Wednesday, April 4, 2012

FINALLY!!!

In more ways than one, this post is a big ol sigh of relief. First, I haven't updated in a looong time, and yet I've had PLENTY of things to post about. I've sewn LOTS of flowers, decorated the churchy (getting ready to redecorate for spring this weekend), made reusable shopping bags, dyed old dresses, spray painted no less than 75 items... and that's probably not an exxageration, helped J redecorate his place, and traveled to just about everywhere, it seems. Sooooo needless to say, it's been a busy time... but really fun time. I've come to a place of such hope and peace and happiness, and my life just feels settled right now. It's pretty fun.

*Disclaimer. The pics aren't that great. Iphones are great, until you want nice pictures to put on a blog. Then they're useful in conveying information, but not in getting a fancypants picture.*

Soooo along with all those projects, J had this tv cabinet. I didn't particularly care for the cabinet, as it was, and... well... it needed to be painted. And sanded. And remade.

We took our happy little selves to home depot for some supplies (screws, nails, magnet closures, quarter round, flat trim, mdf, something to wrap fabric around for the door inserts, new feet- we saved about $20 by using fencepost toppers instead of actual furniture feet- and kilz), and started hacking away. Suprisingly, the supplies cost us somewheres around the $50-60 range, which was WAY more than we were expecting. But I took a few things back that I decided I didn't need, including the kilz (because we bought an entire gallon, and I wasn't convinced we'd need it), we probably still had around $40 invested. And then lo and behold Ace had a free giveaway of a quart of paint... so J and I marched our little selves to the store and picked up two free quarts, color matched to the shade of grey we had already picked out. (And we still have about 1.5 quarts leftover! What else can we paint??!?!?)

Essentially, all the front panels needed to come off- the two interior ones were operable, while the two exterior ones were fixed. This made no sense to me, so I decided to have the interior open, with the two end doors operable. Which also meant I had to finish out the interiors to make it an actual compartment. (It was completely open on the inside.) Lots of cutting, adding quarter round (worst day(s) ever were figuring out how to get the angles correct for that), caulking, sanding, gorilla-glue-ing, screwing (into pressboard, which is no easy task), and general frustration ensued. In all my years of constructing and crafting, I don't think I've ever come across pressboard as hard as this. I broke off two screw heads attempting to get the feet secured. Which, btw, don't use drywall screws for these kinds of jobs. Duh.


Anyway, I think I was more anxious to get this finished than to do everything 100%- there are things that will either get fixed or will fall into the "nobody else besides us will know" category. But... THE GRAND REVEAL!! I'm real excited to have this complete.



But now we need to change up some other things to go with the new tv cabinet. :)

Also, two things to note: I won the office pool for March Madness, by selecting the winner on team colors and mascots. FINALLY, my methods paid off! And also, Sic 'em LadyBears.