Revisiting That To Do List

So two weeks ago I posted my "around the house" to do list here. It looked something like this:

1. Frame several maps/posters and pieces of art.
2. Hang up framed items.
3. Pick up professionally framed maps/posters and hang them up.
4. Hang a sconce that has been sitting in our front room closet for months.
5. Convert my daughter's crib into a toddler bed.
6. Figure out how to refinish a piece of wooden furniture.
7. Refinish the chair that will go with the desk in the front room.

As of today items one through five are totally done. I love how the house looks with the walls finally occupied by all of our wonderful geeky art. It is fantastic. The random sconce isn't too bad either. 

As far as my daughter's switch to sleeping in a big-girl bed, it has been mostly a smooth transition. She usually is pretty good about going to bed or down for her nap. I believe that at least part of this is because her dad is such an avid napper, and she sees from his example that sleeping is an okay thing to do. We have established a little bit of a routine that involves her unplugging her night light after about five or ten minutes and then walking over to the door and running said night light back and forth across the door until I go in to plug it back into the outlet, at which time she will get back into bed and say "night, night." Sometimes this only happens once, sometimes it happens several times. Usually after about an hour or so she falls asleep. Every once in a while I will hear her playing in there, and I am staying away unless the noises I hear suggest things are being used in a really improper way. Earlier this week she kept trying to get into her dresser and I finally asked if she wanted to change her clothes. After a hearty "yeah!" We put her in new jammies and she was out like a light. Once or twice I have gone in after nap time to find that she had pulled a pair of shoes out of her closet and put them on her feet before conking out. But more or less she's got the whole thing figured out, and she seems to like the new configuration in her room.

Now, item six on the list, well, I have more or less accomplished that. In theory, I know exactly what needs to be done. Which leads us to item seven...

...yeah, that's still definitely a work in progress. Last weekend I went out back during nap time and got all set up, and I did manage to get the first layer of the current finish removed. Yay, me! But it was hot as all get out (we've been over a hundred degrees most days for a while now), and I may have gotten dosed with some of the stripper fumes even though I did take precautions. Because the rest of that night? Ooh, I was not feeling good, y'all. So when nap time Sunday rolled around, I really didn't have it in me to go back out there and work on the chair again. Then Sunday evening I felt the beginnings of a sore throat, and our AC went out (again). This led to a rather miserable Monday. We got the AC fixed back up Monday afternoon thankfully, but in between that and whatever I had come down with and my bad experience on Saturday, well...that poor chair just sat neglected on my back porch all week. I do still want to try to get it done before my daughter's birthday party though, which gives me a little over a week. Gonna try a new tack--I got up early this morning and took another layer of the finish off (and was extra careful about the fumes). I think I've gone as far as the chemical stripper can take me though, so tomorrow and Sunday I'm gonna sand that sucker down for all I am worth and see where to go from there. Wish me luck!

Hey, I did get the cushion re-padded and recovered at least. That's a start, right?

Then I just have to work on cleaning the living room carpet (and the rest of the house) before that birthday party...

Mostly Worth The Lack Of Sleep

You may remember that a while back I mentioned that I had ordered a new desk, one meant to eventually become my daughter's homework desk. Well, it arrived some time last week, but unfortunately the perils of shipping had caught up with me (I order so much freaking stuff online it really isn't a wonder), and when I opened up the box and started pulling out the pieces to make sure they were all there and intact, well...yeah, not so much.

Everything was there, certainly. The problem was the top of the desk, the big huge massive piece that everything else attaches to. It was cracked in multiple places, including one very large line right down the middle. Sigh. Thankfully the company that made the desk gets that damage does occur during shipping and has a really efficient (and free) parts replacement department. So I went online to tell them I needed a new top as mine arrived mangled and the next day they shipped it out. Of course, now I have a big broken plank taking up space in my garage until the start of next month, but there are worse problems, I will grant you.

The replacement piece arrived on Tuesday and I decided to put the desk together that night once my daughter had gone to bed. Normally I don't mind, and even often enjoy, when she "helps" me, but I get, um, cranky sometimes when doing things like assembling my furniture, so I figured it would be best for both of us if I did that while she wasn't around. My poor husband wasn't so fortunate. He was gracious enough to allow me to totally disrupt his evening by making him help me by holding up various pieces as I put them together (and reattaching the feet after I put them on the wrong end of the legs). Once we had the basic desk put together and upright, I let him loose and he called it a night. I stayed up for another hour and a half or so getting the various drawers and sliding bits assembled. Was up until two-thirty in the morning getting it done, but I've got to say, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I even managed to pick one that doesn't cover the
oversized vent on the wall, go me!

Let's see, we've got an alien from Toy Story, a Lego alien from
Toy Story, Zeke from Ctrl+Alt+Del, Lego Indiana Jones,
coloring supplies, a box of notecards...

...a Lego TIE Fighter complete with Darth Vader, R2-D2,
and my daughter's Spongebob Squarepants coloring books.

The kiddo checks out her new domain.

Now it just needs a chair. Speaking of which...

My updated to-do list for around the house is now as follows:

• Figure out how to refinish a wooden item.
• Refinish the chair that will go at this desk.
• Frame the various maps and convention art that needs to go on the walls (frames already purchased).
• Hang up said maps and art.
• Hang up the awesome Firefly, Star Trek, and Wheel of Time stuff we had professionally framed once it is ready to be picked up.
• Hang up that blasted sconce my husband randomly brought home from the office.
• Convert my daughter's crib to a toddler bed.

...and I think that's it. Refinishing the chair should be extra awesome, as I discovered when I finally got it down from the shelf in the garage where it has been living. I had forgotten that when my brother-in-law and his wife repainted some of our house's exterior while I was pregnant, I had let one of them stand on the chair, knowing I was going to be overhauling it anyway. So now there's big blotches of blue paint all over it that I get to sand off. Whee.

Oh, for those wondering, I know I mentioned that I was going to try to revamp a lamp that had belonged to my grandparents, but the lamp on the desk is not that lamp. I tried taking apart the old lamp and realized that I would need to tinker with the wiring to actually get all of the pieces separate, so I eighty-sixed that idea and just caved in and bought a new base. I will just tuck the old lamp in a corner in my closet for now until I either decide to send it to Goodwill or find a use for it elsewhere. 

I wish you all a fantabulous weekend! If you'll excuse me, I'm off to do some research on wood refinishing...

Feeling Ever So Handy

Do you ever get in one of those phases where you look around your house and think, "Wow, everything needs to be different right now," and then go on a crazy cleaning/redecorating/rearranging binge? No? Just me? Oh. Well. Okay then.

I go through that phase about once every year (sometimes more often but on a smaller scale) and have been going through a pretty major one lately. Now, the way we have our house set up, in most rooms there are limited ways that I can actually rearrange the furniture at this point. That's usually my go-to method of scratching this particular itch, but it doesn't really work once you've mounted your television on the wall.

So instead I am trying to find all of the small things that really irritate me and fix (or change completely) those specific things. I just bought a bunch of new lamps (that actually match each other, for once) to replace the ones that have just completely stopped working or that I really don't like anymore. I ordered a new desk to make my daughter's work space (she was going to get the old desk I got from Salvation Army a few years ago, but it is pretty beat up and the drawers are no longer cooperating and I really didn't feel like trying to fix it). Once the new desk arrives and is put together, I will rearrange some of the smaller furniture and hopefully that will make a big enough difference that I will be satisfied.

We will, of course, need a chair to go with the new desk. The current desk is more of a landing place for living room junk and a storage space for my current(ish) yarn projects. The new desk will not be used for either of these purposes (I've also gotten some organizer containers to solve the problem that getting rid of that desk will create). We have a really nice antique chair that we got several years ago from my husband's grandparents but that really, really, doesn't go with anything in the house. I have been thinking for a while that it would be a perfect chair for my daughter if I could make myself refinish and reupholster it. I have finally decided that the time has come to actually do that.

But I figured I should probably start small and work my way up.

Shortly after my daughter was born, a friend of ours who owned a piano repair shop decided to retire. This resulted in us getting a pretty awesome piano for an even more awesome price (we just had to pay to have it moved from the shop to our home). We also got the bench that went with the piano.

What, erm...lovely fabric you have there.

It has seen better days.

Now, we chose the piano we did partly because the wood color went fairly well with what we have going on in our house, and the same goes for the bench. The fabric on the bench is another story entirely. Not to mention the fact that this thing is not new (we are unsure how old it is but I promise you that upholstery dates back to at least the seventies). The foam pad on the seat had gone crunchy. That's just not right. I had been thinking for quite some time that I needed to replace the pad and fabric on the bench.

So I did.

This past weekend I dragged my husband out to JoAnn's so we could pick out a good replacement fabric for the seat (we went with a nice dark blue corduroy, which I figure will hold up nicely to Baby Girl's attentions for at least a few years). I also picked up some staples for my shiny new staple gun (bought explicitly with reupholstery in mind!), and some new padding, of course.

It only took me about an hour to do (even with a toddler helping), and I am fairly pleased with the results. It is not perfect, but we don't need it to be.

The hardest part was cleaning up all of the yellow dust from the disintegrating foam pad. I swept twice, broke out the dust buster, and then ran a Swiffer over it, which still came out completely yellow. Yeesh.

Crunchy is not good.

Yellow. Dust. EVERYwhere.

But once I got the old fabric and pad off, and had removed any nails sticking out, I gave the whole bench a good polish, then slapped on a new pad and stapled on the new fabric, and voila!

That oil really did wonders for the thing.

Who doesn't love corduroy?

Baby Girl seems to approve as well.

This seat is much comfier!

Time to jam!

All in all, I am pretty proud of myself. Now I just have to keep the momentum going. One more test project before the chair--a lamp that my grandparents gave me that I can't bring myself to throw away. If I can figure out how to take it apart so I can paint the ugly gold accents black, and refinish the wood body with the same finish I plan to use on the chair, we will be in business. It should be perfect for the new desk, in fact.

I already got a snazzy new lampshade for it and everything.