Is shopping an accomplishment?

Blogging is a little funny. I always wonder what is momentous enough to blog about and am continually amazed at the minutia of people's lives that can be found on blogs. Recipes with goat meat, what to do on a rainy day with 100 yards of string, a daily log of a pet's bowel movements, it's all fodder for a blog.

I blog primarily to let friends and family (since most of them live far away from us) see what is happening at our house. Obviously if I am making some progress in a room, I'd want to let people know about it. Also, if a particular product or tool came in handy, it is worth mentioning. What about shopping? Does just buying something qualify for an entry? I guess in the vein of keeping everyone up to date with what is happening at the tiny bungalow, it seems o.k. to mention it but I can't help but feel a little guilty because not much effort is really put forth in it.

I haven't done much on the house in the past few weeks. Yeah, I am still puttering around in the garden but besides that, we had friends in last week and I took a week to prepare for guests - so we are going on a good 3 weeks of inactivity. In the absence of any true restoration work, I'll share a bit about my latest buy.

No matter how quiet things get on the home front, I continue to spend plenty of time browsing Craig's List. A couple weeks ago, I came across a buy that i thought was just too good to pass up. Yesterday, I moved our new wardrobe and chest of drawers into the bedroom. They are both old pieces and look pretty nice. The hardware is new but it all compliments the house so I think it was a good buy.

If/when I finish the bedroom, it will be a great addition and the room will look like a true Arts & Crafts room. Until then, we still have to "imagine".

The wardrobe that I spent about a month restoring last year has now been relocated to the front entry. I need to put some shims under it because it leans with the floor. It will be nice to have a coat closet near the front door now. I guess I will be scrapping my plans for a mirror and coat rack.

Deck the Halls

The wardrobe project ended up turning out O.K. after all. If I get up enough energy, I may do one more sanding and apply a coat of glossy poly on it but for now it works just fine. Since this project, I've spent the last couple of weekends cleaning up the yard (and cleaning off the front porch after the wardrobe project). I also put up the holiday lighting.

The yard work was easy. While we were away on vacation, a landscape service accidentally came to the wrong house. Either this happened or someone hired a service for us and we'll never know. We arrived home to a yard clean of all debris - our raspberries in the back were cut back and a lot of overgrown weeds were removed near our alley. This left me with only a few small chores - Nice. This is the first time I've been able to decorate a house. I wasn't too ambitious. In the middle of installing the lights, our first major snowstorm hit. This made the street look great but it slowed the decorating down a bit. I installed part of the lighting one weekend and part of it the next. Either way, it is done and the house looks fine.I think that next year I want to plan one of those elaborate traffic-stopping dioramas on the front porch. We'll see how much time I have at that point.

Do Not Apply Over Stearates

The tiniest things can make a project go bad – or at least make you stress out about an ongoing project. For the past few days, I have been stripping and refinishing a wardrobe. It is not a very nice wardrobe but it is wood, it’s pretty solid, and it’s nice and big. I intended on stripping it and then using Polyshades to stain/finish it. I figured this was a simple and quick way to make an old piece of furniture look “not too bad”.

The stripping went along easily. I used Citri-Strip (for the first time) and it did a great job of removing several layers of paint and other finish. Once complete with this, I spent some time wiping down small areas of the wardrobe with some mineral spirits to remove any excess residue. When I was done, the piece had a slightly damp feeling to the touch. I figured I would let it dry a little while and see what happened.

A few hours later, the damp feeling had lessened but there was still a slight tackyness to the wood. I figured this was no big deal and went along and applied the first coat of the Polyshades. I got the finish to look pretty good and left it for a couple of hours. When I came back, I quickly realized that something was wrong. I have used Polyshades in the past and it had always dried fairly quickly. All of the surfaces of the wardrobe were still wet to the touch.

I quickly grabbed the can of Polyshades and read the directions. One item stood out: “Do not use over paint, lacquer, shellac, polishes or products containing stearates.” Could any combination of these sthings have previously been on the wardrobe? Could I possibly have not gotten all of the previous finish off and now something underneath would ruin what I thought would be a quick and easy project? Was there some residue left behind from the Citri-strip? Of course, my mind started racing. I guess the ultimate lesson here is to be sure that the stripper gets down to the bare wood and that everything is dry to the touch before proceeding.

I waited overnight and found that there was some success – the drawer front and some of the rails had dried. An odd result was that the finish was now a high-gloss and not the satin finish that the can advertised. The surface still had a slight tack to it in isolated areas too. Well, I have never been a patient person (which is not a good trait to have if you are fixing up an old home) so I decided to push ahead and apply a second coat of poly. Again, I waited overnight the finish was now slightly less glossy also there were fewer tacky areas.

The next phase will be to clean and paint the inside and replace the back of the cabinet with cedar bead board. I hope that there is no more trouble lurking under the finish – or this could get really ugly. More to come...

More Space in Our Bungalow

Our home is a true bungalow. It is not one of those two-story homes pretending to be a bungalow. It doesn’t have a “great room” or a family room any of those spacious new rooms. It is simple and it is small. It has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and front porch.

Bungalows are great homes because they are typically compact and efficient. They are nice and simple. For people that need a lot of space, I would not recommend a bungalow. If you bought one, you are likely to screw it up with some sort of strange addition. Not all additions are bad, just most of them.

One unfortunate thing about bungalows is that they rarely have enough storage space. Our home has two closets, one in each bedroom. There is no broom closet, linen closet or coat closet. Luckily, we do have a finished basement and this has some additional storage areas. Having the basement is great for our tools and things that we don’t use everyday but it is not so good for socks, underwear, shirts and other daily items.

Over the next few weeks, we hope to remedy some of our storage issues in the house. One project is a hall mirror and coat rack and shelf. I will be installing this as a built-in over the next couple weeks. With any luck, it will be completed by Christmas. The project is a piece of another old house, a wardrobe that I found on craigslist. I hope to refinish it and put it in the bedroom. It would be great if some day we could have it installed as a built-in. I just don’t know where. Perhaps when I screw up the Tiny Bungalow with our addition.