Headboard facelift

With the trunk project on hold until I get the tung oil + citrus solvent, I was itching to get something else done off my mental to do list.  (Something relatively quick and easy)  One of the ideas floating around in my head was to add some nailhead trim to our headboard, which I have been seeing everywhere lately. 

In the stores:

West Elm's Nailhead Upholstered Headboard ($449)

Crate and Barrel's Colette Bed ($1699)

Around the blogs:

A lovely curvy version from Centsational Girl:

A great example of double rows of trim from Casa Sugar:

I already had the rectangular upholstered headboard I made a while back, so all I needed to do was add the nailheads.  While I really like the double rows in the picture right above, our headboard is pretty small, so I wasn't sure if it was going to work.  I figured I would start with the outside row and then evaluate if I wanted to do the inside row.   

The hardest thing about this project was finding the trim.   Centsational Girl recommended getting it online from Beacon Fabrics, which would have worked, but I was feeling impatient and didn't want to wait for something to get shipped to me.   Ironically, the only place in town that I could find it was Rockler Woodworking, a specialty woodworking store that I had originally found when looking for tung oil stuff.  I got two packs of their 6 ft nail strips for $15, and I was in business.  Here I am part way through the first side, and already loving it:

These are not individual nailheads, but a strip where every 5th nailhead is a hole that you tap an actual nail into using a rubber mallet.  Way easier than doing them one by one.  I didn't even take the headboard down, just supported it with my other hand as I was banging into it. (Our headboard is attached to the bed, not the wall, as many are.  If yours is attached to the wall, I would recommend taking it down) Here is the finished product:

Not perfect, but not half bad.   Here is a comparison from before the nailheads:

(really old picture - notice the carpet?) And after:

It was really the touch I needed to define the headboard and make it feel finished.  And as much as I love the double row look, I think our headboard is just too small for that.  So there it is - quick, easy, cheap, and DONE.  My favorite type of project!   

Trunk rehab stage 1: Conquer the smell

Step 1:  Remove the old covering.  This was pretty easy - it mostly came off in large pieces.  Here it is about half way through:

And all done:

Good news here is that 90% of the smell was gone just by removing the fabric.  But the wood still had remnants of that nasty glue as well as some stains. 

Step 2: Start cleaning.  I went to work with a spray bottle of Mrs. Meyers and a scrubbing sponge.  That got things a lot better, but it still had some of the smell.  Here we are after round 1 of cleaning:

Step 3:  Clean some more.  I did a little looking around online, and saw several recommendations for using distilled white vinegar to combat musty smells.  So I did round two of scrubbing with some vinegar (in a spray bottle), and more Mrs. Meyers.  And now the wood is looking fresh and clean.

Well, as clean as you can expect 100 year old unfinished wood with lots of nails in it to look.  Here is a close-up of the progression:

And the smell?  There is maybe 1% left.  Which I think is going to disappear if I just leave the trunk open for a few days.  (The outside smelled a bit when we first got it, but it dissipated rather quickly.)

So, what is the plan from here?  A couple considerations I had in deciding what to do:

•  To make maximum use of space, I would like to have a tray to sit in the top of bars on the sides.
• Now that I have cleaned up all that wood, I would like to leave some of it exposed, but need to finish it somehow
• I do want to line it, since the bottom has cracks etc.
• Lining with fabric shouldn't be that difficult, but I am worried about the areas around the hinge and the bars as being tough to do.
• It would be great to incorporate aromatic cedar, since I will be using this to store linens.

What I ended up deciding on was lining it with the drop cloth around the bottom, up to the point of where the bars are, and then leaving the rest exposed wood.  All of the wood will get a tung oil finish, which I am excited to try out, and was recommended by people that refinish trunks professionally.   I will then build a tray to fit inside with a aromatic cedar bottom, which should help things stored in both parts of the trunk stay fresh.  Sounds easy, right? 

I am running into a snag with that plan right off the bat.  All of the tung oil finishes that I have been able to find (Like this one that is at your average home improvement store) are tung oil thinned with mineral spirits.  I am trying to use non-toxic, green products as much as possible, never mind the fact that I am doing all of this inside and wouldn't open mineral spirits inside the house no matter how many windows are open.  I was able to find a place locally where I can buy 100% pure tung oil, but I would need to thin it myself using a non-toxic replacement for mineral spirits like a citrus solvent, since the oil is too thick to work with when it is pure.  This being Seattle, you would think that I could find a place to here to buy either a tung oil finish made with non-toxic solvents, or at least the non-toxic solvent on it's own and do my own thinning, but that does not seem to be possible.   So I had to order it off of the internet, and wait for it to arrive.  I don't think I will get it by this weekend, which means this project is stalled for now.  :(

My next victim

 I did have a hard time deciding what to work on next.  Ultimately, my decision came down to function - most of the projects I am considering are pretty much cosmetic changes, which are really fun - but completing this one will give us more storage that we really need right now.  So what did I chose?

This!  I got this trunk off of Craigslist for $80 back in November.  It is going to sit at the end of our bed:

It provides a place to sit while putting on your socks, as well as a ton of storage space on the inside, which is going to be primarily used for the new queen sized air mattress and bedding for it.  (Recap - we got rid of the bed in the second bedroom back when we were doing the floors.  The air mattress provides a place for guests when we need it without taking over that room 24/7, but even all packed up, that mattress needs a place to live!)  On the design side of things, I think that the trunk is a nice little "something old" for our bedroom - it gives the room a little more character.

I really love this trunk.  Here are a few shots of the awesome details on the outside:

At this point I haven't done anything to it but clean off the obvious dirt.  Down the line I may look at trying to clean up the outside a little bit, but my project for now is the inside:

Not pretty.  And what I can't convey through the internet is the SMELL.  Seriously, the inside of this thing smells disgusting.  After getting the trunk, I started some research on old trunks and what to do with them.  This website had some helpful tips, and also gave me a hint as to why it smells so bad - back when they were making these things, the glue that was used to attach fabric/paper lining had ....um... animal components.  That are now rotting 100 years later.  Eww!  In any case, I really can't use the inside for anything until I get the smell taken care of and have things generally fresh and clean in there.  Updates coming soon....

Weekend progress

The weekend was reasonably productive, and I did manage to (mostly) take care of my list of "unfinished" items.  And I have the photographic evidence to prove it. 

• Wood filler in a few spots on the floor

Before:

After:

• Touch up painting on some of the trim - I didn't take photos of this, but I did it!
• Paint the inside of the door to the bathroom

1. Looking all dirty (This picture does not do it justice - it looked gross.  At one point in time previously I had cleaned it, and then touched it up with some not-quite-matching white paint I had on hand.  And then it got dirty all over again):

2. Clean, but missing some paint:

3. All better:

• Clean up the door frame on the laundry closet.  This requires a little bit of explaining.  In most doors (well, maybe all) there is a little piece of wood that the door bumps up against as it shuts, I think it is called the door jamb.  

 Well, the door on the little closet where the washer and dryer live had one, until it became necessary (due to some washer leakage issues) to remove the washer and dryer from the closet.  The people who re-finished our place must have put the door jamb on after the washer and dryer had been installed, because it was impossible to get those things out without removing it.  To take it off, I had to remove some screws, and then cut along the caulk/paint that was covering the seam between the frame and the jamb.  After that quick and dirty removal, we were left with this:

Not so pretty.  But once we had it off, we decided to just leave it that way, just in case we ever want to get back there again.  But the leftover caulk and holes annoyed me every time I opened up the door.  A little caulk scraping, hole filling, sanding and painting, and here we are:

Much better.  The door jamb also prevented opening the detergent loading tray on the washing machine, so now we have the added bonus of being able to use that as well!

The only thing I have left on this is that I need to get new transition molding cut and put in, since the current stuff has a notch for the door jamb, but I didn't have time to get to that this weekend.

• Do some "touch-up" sewing on one of my pillow covers, as well as some patching/hemming I have to do on some clothes.

I only took photos of the pillow.  This was from my first piping project.  When you are doing piping, you have to overlap at the beginning/end of the strand, so that then ends are on the inside, not sticking out of, your pillow.  It is by far the worst part of doing piping.  Here is what the pillow looked like from the front (which is what it is supposed to look like):

Here is from the back, in that same spot:

Oops.  Kinda missed that one end.  At the time I was so excited that I had gotten through it that I didn't even notice what the back looked like, and once I did, it was already on the pillow and didn't feel like dealing with it.  But it just took a few minutes (I did it on my first try!), to get the back looking like this:

Yay!  It feels good to get all that crossed off the list, and it is time to get on to some new things.  I might even start working on one of them tonight! 

Unfinished business

Happy New Year everyone!  Although I have to say - 5 days into the new year and it already feels like the holidays were forever ago.  Christmas decorations are put away (tear sliding down my cheek) and now that the place is coming back together to it's normal state.  So the question becomes, what to do next?

It's not like I don't have plenty of options.  I have several things left from my list that I was supposedly going to do over the summer (that was created before I had any concept how long the floors were going to take), a coffee table that needs to be refinished, another little craigslist treasure that I haven't even shown you guys yet that needs some work, and some new ideas that have been popping up. 

But before I get all up in new projects, I want to take a moment to clean up some of the "leftovers"  Such as:

• Wood filler in a few spots on the floor (in the edges around doorways and such)
• Touch up painting on some of the trim
• Paint the inside of the door to the bathroom.  (It got all grimy from hands touching it, I tried to scrub away the grime, and in the process took off some of the paint.  The doors are not painted with the nice, easy to clean semi-gloss trim paint that is on all of the moldings, so I think a coat of that should fix things up.  Currently, it annoys me every time I am in the bathroom)
• Clean up the door frame on the laundry closet.  Sounds random, I know.  It's a long story - I will explain later.
• Do some "touch-up" sewing on one of my pillow covers, as well as some patching/hemming I have to do on some clothes.

It's really not a lot to do - maybe a day's work if I don't have anything else going on and I am motivated - which can be hard when what you are working on isn't the "fun stuff".  But if I don't do this now, before I get into something else, I am sure that it is just going keep on nagging at me.  I am not really one for New Year's resolutions, but I do think that getting a fresh start every now and then is important - all those little unfinished things weigh on you, whether you realize it or not.  My goal this weekend is to lighten the load - wish me luck! 

Merry Christmas!

Hello everybody!  Just wanted to post one last bit of Christmas prettiness while I still can.  (I would decorate like this all year long, if it was socially acceptable)  These photos actually come from my office building, where they do a pretty darn good job decorating for Christmas  - although I have to apologize for the picture quality - they were all taken on my phone.  So this all looks much prettier in person.  While my own Christmas decor is most definitely traditional, I can appreciate the modern version as well:

The strands of lights that go up the the ceiling are my favorite part.  Relatively simple to do and inexpensive, but a really cool effect.

I also really like the ornaments they have hung in the tree branches.  Those icicles are nothing like the super cheesy ones that we put on the tree when I was a little kid. (Not that they weren't awesome then, but it was the 80's)

And the wreaths are pretty cool too!  I love the different textures in the ornaments, and the feathers are a fun, unexpected touch.  I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas! 

More christmas-y-ness

Yes, that is a word.  I can't believe you even questioned it.  So the Christmas cards are starting to pour in, right?  The last few years I have been putting them up on the fridge, but I thought I would get a little more creative this year, using some things I had around the house:

•  clothespins (I used some in our wedding, and have kept the package of them around, knowing they would come in handy at some point in time)
• craft paint
• glitter
• ribbon (technically this was purchased today, but for the purpose of wrapping presents, not any crafty projects)

I am sure you can already figure out how this is going to come together.  Paint the front of the clothespins, and then really quickly, before the paint is dry, cover it in ample glitter, shake off excess glitter, and let dry.  I did about 15 of them in 20 minutes, and that included getting everything out and putting it away again.  Here they are:

(Yes they are drying on an opened envelope of one of the aforementioned Christmas cards.  That is actually on purpose, it will come in handy for the next step.)

I would let them dry for at least 30 minutes to make sure they are really hardened.  Then carefully with your finger wipe away any not-so-stuck-on glitter on to the piece of paper that they have been drying on.  Dump excess glitter in the garbage.  Glitter is going to get everywhere no matter what you do, but this does at least minimize things.   Note: you should still have plenty of glitter on them.  Here is what a few of mine looked like after the wiping away:

If you want to have the truly dripping with glitter look, I would recommend letting the paint dry for a few minutes sans glitter, and then adding some craft glue that will dry clear, and sprinkling the glitter over that.  I was lazy, so I did not take that extra step, but I am sure they would look pretty if you did. Oh, and if you don't like the glitter look, just plain painted, or covered with some Christmas-y scrapbook paper, or even wrapping paper, would look cute too.

Anyways, you are pretty much done.  Next you need something of the string/ribbon variety to hang it on.  I used ribbon, partly because I couldn't find any string.  You also need to decide what shape you want to hang the ribbon in.  I did a couple of swags under the frames in the living room:

   

I used white thumbtacks to hang the ribbon, and then painted them silver so that they would blend in more.  I did have a few other ideas for how you could hang the ribbon.  If you want a more modern look, you could do straight vertical or horizontal stripes, or you could also zig zag it back and forth for a  Christmas tree like shape, sort of like this:

And then all you have to do is hang up the cards.  Oh - and a word on using the cheap "for wrapping presents" ribbon like I did - I reinforced the points where I put the thumbtacks through with clear packing tape, otherwise the thumbtack would have just shredded through the ribbon.  Happy Christmas card hanging!

Oh, and just for fun, here is our mini Christmas trees that are in the second bedroom.  They are very Charlie Brown-esque, but that is what I love about them.  I forgot to include them when I posted our other Christmas decorations.