Painting a boring storage unit.

Without doubt, every home has a functional piece of furniture which is inherently useful and inherently dull. My home is no exception.

This was a great unit from Ikea. It was originally a piece of office furniture, so was made to be functional, not beautiful. It was sturdy, heavy and in great condition. It was also a bit of an eyesore. From the grey plastic handles to the grey plastic feet, it had less personality than week-dead fish.

With a little bit of paint, some extra touches and new door handles, it was transformed into a lovely piece of sitting room furniture which provides much needed storage in an otherwise unused alcove.

Once again, Poppy and I worked together and had lots of fun. We started by dismantling it (thank you Ikea, I love that your furniture can be deconstructed and reconstructed with such ease) and permanently removing the grey plastic feet and handles. The separate parts were taken downstairs to their new location and put back together in a slightly different format, with the smaller section in the middle to make it look more symmetrical and balanced. 

As the plastic feet had been removed, we needed to replace them to allow the unit to stand comfortably above floor height. We used simple blocks of wood, just rough-cut slices from a sturdy piece of timber and applied them to the underside of the base.

For the next step to hide our rough-sawn feet, we screwed a length of planed timber to the foot of the unit and embellished it very simply with a piece of quadrant along the base, like so:

The top received the same sort of treatment, but with an added bar across the top of the primary piece of timber, just as an extra detail.

The big grey plastic handles were originally inserted into each door, leaving a large hole on removal. With a huge amount of patience and various layers of filler, we could have filled the holes, but that sounded like a bit of a chore, so instead we picked up some cheap heart shaped signs and back screwed them over the missing bits :-)

The doors, handles and new timber were then painted up with cupboard paint (sorry, I don't remember the brand this time, but I do remember that it took bloody ages to choose and that the colour was ivory) and some cute ceramic handles affixed onto the new heart shaped back plates. I found the handles on ebay and was thrilled to bits to find that the colour matched the rest of the tones in the room.

We did change the construction inside the unit to allow it to be more friendly to my crafting needs (extra shelves, screws for hanging tools and frames for holding jewellery) but I didn't really want to show you what a darned mess it is inside ;-)

The total project cost came to about £50 and was well worth the investment to change a useful, but aesthetically dull piece of furniture into something rather more beautiful.

Building a garden chair.

I'd forgotten to add this until I looked through my cousin Hannah's photographs on facebook. She's an absolute genius for taking a photo diary of this one as we went along. We were really excited about making these as we hadn't built anything together before. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping and we needed somewhere to sit in peace in the garden. And so, the garden chairs were born.

This chair has a twin, bit I think you get the idea. Hannah is my absolutely amazingly epic cousin from Australia. We share an interest in adventure and change, so while she was visiting England a couple of years ago, we decided to build some garden furniture on a whim. Decent garden chairs can cost a pretty penny, but can be built for a fraction of the cost when using treating decking boards and timber. 

Inexpensive tanalised timber can be purchased at most of the larger DIY stores in the garden section and will cost very little. Be sure to purchase the planed version if you plan to build furniture with it as the sawn version will be very rough and will leave an ugly finish. We started with the sides of the chair:

They're upside down in this picture, but consist of one long back leg, a shorter front leg, a bar for the arm and a bar to brace the seat. We added 45 degree angled braces for the sections connecting the arm bar and the back leg, as you can see. When building furniture, make sure that the surface you are working on is level and check that your angles are true after every step. It's easy to correct as you're going along, but very difficult to correct an entire construction.

Although the timber had been treated, we knew that we wanted a bold colour finish, so added our chosen paint at points which we expected to be difficult to paint on completion of the build.

Next, we constructed a simple seat with three cuts of a decking board and two side bars, leaving a gap at the rear of the bars to allow space for the backrest. This is as good a point as any to recommend that you use decent wood screws. Reisser make particularly good quality Phillips-head wood screws, but they're a bit of an investment. Buy the best quality you can afford and they will return the expenditure by being more efficient and easier to use. Buy in bulk if you can as screws always come in handy once you've been bitten by the building bug!

After adding the seat to the basic side frames we then screwed a bar along the top of the back legs and a longer slice of decking along the front to hide the underside of the chair and add support.

I'm afraid that we forgot to photograph the next step, but we included lengths of timber running down the inside of the back support set at about an eighty degree angle from the seat. This was to ensure that our backrest would be very slightly tilted when in situ. We made a frame which mimicked the seat for the backrest with three slices of decking and two support struts, then screwed it onto the bare bones of the chair.

At this point, it started to look very much like a chair indeed, but still needed arm rests as it just didn't look like a slouchy enough space for us as yet. We measured the arms and cut two lengths of decking to those measurements. For the sake of soft corners, we cut a small 45 degree angle from each corner of the front of the arms and about a 20 degree longer cut from the back, sanded the rough edges, then screwed them on.

For a pretty and waterproof finish, we finished the chairs with two coats of Sadolin My Garden Woodstain in a colour called Harry's Deckchair. A lovely project. The chairs are heavy and sturdy and are weathering well. They're nearly two years old now and require a good scrub and repaint, more to keep them waterproof than for any other reason as the colour hasn't faded.

I think that each chair cost about twenty pounds when hardware and decoration costs were added. Definitely worth it though as they're also too heavy to steal ;-)

Hannah was a trooper and we have another project lined up for when she returns to visit me in a few weeks. Happy days :-)

The electricity cupboard

This is my electricity cupboard:

This was my electricity cupboard: 

Pretty gruesome, I'm sure you'll agree. The external section to keep it protected was a metal cabinet which had kindly been stuck to the wall at the wrong angle on both planes! Not only did it rest slightly diagonally when viewed from the front, but also from the side. Joy. 40 years of bad paint jobs, a broken catch and rusted hinges added the finishing touches to that "I live in a squat" impression. 

There was nothing else for it - it had to go. My landlord felt no need to protect me from such a hideous monstrosity in my hallway (oh yeah, it had to be in the first room that people see, to completely mortify me when friends came to visit) so it was up to Poppy and I to address the situation.

And so, Fred was born.

Isn't Fred beautiful? It may seem a little strange to name a cupboard, but Poppy and I have worked on so many elements of the house that projects need specific names when we discuss them or we get mixed up. 

We boxed in the cupboard from floor to ceiling with a very basic frame, allowing for support bars at either side to fix in shelves after construction. Sorry I don't have full project pictures, but I didn't know back then that I would be describing the process in the future.

Once the frame was fixed to the walls and ceiling, we added tongue and groove shelves (they only needed to be lightweight) and tongue and groove panels on the sides. The doors are also T&G with black iron hinges and brass catches.

All in all, this was a relatively low cost project when you consider that it not only provided storage, but also beautified an undeniably ugly space. I was happy to leave the black heads of small brads showing where the T&G was held onto the box and finished up with two coats of antique pine matt varnish to help the new wood blend into the hallway. All in all, another fun job. Few people remark on Fred, which is a bit of a shame as it was a doozy of a project, but I think that's because it blends well with the surroundings and seems to look as though it's been there forever.