My Father-in-Law, The Chatty Buddha, wanted me to make him a pizza peel and while I have built cutting boards and boat paddles, I hadn’t yet made a peel. I agreed, sourced the lumber from a local salvege store. It used to be flooring, but after some magic with the table saw, jointer, some glue, and a hand plane or three – he has a pizza peel that I gave to him for Christmas. I hope to be enjoying pizza from it for years to come.
Tag: Up-Cycled
Film Friday – Forging Double Feature
Hall Tree and Shoe Rack for My Bride
Soon after we moved into La Maison du Talley in Seattle, my lovely bride decided that “we” needed a place to hang coats by the front door. I looked a little at coat racks and hall trees in the shops close to the house, but I just couldn’t stomach paying $250-300 for a semi-crappy coat rack that was the wrong color or wood for our house. I had one of those “light bulb” moments and decided to build one for us. Normally, I would have cut the raised panels (I tried to convince Stamps-With-Foot to let me do linen-fold panels) and added a little fancy trip work, but as I was recovering from shoulder surgery (#4), I decided to go with the re-use route. Second Use is a used hardware and reclaimed building material store in Seattle that I frequent and I cruised over for a used fir 6-panel door. Right away, I found the perfect one that set me back a whole $30. While pushing the cart loaded with the door to the front, I found a couple of cast off cabinet doors, a few odd sections of trim, and a bundle of old tongue & groove fir flooring. A plan formed in my little head…
I cut two feet from the top of the door, then flipped it over. I built a bench and shoe rack from the cabinet doors (raised panels turned in to match the adjacent hutch and the flat panel cabinets in the rest of the house) and attached it to what became the bottom of the door/hall tree. I ringed the top with a flooring plank, tongue down, and then applied some 100 year old left over fir crown molding on the top. The whole thing was sanded down and stained a deep red mahogany and finished off with 3 coats of exterior grade polyurethane.
For the hooks, I sourced a set of coat and helmet hooks from an old Seattle firehouse and small round dog leash hooks from Rejuvenation Hardware. When all was said and done, this was the very first project finished for our home in Seattle, I spent a total of $94, and I wrote a little love note to Stamps-With-Foot on the top of it. My little wife was giddy when I brought it into the house and she raved to friends for weeks about handy and awesome her husband was – made me puff out my chest like a Banty rooster.
If I did this again, the only thing I would change would be to make the shoe shelves movable as they are about 1/4″ too narrow for my running shoes, but perfect for her shoes, which I guess is the most important feature.
Cast Iron Camping Cookware Box
In my on-going project to build the finest glamping/campaign furniture kit in the Pacific Northwest, I have added a custom box for holding all of our cast iron and campfire cooking gear. It all started out with a wooden box I picked up at a garage sale that was full of a cast iron camp set that had been used once. We have added a square fry pan, pot lifters, trivets, stand-off, roasting sticks, a grill, bacon press, a 12″ lid, and corn-shaped bread pan. I had thought about including all of it in my camp kitchen, but it would have made the unit so heavy that I would have needed a winch to get it off and on to my truck bed.
The box that it came with was just a roughly tacked together crate, but it had potential. I spent a couple of hours adding trim, remaking the lid, adding reinforcement, and painting it a deep red. To Finish it off I added brass pipe handles and brass closures. It is still not light, but one person can carry and move it. The “new” box holds all the aforementioned gear, looks snazzy, and doubles as a seat for around the campfire.
Wooden Nightstand Build
My sweet sweet wife has issues with the color green – most shades. While living in Hamburg, we had a tiny bedroom that Stamps-With-Foot wanted to paint “sage green.” She bought the paint at Max Barr (a Teutonic version of Home Depot) brought it home and painted a little swatch on the wall. It was kinda dark, so she painted the whole wall. Still kinda dark. She then painted the whole room. I came home and my bedroom was Olive Drab, Army Green… It took me two coats of primer and three coats of paint to banish the darkness.
Flash forward a few years to Seattle. We have replaced all of our MDF particle board IKEA crap furniture with real wood pieces with the exception of our night stands. I hate them. Hate. I traded my mother a couple bookshelves for a former dressing table/vanity that was deeply scratched in places and had a couple of drawers that wouldn’t budge. It was in two pieces already and I shortened the legs, stripped off some of the old finish and prepped them for paint. Stamps-With-Foot wanted the pieces to match our 1930’s bedroom set, which has a sage green accent color. The plan is to have the bodies painted green, use a soft sunflower yellow for the accent and to completely strip the top and drawer fronts and coat them with a polyurethane so that the natural color and grain would pop. I had primed them, sanded, primed again, and grabbed some color swathes for her to choose from. She chose a fine green and I had it custom mixed at my local Benjamin Moore store (friends don’t let friends buy paint at Home Depot). I had two smooth coats sprayed on before my sweet wife decided they were the wrong color green. I tried in vain to talk her out of making me swap the color. I tried really hard – I even mentioned the Hamburg incident. No dice, the color WOULD be changed.
I showed up at the paint store with a picture frame for them to color-match, ignored their snickers, bought all new paint, went home, sanded, and resprayed both pieces with two coats of the “new” green. I painted the accent color and rubbed the color into the cracks before washing it off the high spots. The tops were polyurathaned, drawers were fixed, dividers installed, fronts refinished, 100+ year old glass knobs bought/installed, and then I carried them up to our Master Suite and my sweet bride gushed over them. Her delight made my heart happy.
In my heart of hearts I know she is still second guessing the 2nd color choice, but I have sworn to myself that if she changes her mind again she will be banned from deciding house/furniture/accent colors for the term of one year and that I will turn the basement into a mountain chalet-themed man cave- which might happen anyway, I am just really looking for an excuse to belay my guilt.
