Front Entryway

Completing the front entryway has been going kind of slow, since so many other projects keep popping up of things that have been needing to get done first.  Finally I did the last few things to complete it and I love how it turned out!!

To see how I made the coat hanger check out here and the bench check out here.

Necklace Holder

Okay so confession time.....I have an addiction to Paparazzi Jewelry.  If you haven't tried it you should!!  It isn't expensive and it is cute!!!  So......because of my addiction, I have run out of space. I was getting tired of my necklaces getting all tangled up and I couldn't see all that I had. I decided to do something about it. This is what I came up with.

It started with me asking my husband to cut me an 18" long piece of wood. Then I stained it. 

It's kind of hard to see, but after the stain dried I marked out dots evenly for the hooks to go, I marked every inch and half.

To make it easier to screw the hooks into the board I made a little hole in each spot that I marked.

After screwing in each of the hooks, I added the vinyl and a couple of hangers on the back of the board.

The finished product!!!! I love it!

Antique Piano Repurposing Part 5: Coat Hanger

In case if you have missed previous parts of the Piano repurposing here are the links:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

This project was really quick one, the spot behind our door became a huge dumping ground for coats, shoes, and backpacks all in the same spot.  Besides looking cluttered all the time, there was all kinds of dirt and snow getting on stuff and the coats weren't being able to get dried out well.  

 Before

After

We used some of the wood that we still had from the piano and attached hooks to them and then attached it to the walls.  The shoes all fit perfectly underneath the bench.  It feels so much better looking at it now.

Antique Piano Repurposing Part 4: Bench

If you have missed posts about the Antique Piano that we have been repurposing the links are here Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

It has been so much fun being able to create so many new things with this piano.  Here is the next project that we did.

First of all, as a reminder we have to go back to this picture where we cut out the section that we used for the hall table. Now we are going to use the other section.  We removed the sound board and was left with this:

Now we flipped it over so what was the top has now become our base.  We cut the posts to become flat with the rest of our base.

Our next step was to attach the top of the piano to our base, this became the seat of our bench.

We decided that we needed to stain the wood to give it a more finished look.

After the stain dried, we used some wood scraps and created some posts for the back of the bench and attached them to the posts on the base.

Finally we were able to attach the board that I wanted to use for the back of the bench.  

Here it is after we moved it inside to it's spot just inside the front door as a place to sit and put your shoes on.

Boy's Room

Two of my boys share a room and they love the super heroes so of course I had to do something to go with that. Using my cricut I cut out vinyl to use as a stencil.  I cut out their favorite hero's logo, these were about a 2'x3'

Here is the vinyl on the wall, this was a great opportunity to use up scraps of vinyl I had laying around. Next up was painting.

I did have to do a couple of coats to make sure it was covered well.

I added a couple of stripes on each side.  Then hung the artwork that I already had for them.  For Christmas I made them each comforters for their beds to go with their super hero.  I'll show what I did for them on another post. 

Tween Girl Room

 I mentioned last week when I shared my before and after pictures of the kitchen island here that I spent part of the summer painting and decorating the kids rooms.  I want to show you the first one.  My oldest is a tween, as much as I don't want to admit it, so I had to try and think of something that she could grow with in the next few years into being a teenager.  This is what her and I came up with.

To start out with the walls were all white. This is the first time that we have bought a house so we have been having fun with painting and not having to worry about changing it or getting permission from the landlord (I never painted any of our old places for these reasons).  My daughter loves pink so we went that direction. 

First thing I did was paint the entire room light pink.  She is still using the quilt that I made her here.

She is also a huge Harry Potter fan so she also had to hang her banner.  

On the big main wall on the other side of the room, I cut out a whole bunch of little circles using my Cricut with gold vinyl.

She thinks this wall is so cool!!

The last thing is the corner with the desk and chair.  That desk has been handed around between my aunts and then to me and then to my sisters, it has been sitting in my parents basement not getting used.  They brought it over for us.  

It needed a little love before I could put it in her room.  I had put wall paper flowers on the desk when I used it forever ago, I had to remove those and give it a new coat of paint. Also it used to have gold accents then I painted it when I did the flowers, covering the accents.  I brought the gold accents back with some gold paint and it was set to go.

The chair was a bit more work, it was one of our old kitchen table chairs, so it was wood stained and the back and legs were black.  The seat I painted white with chalk paint and the back and legs I spray painted with gold paint. 

I put them in her room and it was finished!!

Kitchen island

We moved into a brand new house just short of a year ago.  I was doing some painting in the kids' rooms this past summer, and this just kind of happened one night while doing them.  The walls around the island were really bugging me it didn't seem to flow with the rest of the kitchen, also the kids kept trying to scale the walls while holding onto the counter and the white was showing all their footprints.  I had black paint from my project in the boy's room so the island got an update as well.

 Here is the island before we moved in. It really didn't seem to sit right with the white paint.

Here is After! I love it so much, the braces/brackets for the the counter top don't stand out now and I no longer see dirty footprints. Double win!

Antique Piano Repurposing, Part 2....Hall Table

 If you missed our first post about this piano that we are giving new life to you can check it out here.

Now to continue on our story....

We left with the piano looking like this.  I forgot to get a picture of it right after we removed the harp.  We wanted to keep the front portion (where the keys sit on the piano) so that required us to cut that section out.  That led to fun with a skill saw :) Surprisingly, it was very easy.

Here is how it looked right after my husband cut it out.  Nothing like commandeering your garage and turning it into a mini workshop!  The large section left on the floor? Don't worry it has more life to give and we will get to it another day.  

On of the pesky pillars

Next there was a lot of sanding, and sanding and then more sanding followed by wiping it down to get all the dust off of it.  It might be hard to tell, but there are lots of groves and small spaces that made sanding difficult, particularly the pillars on either end.  But somehow the job always gets done, just a little time and elbow grease.....and it makes for a great excuse to get an orbital sander!

We used a stain-polyurethane combo from Minwax, put on in two coats.  If you remember my husband's sled restoration project he did the staining and polyurethane as two separate steps.  After doing this he preferred the end result with having them done separately (staining, then applying a polyurethane) as they were done on the sled.
 

We wanted to create sort of box-like structure for the glass top to sit in, thus we didn't cut the ends down all the way flush.  We used some of the wood from another part of the piano to go across the front closing it in, also slightly raised from where the glass would sit.  So now we were left with the sides and front closed in and the backside open.
 
We cleaned the keys and put them back in their spots and brought it into the house.  We did a lot of looking around online for glass businesses where we could order the top from.  It was a little trickier that I thought it would be.  A lot of local places didn't do table-top glass.  Online stores could ship it but the price of shipping was more than the glass itself.  Then there was the type of glass: 3/16 inch vs 1/4 inch vs 3/4 inch vs annealed vs tempered vs beveled edge vs rounded edge vs...well you get the idea.  We ended up finding a local place and the price was great and we were able to drive down and pick it up a couple days after ordering it.  We didn't want to drag anything out hemming and hawing on which glass would be best, so we went with a 3/16 inch-thick, annealed glass with a straight smooth edge and it was perfect!  We measured where the glass was going to sit, then measured it again....and again.  We don't have a glass cutter and didn't want to mess with that, but shop class paid off and the size we ordered fit right into the spot we had created.  Otherwise, trying to cut it or taking it back to the glass store for a resize would have been in order.

 Here it is with the glass!!

This is one of my favorite parts, the beautiful ornamenting on the table.

One of the best parts is you can still see the keys!!

 This is sitting in the hall of our front entryway. 

I just love it!!!

Stay tuned for more projects from the rest of the piano.....