Travels With Miranda

The ‘secure the filing cabinet’ project took longer than expected today, so the new dresser isn’t done yet. But there’s enough done for a decent sneak peek. My mother ordered me to only show what’s done and to not reveal the interior ever. Ha ha ha.

The new dresser offers about as much cubic storage space as did the cloth dresser, but in a more compact package. It goes floor to ceiling and fits in the space next to the shower with no overage. The extra three inches or so of clearance space through the dressing room might not sound like much, but it makes such a difference!

We built the dresser out of plywood. When it came time to secure the drawers, my mother’s initial idea of just putting a stopper in front of them didn’t work so well. We squeezed in a ninth drawer and there just wasn’t enough vertical room any more to lift a drawer over the stopper. So we both concluded that a door would be best.

My mother isn’t the kind of person to slap a door together with plywood, some trim, and 50 billion screws. Instead, she used pine 1″x2″s, some thin press board paneling, part of the leftover vinyl from the desk, stain, and wax to make this gorgeous Shaker-style door:

I can’t show the whole thing because we have to finish the top of the dresser for reasons I’ll get into when I do the proper reveal of the dresser that will show off some of the little construction details.

The door is held with a hook:

(I still need to stain and wax the front of the plywood casing. Don’t tell my mother I showed you that picture! )

Finally, the inside:

And there’s the starting point for the dresser. Originally, I was going to have a very simple structure to hold some plastic baskets. But my mother got inspired to use some empty wine crates as the drawers. They were of a perfect dimension for the space, so the dresser got built around them.

The dresser is secured to the rig with two toggle bolts. Obstructions in the ceiling wouldn’t let it go very far, so they are more insurance than anything.

Even though I haven’t gained any storage space, the new dresser’s dimensions and aesthetics make a huge difference. I also like having nine small drawers rather than six big drawers.

I’ve also finally figured out how to make the wardrobe work for me, so as soon as we complete that project, the dressing room will be done.

I don’t get any credit whatsoever for the dresser or any other jobs, btw. All I do is fetch tools, hold the wood for sawing, and help with the staining and waxing. My job involves a lot of stairs.

WHEW. My mother and I are done with the last bit of the hard core renos we planned for the summer. Now, we have all the little details to finish up as well as the inverter and battery monitor projects. So I really don’t have much to show off just now, but some is better than none!

First off, my new desk top. OMG. I didn’t even know I needed this until my mother informed me that I did:

Hopefully, third time will be the charm for the desk.

What we did is cover the existing desk with two layers of 1/2″ MDF glued together (no 1″ sheets available). We then covered the new work surface with cloth-backed vinyl. The colour is delicious. It’s sold as ‘plum’ but looks like chocolate in artificial light and wine in natural light. It contrasts perfectly with the green and the red tones can be found in the flowers of my curtains. The lady at the fabric store told me three times that I had made an excellent choice of colour and she was right!

I am worried about kitty claws, so I’ll be covering empty swaths of the desk with a mat or blanket.

There is now a gap between the top of the little bookcase and the new desk and I have a wooden ‘in box’ that fits perfectly there. I’ll show it off once it has a handle and latch. There is also a gap at the other end of the new desk top, at the end of the mattress:

My mother thought that my extension cord management idea was good, so she improved the idea, building a new bed frame with gaps for holding cords. We covered it with plastic trellis to give the mattress a flat surface to lie on. The trellis is rigid enough to be a good surface, is light, and will wear well. It was expensive, but the best product for the job.

At the end of the mattress, you can see a wide plastic drawer. I picked it up at the Ottawa Solutions store (I’ve never been to a Container Store, but I suspect it’s the same idea). The drawer spans the whole width and depth of the hole and is going to be used for archival storage (ie. old report cards, greeting cards, correspondence, and the like). I used to have all of that in a basket in an overhead cabinet, but this is a much better use of space. Over top of the drawer is just enough space for storing my laptop for travel.

Also at Solutions, I picked up what I needed to stop swearing each time I open the door to my wonderfully spacious medicine cabinet:

I like to open the door when I pass and just smile at how pretty and organized the cabinet is now.

The cabinet is well designed in that it has a lip on the bottom of each shelf, but everything would tumble out when I opened the door. I wanted containers that would fill the space and be retained by the lip.

So I brought the measurements for the shelves with me to Ottawa and went through the store until I found the cheapest items that could fit in the space. The silver containers were deeply discounted office supplies. There were three of the big ones left and without any real thought, I grabbed four of the narrower ones. Got home and discovered I still had a gap, perfectly filled by my brown basket. I couldn’t have designed this space more perfectly! Every space is sorted by use and everything is so apparent. No more opening up a tube of toothpaste when I already have one started.

To whet your appetites a little, my wonderful new dresser is now functional and just awaiting finishing details. The wall in the living room is up, but the door needs some catches and both need paint. There’s a new water pump access panel in the entrance stairwell, but it too needs paint. The filing cabinet still needs securing, but we think we have the solution. The office and dressing room both need paint touch ups. I also need tons of trim along the floor, but that will come with the electrical work.

My home was fine the way it was, but it is now ‘much better’ (said in my mother’s hilariously exaggerated French Canadian accent!).

My mother and I started to do some work on the rig this weekend. She muchly expanded our to do list. The end result is going to be blog worthy awesomeness at some point, but is only half completed at present.

One project that we did finish were the curtains in the study. Yes, I already had curtains in the study, and lovely ones at that, but only from the inside. They didn’t look finished on the outside and were, according to the US customs official in 2011, a dead giveaway that my rig was a full-time home. So we lined all the curtains with white material to make them look uniform around the rig and moved the rods up higher so that they don’t show from outside, like so:

I wish I’d thought to grab a before pic, but that’s me.

Next, the hideous, never meant to be permanent, cloth dresser is GONE!!! WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!!!

However, due to a slight and easily fixable, measuring error, I can only show you this teaser of my new wonderful, everything I hoped for, dresser:

I have gone from six huge drawers to nine smaller drawers and I look forward to organizing my clothes this evening.

We also started to get the filing cabinet secured, a job that surprisingly has my mother stumped.

And I sort of have a new desk! This is one project that I would never have thought I needed done, but which my mother zeroed in on right away because of my the new client I’ve picked up. I’m not sharing an pics of that till the job is completed because the awesomeness of the end result will be diminished by showing an in progress pic.

We’re short on time, but after finishing all of these projects, we have some major work to do in the living room, including building a wall, a door, and possibly even a closet.

And at some point, we are going to get that new inverter installed. I did some research and discovered that a 1,000W inverter needs really small gauge wiring, ideally no. 2, so that will require making an even bigger hole in my living room floor. Since I’ll be making one hole, I agree with my mother that I might as well make a bunch more and, well, the end result will be awesome.

I just hope we’re as good at finishing projects as we are at planning them.

(I’m off to Gatineau on business tomorrow, so I may not be able to blog again until the end of the week.)

I have to confess that I became addicted to Dollar Tree stores when I was in the US last year. I’m not one of those crazy people who buys random stuff just because it’s cheap, but they do have a lot of really good products that I actually need. In fact, I’m still going through my stash of waste bags that I bought expressly for emptying the litter box, buying enough so that I could scoop twice a day and have enough bags for a year. That investment was all of two or three dollars.

So when I saw a Dollar Tree by the Walmart in Minot, I ambled over after dinner to see if I could get the things on my list:

a) A new pair of nitrile-coated gardening gloves, which are awesome for hooking and unhooking the toad as they are warm, but water proof, and easy to slip on:

My last pair was pink and my current pair is green. Stock image because they are filthy.

b) A slightly bigger basket for the produce. I had bought a black one last year:

And think that this slightly bigger pink one fits in better with my decor (although it’s a bit too hot pink):

c) A tiny waste container for the dressing room into which I could put cotton swabs, band-aids, lysol wipes, etc. without having anything on the floor. This yellow bucket was perfect:

I also picked up a couple of food items, including honey graham crackers, that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, and a bath sponge. The cashier said to me, “Did you find everything you were looking for? And maybe some extras?” I don’t think that he believed me that everything but the honey-mustard chips were on the list! And as for the chips, I’m addicted to mustard, okay?

Miranda’s interior makeover is definitely an amateur and barely skilled effort. But that doesn’t mean that the rig can’t still look pulled together. One of the unifying elements is the oak cabinetry throughout. The problem is that there is also mismatched wood throughout. So starting in the kitchen and then in the dressing room with the wardrobe doors, I used a golden brown colour that matches the honey oak of the cabinetry to make my additions blend in a little better. I decided to buy a ton more of this paint colour and use it in the study, which had no fewer than four different wood finishes.

Now, I suck at taking decent before shots, but here’s an idea of what the bed base looked like this morning:

As you can see, the trim was unpainted. I was going to paint it golden brown like I did with the trim around the sink in the kitchen, but the bed base had a bunch of holes and scratches. Now, it’s all golden brown:

My desk, while sporting a few chips, does match the rest of the cabinetry, so it’s fine, except for the top:

I decided to paint the top as well as my little bookcase and the new top I made for it this morning (it’s been a productive day). Both the bookcase and desk top swill be golden brown and sealed with Verathane to protect the finish. Here’s a sneak peak of that:

Finally, the white door into the toilet room from the dressing room was getting on my nerves. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Once I was committed to buying more of the golden brown paint, the answer was obvious: match the toilet room door to the wardrobe doors. Ta-dah:

I’ve got two coats of the golden brown on now and will do a third after dinner.

Tomorrow will be a mostly lost day as I need to put in a half day at the apartment complex. I’ll be glad for the extra income and the new manager is glad to not have to come in yet on a weekend. So I hope that three coats of brown will be enough and that I will be able to apply the Verathane tomorrow. Sunday, I’ll be able to get the rig completely squared away, and Monday I will be moving back in 95% of what’s in the apartment, leaving only a functional office and kitchen!