Bloggy

I got married to my hunney! Stopped blogging for a couple years it seems... missed some important details. Brandon ended up coming with me to Kentucky for nursing school. Of course he waited until the last possible minute to decide, but he came! He asked me to marry him during the second semester, right before the second huge Med/Surg test. I was a little distracted, and only got a B. When we got to Nevada, we got hitched at the Justice of the Peace with both sets of parents there by our sides. We'd imagined eloping, but the parents wouldn't have it and drove in from out of state! Looking back I am so glad they did. If the situation were a little different, I'd have loved to throw a big party. But times were tough then. We were so broke, and lived in this ucky little apartment. We just wanted to be hitched, none of the fluffy stuff mattered. We had a cake from Trader Joes and BBQed burgers on a grill outside the apartment after the wedding. I had (stupidly) worked the night...

I like brown! Hmm. Too basic?

This is another recent project. The house came with 2 bedrooms... used to be 3, but the dining room was obviously once a bedroom. When we moved in, there was a closet in the dining room, with the same ugly doors as in the guest bedroom. I took those out day 1, and started imagining what I wanted in its spot. We decided on an office/bookcase, since maybe one day the guest room would house a kidlet...? The challenge was designing a space around the heating vent that went through the back left corner of the closet, and also doing it for next to nothing since I'm cheap. So, I learned how to use the circular saw and got some pine boards and just started in. The final color of the room (it's 4th color in under a year) is called Butter Rum, and it's perfect-- not too dark, not too bright. The shelves match our accent wall which is brown. I think there are 4 different shades of brown on my walls throughout the house. Love it. The bookcase is a success, and I owe it all to fancy tr...

One of my favorite recent projects is the resurrection of this Lane Cedar Chest from the 1940s. The chest was found in grandma's house when she moved out after grandpa died. It had been living in an upstairs closet for who knows how long. There were glue spots on the veneer, the polyurethane was wrinkled and spotted like an alligator... it was gross. I had it hiding at my house for months, and one day I decided to just dig in and fix it! Dirty, lumpy, cedar chest. I bought a sander finally after hand sanding for hours to the demise of my fingerprints, and sanded the whole thing down. I was so lucky that the veneer was thick enough that I only sanded through in a few parts. Man I was lucky!! Lesson learned, don't sand veneer with power tools!! finished! Looking back I probably should have stripped it first to see where that got me. Then I stained it with natural stain from Minwax, then used polyurethane over the top, several coats. I wasn't sure if that was the th...