Projects In Progress

Alternate title: I suck at finishing anything!

I know, I've totally slacked off on blogging this summer. I think I have house project ADD or something, I can't seem to fully finish anything enough to have pretty pictures for a full "reveal" blog post. But I'm owning up to it. Fully admitting I've got a problem, because without fail, halfway through a project I'm already daydreaming about the next one, and lose motivation to finish what I'm working on so I can move on to the next exciting thing.

So. Now that you guys know I have a problem, here's a sort of 'Friday Fly By' post to share what I've been working on, but not shared yet because it's not finished!

First, our garage makeover project. This is like 90% done. Although I kind of fear I'll never get around to cleaning up everything for nice "after" photos. But since I last posted about the garage, I've built and painted this firewood storage cart.

(Built = making it up as I went along until it looked roughly like I wanted in my head)

But I still haven't gotten around to painting and attaching the top of it, to make a shelf space on top for storing citronella candles.

I've also partially painted the scrap wood storage bin my husband made. The center will be white...eventually. As of right now, it's only got one coat of white (painted after I snapped the below photo).

I also finally poly'd the workbenches, and attached the handles to our under-bench rolling shelving units.

And we finally got around to installing the pegboard and slatwall. First, we made a frame to attach the pegboard to.

And then just screwed it into place. I still have plans to frame out the pegboard, although I've yet to decide if I want to paint the frame white or stain it to match the tops of the workbenches.

And here's the garage currently. Kind of organized-ish. But then, I've already got fresh wood from the hardware store and stuff spread out almost as soon as it was put away....

Oh yah, remember when we were going to build deck chairs? Yeah, that would be prototype #1 and #2 just taking up space in the garage....

At least the workroom off the garage is nicely organized, and not too trashed again!

Another oldie but goodie, that I started talking about back in freakin' January, our family room fireplace facade. Which is like 96% done. I've even had the shelves decorated since the end of July.

And here are some horribly lit photos of the rest of it. Looks almost done, right?

What you can't really see is that the baseboard around the bottom of the hearth is actually sticking out about a half inch. That's because it no longer slides in next to the baseboard on the wall, after I painted it. So we have to pull the wall baseboards off, cut them down slightly, reattach and recaulk them for the hearth baseboard to fit. We also need to do some additional caulking down the right side of the entire wood facade, because we ran out of caulk, and also caulk around the new fireplace doors with high-heat caulk before we can have a fire. But it's so close! Even in these badly lit photos, it still looks a hundred times better than the solid floor to ceiling brick with no mantle that we used to have.

In other family room news, I finally put up some art. Which I'm pleased to share in more horribly lit, bad reflection photos.

This was a last minute project that I did the morning before we were having some friends over earlier this summer. I just took the IKEA frames that we had in our last place, spray painted them white, and printed off some stuff I found on Google images, on lightly textured card stock, so it would kinda sorta look like paintings.

Not bad from far away. And cheap. At least we finally have something hung on one wall of our entire downstairs of our house! (actually, scratch that, we do have wall art in the downstairs bathroom. But that's it, nothing in any of the other rooms downstairs yet!)

And while I'm on the subject of the family room, I've also been looking at fabric samples for curtains. I've actually ordered a few more samples since taking this photo, as I was mainly trying to photograph the giant moth on the window next to the fabric samples.

Ewww. Both to the fatty moth and to our dirty screen door!

As far as what has been dirtying up the garage as of late, I've been building a coffee table. It is a knock off of this $700 Pottery Barn table, and is the first thing I've ever built from plans, and not just made up as I went along.

via Pottery Barn

My husband isn't allowed to help me at all with this project, since I really want to learn carpentry on my own. But this means it is taking me a ridiculously long time to figure things out. Building plans say things like "attach the leg with glue and finishing nails," but never give any details on how you actually go about clamping things into place so they'll stay straight and snug when you're doing the attaching. So there have been literally hours spent just experimenting with various clamps and pieces scrap wood, trying to figure out how the heck to do this. My brain just doesn't work this way, and Googling "how to clamp wood legs to attach to a table" was not very helpful.

But I'm very slowly learning. I've found that I have to experiment multiple ways to get something clamped into place, and then take it all apart so I can apply the glue, re-clamp everything, and then nail it into place. It's slow going, but luckily with things like table legs, once I figure out how to do it the first time, it's easier with the subsequent legs.

I think I'm at about 14 or 15 hours into this build, and roughly half way done. Of course, I've still got the most difficult part left, building the drawers. But it's actually starting to look like a table now, and everything is reasonably square and straight!

So, that's what I've been up to lately. Not finishing much of anything. And of course, while working on the coffee table this past weekend, what was I doing? Thinking about dining room decorating plans. I'm hopeless!

Have you guys been working on anything lately that you just can't seem to finish before moving on to the next thing? And since this post is completely all over the place, I'm going to end with this shot of Hailey. She's totally thinking "Mom, I love supervising you, but all that hammering keeps startling me! Come here and pet me instead."



Happy Friday everyone!