 8, 2011 · 9:41 am

Bathroom Storage Solution

Good morning!

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Ours consisted of a trip to Lowe’s and an afternoon of building…who is surprised?? Can’t complain though…the chill of fall is definitely in the air, which means our unheated one car garage-turned-workshop will soon lose it’s appeal as our go-to workspace. So, while the weather cooperates, we’ll be out there trying to finish up a few projects we are determined to do this year before it gets too cold (obviously this means you’re all getting hand built stuff for X-Mas…sorry).

I think I’ve discussed this on here before, but we have 1.5 bathrooms in our house and they are probably the smallest bathrooms ever.  You’ve already seen our half bath…

(Find out about how we painted those stripes here, and about that shelf we built here).

Anyways, now that the half bath is good shape for the time being, we thought we should spend a little time on our “master” bath.  I say “master” like that, not because I approve of unnecessary quotation marks (find out more about that here, haha), but because it’s really a lousy excuse for a master bath.

 

Not so bad at first glance, but it’s definitely tiny and space is limited. There is some storage under the sink and above the toilet, but it wasn’t working for us (imagine various toiletries falling out of that cabinet into the toilet. Yep, that happened.) So the idea for a new storage shelf was born, and the only place to put it was under the window opposite the sink/toilet wall.

Since the shelf had to be the perfect size to fit under the window and still allow the door to swing past it, Bryan designed this shelf on his own (that’s right, this is NOT just a post about us building something from Ana White’s website! Yippee!!) The design was really just based on the idea that we needed a place to store some towels, some toiletries, and some other bathroom necessities.  We found a couple woven baskets at Lowe’s to bring some natural texture into the room, and designed the shelf heights/widths around those.  We also may or may not have measured the top shelf to hold TP rolls. Hey, might as well make sure they’ll fit! Here are a few detail shots of the building process:

Bryan using uniform spacers to make sure the shelf height is the same on both sides:

If you look closely at the picture below, you’ll see two pocket holes on the underside of the shelf, made using the amazing Kreg Jig…a must for almost every project we’ve ever done.

Here are some of the fancy routed edges:

And some more fancy woodwork on the legs:

We used the same stain we’ve been using for everything in our house lately (Minwax Stain in Ebony), and gave the entire thing a coat of satin polyurethane since it’ll be in a humid environment.

Here it is in it’s new home, all dolled up:

No. We aren’t planning on keeping 6 rolls of toilet paper in there at all times. But we could, and that’s pretty cool.

Another angle…

And just because I haven’t mentioned Goodwill yet in this post, both of the glass canisters (holding Q-tips and cotton balls) are of course thrifted:

Now that we’ve solved the storage problems, I’d really love to tackle some of the bigger design problems in there.  Suffice it to say, the tiling throughout the room is SO bad that it’s driving us both insane. I don’t think we’re ready to do a real project like that, especially considering this is our only shower and a long drawn-out demo involving two amateur DIY-ers could possibly ruin our marriage (anyone else been watching Marriage Under Construction on the DIY Channel? At least we’re not as bad as them…)

Happy Tuesday 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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