First Pallet Sign

I've been admiring the extremely trendy and rustic-chic pallet signs in stores lately. Unfortunately, the price tag and the cheesy sayings have prevented me from buying one. Okay. And my DIY attitude, too.

My desire to make one finally came to a head when I realized I had no ideas for my sister's Christmas present. She has a big-girl job now, so what do you buy the independent young woman?

After consulting my carpenter (aka, my wonderful father-in-law), we (aka, my wonderful father-in-law) assembled a pallet sign pretty quickly. Again, I am cheap, and even though I wanted gray stain originally, I borrowed leftover stain from a friend's project (Minwax Jacobean 2750).

The hard part was picking a non-cheesy, non-cliché, non-attitudinal statement. Another challenge is my horrible hand-writing and minimal skills with paint. I intended to use a projector to stencil out the letters, but the weather kept me from running to school. I wound up lettering freehand based on some art I found online. Here's the final result:

A few people have asked me "be still and know what?" Check out Psalms 46:10. Overall, not too shabby! I used Waverly semi-gloss acrylic in "Plaster" and "Celery," both found at WalMart.

Pallets: free

Stain: free

Total cost: $3.52

I'll definitely be repeating this project in the future. It probably took 4 hours in total to make a beautiful statement piece.

Desk Makeover: "New" Nightstands

Alternate title: how to offend antique enthusiasts.

This project was a looooong time coming. I bought this desk over a year ago, at my hometown thrift shop:

My initial impression: old, heavy. battered, worn, and UGLY. I hear the antique lovers screaming in protest already. If that already got your panties in a twist, hold on tight. It's going to be a bumpy ride....

So why did I buy this hunk of junk if I hated it so much? Because I had been searching and searching for matching nightstands to replace my current college-budget IKEA-wannabe set. This desk might have been ugly, but it was oozing with character - the quarter-round trim, the delicately curved drawers... I saw the desk and wished I could could just chop it in half! Oh wait. I actually *could* do that. More accurately, the man-thing could do that:

I hear more agonized screaming from the antique-lovers. The worst is over now. We patched up a water-warped drawer bottom and sanded the two pieces. It looked like the desk was used in someone's garage for nails and other repairs. All surfaces were pretty badly scratched and dented. I used wood glue and wood filler to repair what I could. My skills are pretty rudimentary, but it seemed to work.

 Unfortunately, there was not enough of the fancy quarter-round trim salvaged from the desk to complete an entire circuit of the two "halves" that would become my new nightstands. I decided to buy some from my local hardware store. That stopped this project in its tracks for 3 months. No one in town carried anything like the original trim. Nothing in my mother's woodmill magazine was worth ordering. I finally found a simple rope-twist quarter-round. It was a pale imitator, but it would do. I learned how to use a miter box and cut everything out.... and it was HIDEOUS. the width of the new trim was significantly less than that of the original, and the "twists" in the rope pattern were so extreme that the mitered corners were irregular and wouldn't match up.

I almost gave up! Let this be a lesson - never throw anything away when repurposing furniture. I still had salvaged pieces of the original trim. While I didn't have enough to trim the entire top of the two pieces, I had enough to miter the ends and place a decorative trim on the fronts:

This will sound obvious, but the original trim looked so authentic and genuine to the overall feel of the piece. I don't know why I didn't think of it in the first place!

The man-thing and I had many discussions on how to finish the nightstands. I argued that I had snagged some deep teal paint from a previous project for my mother, and it would match our bedspread. He is adamantly opposed to painting wood. Having been stained for so long, the wood didn't sand to an even color; I had my doubts about re-staining. Ultimately, I took the plunge (while my husband was away, heh), and used the paint. It was so much lighter when wet, I was filled with immediate regret:

But as it dried, it began to match my vision. Finishing touches were new hardware, drawer liner, and felt pieces for the feet. Let me just say that Ace Hardware makes the best self-adhesive felt pads. The style I use is linked in the tally at the bottom. These are great for avoiding scuffs on hardwood, making heavy furniture easier to move, and, in this case, preventing any paint that still needed to settle (I'm impatient) from hitting the floor.

Due to the height of the "new" nightstands, I purchased bed risers to make the top surface more accessible. I also bought new lamps, since man-thing admitted (after two years, guh) that he hated the color I painted the last pair. The final staging:

I love it! My husband was really impressed that I finally finished the project on my own after a year. I think he was worried the desk was going to be in the garage forever.

The break-down:

Desk: $40
Wood glue, wood filler: $8
Felt pads: $4
Paint: reused, $0
Sand paper: left over from previous projects, $0
Quarter-round: $19
Hardware: $2.69x8 + tax = $23ish
TOTAL: $94, lots of elbow grease, and patience.

Clearly not one of my more thrifty projects, but I couldn't be happier with the result!

So what do you think? Was I wrong to hack apart an antique and repurpose it? Or did the end justify the means?

The New TV Console

Finally time for an update! This one doesn't count as thrifty whatsoever, but it sure is a pretty project...

We got a new TV recently. When the husband and I set it on our old particle-board TV stand, the flimsy piece of furniture gave a huge shudder - it couldn't take the weight! Immediately, I started looking for a replacement.

Bless my sweet mother, she collaborated with me to find an antique piece to repurpose before my husband could buy another "modern" particle-board TV stand. For some reason, I'm obsessed with little drawers right now. I had an old card catalogue in mind, but after a full day of searching through my mom's favorite store, we found nothing that quite matched my vision. As a last ditch effort, we stopped by Cornerstone Antiques. There we found this beauty:

The label read, "Monterey Hardware Store," which I have yet to track down. However, I knew immediately it must be mine. The measurements for our appliances and the new TV base were tight, but certainly do-able. This piece looks like it was pulled from under a hardware store counter and given a new recycled plywood back and solid oak top. Some of the drawers were a bit ragged on the edges. It features not only 6 rows of mixed-width drawers, but also unmatched porcelain knobs and labels and hardware pieces still glued/stapled to the drawers. There is so much history in this piece!

With the help of my husband, we came up with a plan of attack. We took out the top row of drawers (please don't send me hate-mail!) and knocked out all but one of the dividers for our electronics. On the side of our receiver, we completely removed the back to accommodate the tight fit.

For the other, we used a keyhole drill to create a hole, through which we passed the cords for our dish box and Blu-Ray player. Some of the drawers removed were used to replace some of the more worn and fragile drawers on the bottom.

This project took only an hour or so of our afternoon, but the visual impact in our living area is stunning! Despite my concern about the measurements of our electronics and the narrow depth of our new TV console, everything fit so perfectly that it must have been mean to be.

As an added bonus, the red tones in the original stain pick up the colored speaker covers on either side:

It raises our television about 1.5 feet, but it's a very comfortable viewing level. We've had the new TV console in place for a little over a month, and I am still in love with it. It's such an interesting piece with tons of character and history!