Archives for May 2014

Okay, I left you on the edge of your seats yesterday waiting for the conclusion of our table/kitchen island saga yesterday with this guy:

All ready to get stained, but also looking a bit boring.  So we decided to spice things up a bit.  Claire and I had the brilliant idea of using a herringbone pattern on the front of this guy to give him a little pizzazz.  (PS TOTALLY WORTH IT NOW, but partway through this project I was DEFINITELY regretting this idea).  If you’ve been around here for a little while you may remember the stage project that we did for the youth area of the church with different shades of wood stain, so we decided to carry that trend through the church for this project. I used wood molding from Home Depot and just started out cutting 8″ long pieces and laying them out in a herringbone pattern.

Once we had all of the pieces cut, we stained them in 3 different shades of stain:

And in case some of you who have known me forever have seen my recent organizing posts and said: That is NOT THE MJ I KNOW! Rest assured, I’m still the same old me… here’s what the rest of the garage looked like during this project:

LOVELY.

Anyway, the next part was the hardest part of the whole project: painstakingly piecing together all of the smaller pieces of the herringbone pattern.  And here is where I have to say that it is SO IMPORTANT to have good friends and family, I was on a deadline to get this done and I had to go to an event I had promised someone I would attend.  So I left my husband, my brother and his wife to finish up the final steps of this project.  We figured out the easiest way to do it was take the already stained pieces and lay each one over the spot it needed to go, mark it and cut them individually.  So it worked best to have someone marking them and someone cutting them (CAREFULLY) on the miter saw.

Once they were all cut, we just wood glued them down.  The fit was pretty tight already, so the wood glue was just a little extra insurance.  And this isn’t going to get a lot of wear and tear since it is on the front of the piece.

BUT OHHHHH it was worth it… Check out how cool it looks!!

Like any home made piece, it isn’t perfect.  But I love it! And I love seeing it in its home at church:

We have an artist who works for the church who painted that mural and hand-drew with chalk the cover to the CD that is displayed on the right.  CRAZY talented.  CRAZY.

The backside is a little rough, but the drawer works (mostly) and it has enough room for all the things they needed to store, so its perfect! (PS Can you tell I worked connection corner on Sunday and had my Dr. Pepper addiction fulfilled?)

Looks pretty good if I do say so myself!!

I’m finally posting about the project my friend Claire asked me to take on last fall, but because of scheduling and my brother’s wedding, I didn’t get around to starting it until late March.  It was a multi-weekend project but we finished it up just in time for Easter (I told you I was behind on posts!).  Claire works for our church and had this great idea for a welcome desk that meshed better with the personality of our contemporary service.  So she and I talked through plans and decided that it should be about kitchen island size.  So I went to my normal blog stop for plans and found Ana-White’s plans for this kitchen island.  I’ve used Ana-White plans a few times before, most notably for this dining room table.  I figured I could alter it a bit to make it work for us.  You know, like putting in a shelf instead of the X for wine storage.  (Not that I don’t like a glass of wine, but this maybe not appropriate for the church’s welcome desk).  And we only really needed one drawer and no cabinet fronts, so I only used the plans really as a model for the base of the structure.

Step one is basically constructing the box out of ¾ inch plywood.  We had Home Depot cut two sheets of the plywood in half vertically, and then once we got home we cut two of those halves (so one full sheet) into shelves and the dividers.

I used my kreg jig on the inside of each of the dividers to secure it to the base, being sure to go ahead and put in pocket hole locations for assembling the top whenever we got to that point.  Since I was winging it, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to use as a top for the piece yet, but knew I would want to secure it from the bottom, leaving a smooth top.

The next step was to add in braces between each section to give the backing something to attach to. IF you are going to be adding in a drawer or drawers, be very very sure everything is square. Otherwise you may have to take apart and reassemble several times… ask me how I know.  Oh and here is where I will stop giving you advice on how to put in a drawer and tell you to find other sources… mine only kind of works. And that was after reassembling 3 times. It probably won’t be the last drawer I ever attempt to build, so I’ll let you know if the next time is successful.  If you want more qualified instructions, I like Sandra’s tutorial about drawer assembly here.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves we aren’t ready for the drawer yet.

The back (front?) piece was a piece of ¼ plywood cut down to size and secured in using wood glue and an 18 gauge nail gun.  From there we assembled face frames using 1x4s and 1x2s to create the pattern.  One for each side and one for on top of the ¼ plywood we’ve just attached.

We knew for size reasons we didn’t want the top of the island extending out any further than the actual island, and I realized that I had a leftover piece of the ¾ inch plywood that would cover the top perfectly except for the top of the face frame that we’ve already cut, assembled, glued and nailed onto the front… that puppy was NOT coming off.  But since plywood like that isn’t cheap, Claire and I came up with a more decorative solution of adding a piece of cove molding to bridge the gap between the top of the face frame and the front of the plywood on the top.  I think it actually adds a lot of character to the piece, so I’m happy with the snafu. This is the point of the project where I started to get pretty rushed for time and somewhat frustrated with how long it was taking, so unfortunately I don’t have great pictures of this step.  (you can see the gap in the picture below)

We did decide to add some heavy duty casters to the bottom of the piece to make it easier to roll out of Each caster has three long screws in it, since the fourth would drill up through the bottom of the piece. But we’ve moved this piece around quite a bit and they have held up very securely.

Next up we cut the shelves two for each of the outer sections and one for the inner section and secured those using the kreg jig pocket holes. Then it was time to attach the face frame to the open side and complete the drawer.  Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not going to even begin to tell you how to build a drawer because I messed it up completely, but there are lots of great bloggers out there who have successfully done this, so I highly recommend checking them out if you are adventurous enough to try it!

And because this post has gotten CRAZY long… I’m going to leave you with the dreaded Cliffhanger… tune in tomorrow for the second half of our adventure!  (you’ll want to tune in… it involves an AWESOME herringbone addition!)