Push.

Work has been crazy lately. Nevertheless, we stole an hour last week to install two new old finds: mismatched (but coordinated) push plates for the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room.

Of course, we had to go ebay on this - new push plates (or old matched sets) are expensive for us right now (we're in a cheap phase, as usual).

First, I found this small, plain one - great style and it fits perfectly. The push plates that were on the door when we moved in (and until last week) were too wide, so they stuck out over the moulding and you could reach in behind. Silly.


Then Ken thought we should see if we could find one that said "PUSH" - there were some cool ones we had seen and we got fixated on those. So, we searched, and success! I found an old used one, same style as the first one but a tad bigger. But, since no one will be looking at both sides of the door at the same time, they're perfectly fine together.

I also think it's neat that the door either (a) wasn't always a swinging door, or (b) was a stock door that someone made into a swinger by filling the mortise (very nicely, I must say). Option b would be more consistent with a kit house, I think. Cool either way, though.

Is there an FA?

Furniture Anonymous. I need it.

I'm apparently on my mid-winter furniture bender. I go months without doing any ebay or craigslist searches for "mission oak", and manage to stick to "just looking" at the antique stores, and then - bam! - I'm off the wagon. I just can't help it - maybe it's the whole cabin fever thing, looking at the same old stuff all the time. What is my epitaph going to say, "Here lies Sarah, who had way too many chairs"? Eek.

I think it started, this year, when we decided to move some things around to freshen up the living room. Then Ken thought we needed a side table (we lost one in the move). Enter this $16 beauty - solid oak. It needs refinishing - I can put that off till summer. We plan to get a round tile to fill in where an ashtray probably originally was.

Then I had to reupholster the footstool (last post). Here it is, with the right fabric on it, finally.

The rocking chair is next - we've had it for a long time, but I'm finally getting off my butt and writing in to American Bungalow's "Perspective on Antiques" column - which I've been meaning to do since 2006, when I saw a very similar chair in their pages. Procrastinator!

And now tonight - after an all-day meeting, I had to decompress with some shopping, so I went to one of my favorite shops and found this (mostly) solid oak mini-desk (I'm not entirely convinced that the top is solid, but the legs certainly are):

It folds, somehow, but the back stretcher is a bit confusing to me. How do I fold the legs when the stretcher connects them? Weird. A question for later, when I certainly end up stripping the paint off. Ahh - paint stripping - now that's a summer obsession.

Anyways, the more I look at this table, the more I like it - which is always a good sign. And, of course, it was not expensive - so I can justify my addiction, right? You agree with me, right?

Giving the people what they want

Last weekend my brother and his partner were up visiting. Brave souls, coming to Maine in winter. And they were punished for it - with a snowstorm on their way home. We had a great time nonetheless - us girls drank plenty of wine and the company was great!

You know how when people come over you suddenly realize all the inadequacies of all your home furnishings? Well, I noticed (and noted, aloud) that the old footstool was really needing some work.

I wondered (again, aloud) whether I should re-cane it or re-upholster. "It needs some cushion", my bro noted. So, re-upholsery it is. Sorry about the tender calves, Dave!

Today we took it mostly apart, gingerly pulled out the no-longer needed cane supports, and began the re-assembly. The problem was, Henry was extremely put out all day about it - you see, this is HIS fireside stool most of the time. And he was not happy about its disassembly. He kept checking on it and sitting on all the various parts as we worked. Oh, Henry.

We got it glued back up and added a plywood top, then I upholstered it with a bunch of remnant stuffings and battings from other chair projects. Sweet! I didn't have the right finish fabric, so here it's just a burlap liner fabric until I get to the fabric store.

Good enough for Henry for now, though. The world is right again!

Of note...

From the folks at Modern Bungalow:

Author and columnist Bruce Johnson, who is also the Director of the National Arts & Crafts conference at the Grove Park Inn (Asheville, NC), has launched a brand new web site. The site is new, but it's off to a great start and will contain a ton of useful info and references for collectors and fans of the Arts & Crafts era. Check it out at: www.artsandcraftscollector.com

Most annoying project EVER!

Where to begin.

We finished the upstairs bathroom a couple of years ago. It's fabulous and we love it. But we didn't like the look of the cover over the vent fan and it didn't fit properly. After a couple of feeble attempts to find a nice, antique-looking register cover or something, we gave up. And we made the fatal mistake of saying, "someday we'll do something better up there. This (sawed-off plastic hideous thing) is good enough for now".

As you might remember, we've been hacking away at our punch list, and the time came to replace the cover. Also, Ken innocently noted one day that there seemed to be a draft coming in when the fan was off - despite there being an external hood, it gets damn cold here and there is, indeed, a tiny draft.

So he temporarily binder-clipped a piece of (not color-coordinated, by the way) fabric over the sawed-off plastic hideous cover.

Mind you, I am about 8" shorter than he is, so anytime I wanted to take a shower and he wasn't home, I had to jam all kinds of headbands and random items in there on my tippie-toes to try to tent the fabric so I could turn the fan (and light!) on.

Yup, enough of that.

Finding no local source of teak*, I ordered (online) a nice piece of teak plywood and strips of 1/2"x2" teak from which to fashion a little door that we thought we could put over the sawed-off hideous cover when not in use. The teak arrived last week, and I got to work. (We're using teak because the floor and other accessories are teak or teak-esque, plus it's insanely weatherproof.)

I mustered all the skill from a couple of DIY picture framing sessions at the frame shop (and called on Ken to help with cutting a groove in the rails), and put together the lovely little door. Got some stainless hinges and headed upstairs (with the new scaffold - it's great!) to install it.

Not so fast. So, the thing didn't fit over the sawed-off hideous plastic cover. One late-night trip to the store later, I had a brand new round, smaller metal cover. We sawed (cleanly) the very top off, to make it fit the ceiling, and the teak cover still didn't fit. Sawed more off - now it fit, but wouldn't open. Argh.

Two days later - back to the store and I found a compact, flat rectangular vent cover and - it fit! Except the hole that attaches it in the center needed to move a little bit. So I drilled that out.

And - half an hour ago and three vent covers

(plus a lot of lost patience) later, voila! A teak cover with a handy-dandy handle that short people can reach, that opens up when you're ready to take a shower and closes to prevent drafts in between.

Now that was a challenging punch list item. Glad the freakin' list is almost done (for now - it's never really done, is it?).

* The funny teak story - so I went to a big box store - I'll let you guess which one - and after looking around the hardwoods section and not finding any teak (not that I expected any), I headed to the flooring department. My thought was that if they were going to have any teak whatsoever, it might be a strip of floor I could snag.

Me: "Do you have any teak flooring?"
Associate: "Any what?"
Me: "Teak wood, you know, teak?"
Associate: "Never heard of it."
Me: "What!? Teak, T-E-A-K, you know, like they use on boats? And floors? Teak?"
Associate: "No, I've never heard of it."
Me: "Wow. Thanks...(mumbles as she walks out of the store, bewildered)".

Sale item alert: could have used this before!

I was shopping the post-holiday online sales and happened across this little bit of heaven - it's a scaffold with a tray for just a shade over $23. The extra shipping stinks, but it's still CHEAP.

And it's perfect because we cleaned the basement (again) yesterday, and I began to get some good visualization going about what we're going to do down there. And it involves painting the underside of the sub-floorboards, which would be a very, very sucky job without a scaffold like this.

That's what we consider a sign - we're on the right track with the basement plans. Now we just need to accumulate all the parts...

Getting punchy again

It's been a crazy couple of weeks - I was in San Francisco for work, and got stuck there an extra two days because of giant snowstorm #1, which shut down the east coast airports. Luckily, I got home just as giant snowstorm #2 pummeled the middle of the country.

So, we've been laying pretty low. Our goal for holiday break is to work on the old punch list again, and after catching up on sleep after the jet-lagged, red-eye-flight, airport-dwelling beginning of the week, we started on a couple of those tasks.

Sorry readers, it's going to be a while still till our next big project - our bedroom. We pushed it back to March break - it'll just work better. Anyways, Item 1 on the punch list was to finally put a surround around our pellet stove. See, when we bought the stove, there were two different sets of dimensions for our model, depending on which piece of literature you had in your hand. We knew that it would either just barely or not quite fit all the way back in the firebox. Turns out, it doesn't quite fit in the firebox - the back of the 'finished' part of the stove sticks out about an inch from the brick surround.

We wanted to avoid any giant, tacky surround piece (like the big brass or black frame sold by the stove shop), so we've been just waiting for a solution to pop up. We decided to figure something out just before I left, and went to the big box with the idea of finding something metal we could tuck behind the stove and paint black to make it fade away.

Then, Ken happened upon a random piece of someone's roof flashing, in a custom reddish-copper color. We thought it would closely match the brickwork, and we snapped it up (it was marked down from $18 to $5.25, and the woman rang it up for $4.71, so the price was right).

Using the existing lengthwise bend to fit it against the stove back's 'lip', we cut it to size with tin snips...

...and brought in some clamps and wood to make a break for bending the metal to fit in the firebox, but were one piece short & too lazy to go back to the garage, so we used a copy of "Swan's Way" as the final piece of the metal brake. Thanks, Proust!

Though we planned to use liquid nails to tack it to the brick, it 'sticks' just fine with no adhesive so far, so it ended up being a really simple, easy, tidy, quick project.

And, now we won't have escaping pellets falling down behind the stove anymore - finally!