a hardworking little box

Posted on September 1, 2015 by zefiart

Guess what?

This post isn’t about something made with wire!

This is a little project I’ve had on the go for quite a while… Took me ages to finish it, then ages to get around to photographing it. But here it is…

I started with a plain box on castors I picked up at a tip shop. I couldn’t find any before photos and, natually, I didn’t take any before I began work on it. It was all the same colour you can see inside in the pic below – an orangey stained timber.

Yeech.

First thing I did was sand back the outside and give it a coat of paint.

Or four.

I started with white, then pink, then turquoise and lastly a pale grey. Mainly cause I couldn’t make up my mind, but also cause I wanted it to look patchy.

That was the easy bit. Then I had to make a box for the drawer. In theory, how hard is it to make a box?

hmph,

I made the front using a collection of timber bits from the hardware store bin. Then I used some 12mm MDF to put the box together. I cut the pieces, put glue on them, then delicately balanced it all together and used masking tape to hold it together till it dried.

Yes. Masking tape.

What do you use?

Here’s the front view of the box – its made up of three offcuts glued and nailed together, then stained to match the interior orangey colour. I also dry brushed the front with some of the grey.

I chose a rusty antique handle from my collection. It had some green patina on it but I added to it to give it more character.

Here it is finished.

Not bad for a project that took me something like 3 months to finish…

So, what would you use it for? A handy side table with storage. A bedside table for a futon bed. Put a cushion on it and its a footstool.

I’m sure it’ll come in useful for something!

rustic windchime

Posted on August 29, 2015 by zefiart

So much for my plans of posting a bit more regularly. All the best intentions and all that… things just get away from me.

I may have mentioned I’m currently working 5 days a week. I gotta tell you, I’m loving the extra money. What I’m not loving is the time squeeze on doing my own stuff.

I’ve got a couple of projects on the go in the casita, one is finished and just waiting for me to be at home during the day, preferably when its not raining, so I can take pics of it to share.

Perhaps tomorrow will be the lucky day!

Meanwhile I thought I’d share my latest rustic windchime. I just love these things. I have the first one I ever made hanging in the middle of the living room cause the wind on the porch almost destroyed it. I think I’ll be moving it to the mudroom or enclosed porch when I remember to do it.

I find these old hand sanders in tip shops occasionally and collect them. I then use my pre-rusted eye screws to hang all kinds of junk from them. I love to add some crystals for a bit of sparkle and copper wire for a bit of colour.

I still haven’t cleaned up the office or moved things around as planned. Without a working light in there its kind of hard to do anything in the evening, but honestly, its such a mess in there that it fries me brain if I even think about tackling it.

Heck. I still haven’t put away the washing I folded last weekend. Every time I need undies or socks I just grab them out of the basket, why bother putting them in the drawers?

Sigh.

I’m not a very good housewife. Turns out my grandmother was right. She said that if I couldn’t iron properly I’d never make a good wife and no one would want to marry me.

Right on both counts!

Anyway, I don’t iron – well or otherwise. If I can’t wash and wear it, I don’t buy it.

But I did learn something from my mother: if you hang things on the line properly (and fold them!) then you don’t need to iron.

Turns out she hated ironing too.

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what i’ve done and how i spoiled myself

Posted on July 26, 2015 by zefiart

Since Wayne has been in hospital and recouperating, I’ve been the one feeding the horses morning and night.

As such, I’ve had to go into the feed room morning and night… and every time I opened the door I was greeted by the aroma of mouse pee.

Eech. Yes. Mouse pee. I felt like scrubbing out the inside of my nose every time I went in there.

See, I sorted out and cleaned up the feed room about a year ago. Since then it deteriorated and deteriorated into the mess it was up until this morning. Sorry, there are no before pics.

Part of it was my fault. I used to store all my timber in the feed room along the left hand wall. I also stored some old kitchen chairs in there that I planned to fix. I did remove my timber a while ago but the chairs were being used to toss horse rugs over.

All good in theory. Then came Wayne. The pile of horse rugs got bigger and messier, no longer tossed over the chairs but piled on them, falling off them, pooling on the floor. Bags of horse feed with small mouse holes in them stood along in front of the old freezer we store horse pellets in. The old bench I use for general horse medical stuff was covered in molasses, mice began to nest in the rugs, empty feed bags and the plastic bags carrots or licorice come in were all over the place…

I would go in there every now and then and pick up bags and put them in the rubbish. Every now and then I’d sweep the floor, wipe up the molasses spills… but I finally had enough.

Today I went in there and hit the place with a vengeance. Firstly I sorted the horse rugs into a ‘cut off the buckles and throw the rugs away’ and a ‘keep’ pile. Then I bagged up all the rubbish and swept the floor. I put all the feed bags into a large chaff bag to give to a friend who re-uses them.

Then I got a couple of pieces of leftover pine lining (left over from our kitchen remodel) and put them on the walls. I had to use a nail to find the studs to screw the pine into (its an old house, the studs are all over the place!). I used whatever large hooks I had for rugs to hang on.

Would you believe the place no longer stinks?

I’m so pleased with the new, clean feed room. Which will no doubt stay clean till Wayne is well enough to take over feeding the horses…

The large box on the right holds 2 bags of chaff. The old bench in the middle holds medical bits and pieces, the old freezer holds pellets. I put the old pink bin in between the chaff bin and the bench for rubbish. Hopefully it’ll get used.

On the left I’ve piled up feed bins and some buckets and my carrot basket. I made that out of a galvanised metal basket I bought at a tip shop and some old legs off a side table I pulled apart. Its perfect, I lined it with an old summer horse rug so the smaller carrots don’t fall through and it keeps them fresh as it allows air to circulate around them.

Meanwhile, here are some other small updates to my workshop in the casita. I re-used some old boxes to make shelves. I love this new little storage corner for things like spray paint, glues, fillers, etc. Nails hold my levels and some old tins screwed into the lining on the wall hold pen, paint tubes and box cutters. Where the wall lining stopped there was a gap I often lost things down. I fixed that by putting in a bit of timber and creating a new shelf.

On the other side is my original shelf which used to hold not just the small paint tins but also the spray paint. A basket for odds and ends, some tins for paint scrapers and more shelves made where the wall lining ends. One old rake head holds brushes and another holds scrapers.

And my Haywood’s sign is up on the wall properly!

I’ve also done some rearranging of work benches and stuff but I’m not ready to show it off yet. I mean, I did organise it, but then I got to working on things I never finished so… its messy again.

Meanwhile our old kettle has been playing up. Everytime we boiled water it was like a flood on the benchtop. I decided it was time for a new kettle.

I also decided I deserved a little spoiling so I got one of these:

Yep. That’s right. I bought a Smeg kettle, one of those kettles which, for the price, should not only boil your water but should make the coffee and serve it to you in bed. I got it in the mint green of course, to match the kitchen doors.

I love my new kettle.

another thing you can make with old shutters

Posted on July 12, 2015 by zefiart

This is a project I finished last weekend but which I couldn’t photograph till this yesterday. It was still gloomy and overcast but better than trying to photograph it in the dark after work.

So, here it is! Our new ‘gas bottle and bin hiding’ box!

This is what you’d see as you came to the front of our house – my little window shelf with the pretty succulents and a small cement slab holding gas bottles and stuff to go to the rubbish bin. Not particularly attractive. Which is why I never have any photos that show it.

I always planned to make some kind of cupboard to hide them. I had these old shutters (louvre doors really) which I’d bought at an op shop a few years ago. I’d used them to make a screen to cover the hot water cylinder when it was on the front porch. When we moved the hot water cylinder to the side of the house we no longer needed the screen.

But I never throw anything away if I can help it. Things have more than one lifetime around here.

The shutters were too big for the new gas bottle box so I had to cut them down. I had two narrow ones and two wide ones so I worked out which would work best – the narrow ones on the sides, the wider ones in front as doors.

They were already painted the same colour as the house so they were perfect. I cut them down to the right height and joined them at the corners using hinges. I used small brackets to attach the sides to the wall and keep it all in place.

The lid is hinged above the box so that it slopes. This is for two reasons. Firstly I just thought it looked nice. Secondly I don’t want this to become another flat surface for things to accumulate.

Now all we need to do is lift the lid, use the hook to keep it open, then swing the doors open to access the gas bottles.

There’s a small bin in there for empty bottles and I put the kitchen rubbish on top of it every night cause I hate stinky rubbish in the house. In the morning we take it down to the bin on our way to work. Having the rubbish inside the box means less temptation for the dogs to go excavating for goodies.

Not that they would.

My dogs are well behaved.

But in case a possum comes visiting. You know.

Of course, nothing ever comes together easily. The leftover bit of door I planned to use for the lid wasn’t long enough. The solution was obvious: I found an old bit of timber to extend it to the right length.

I even added some initials.

Did I ever show you the gorgeous little watering spout I got at a garage sale?

So here it is. Our new gas bottle box.

Ok, one thing finished and crossed off the list.

Another 5 million to go.

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a place for everything – even headlamps

Posted on June 18, 2015 by zefiart

Got home the other evening and found a stomach on the garden path.

Yep.

A stomach.

No hair. No feathers. No head. No beak. No feet.

Nothing.

Just. A. Stomach.

A ruminant’s stomach.

Seems the poodles thought it was time to up the challenge for me. Every time I find one of their kills, there’s less of it to identify it by. I was able to identify the last specimen by the feathers and some guts.

This time all I got was a stomach. With munched up grass in it. I’d guess rabbit or wallaby… and given they haven’t yet caught a rabbit (that I know of), I’d say wallaby.

At this rate I’ll soon be an expert at identifying species from the inside out.

sigh.

Ok. At this point let me just say that I don’t like my poodles killing anything, even rats or mice. Though whatever is living in our ceiling is asking for it…

I especially hate it when they kill wildlife or our ducks, chickens or geese. But they have a strong prey drive and they will kill any intruder in their yard. Its a fact of life and I’ve had to accept that my gorgeous fluffy dogs are real dogs… predators even.

But on a cheerier note, at least a more creative one, I finally created a place for Wayne’s huge collection of headlamps.

He has a million of them. Battery operated, rechargeable, you name it, he has it. He bought one so he could go out to feed the horses in the dark. Then he bought a second as a spare. Then he got a rechargeable one. Then he found a brighter one. It goes on and on.

I don’t care how many he has. They come in handy when I’m searching the yard for clues such as hair, feathers, a head… What I have a problem with is him recharging them all over the kitchen counters.

I had to create a spot for them which met these requirements:

store all the headlamps in once spot and not all over the house
a spot handy to grab one on the way out
a spot handy to put it back on the way back in
the ability to store and recharge in one place

I had no idea how to do this. I didn’t know what I wanted it to look like or where to put it.

In the end I went for quick and easy. I grabbed a bit of chippy old skirting board I had in the shed, drilled holes in it and jammed in some really big nails. I added a cool chippy green-blue door thingy. Just for fun I painted the heads of the nails pale green-blue to match.

I chose to put this new headlamp hanger on the front porch, in the enclosed area. Unfortunately there’s no power there so I had to use a long extension cord going from the outdoor power point in the middle of the porch and a power-board mounted on the wall. I’ll be managing the cords better once I find my box of cable clips…

I added this cute half planter basket to hold the chargers.

In order to do all this I had to move a few things over to the other side, so the kitchen window ledge is looking a lot busier.

I’m happy. The headlamps are off the kitchen counter. Wayne is happy cause he no longer has to search for headlamps I’ve moved.

Win win.

wardrobe makeover

Posted on June 16, 2015 by zefiart

I had mentioned in a previous post somewhere that our bedroom has a split personality. Today I’ll share how I’ve frenchified a plain (ugly) pine wardrobe to contribute to the french provincial/white/shabby half of the bedroom’s personality.

This is what the ugly wardrobe looked like before.

So, I found these fancy appliques on ebay.

I did the usual: removed the doors, sanded back them back a bit, glued the appliques on the doors and undercoated them.

I painted the entire wardrobe a creamy white (same colour I used on the dressers I updated here and here). I scrounged through my collection of knobs and handles and found some cute little rusty ring pulls…

That’s when things started going downhill.

Did I mention I started this makeover before Christmas?

So… after putting the doors back on the wardrobe, and the handles on the doors, I did a little extra sanding and then rubbed spots of the wardrobe with watered down burnt sienna paint to give it that old patina.

I hated it.

So I repainted it.

And re-sanded it, just enough to show a tiny bit of the grimy-ness left by the burnt sienna.

Then I waxed it with clear wax, just cause I like the satiny feel.

But there was more to do. It still looked plain and ugly, like someone had just stuck a couple of decorative bits on an ugly old pine wardrobe and painted it white.

Which is pretty much what it was, really.

I wanted a more “armoire” look, so I designed a top for it. I did this by measuring the top of the wardrobe, re-measuring it, then drawing half of my design on a folded piece of paper, cutting it out, unfolding it and tracing it on a piece of pine.

I used my new, more controlled skills on the jigsaw, to cut it out. I only stuffed up a little bit on the top middle bit… the most important bit… but hey, I won’t point it out and maybe you won’t notice it…

I used my mini router to give the edges a bit of curve. I had to brace the corners to join it together, and I had to provide extra little bits (you can see those on the sides) to screw onto the wardrobe top.

Hey, I make this stuff up as I go along! If you’re after professional how-to’s you’re on the wrong blog!

Here it is on top of the wardrobe (minus the doors. Again.).

Yup. You noticed.

I sure did.

After I put it on the wardrobe.

The top was too long.

Not by a smidge… by a whole lotta smidges.

And I measured it more than once!

This is why I’m not a carpenter. And why I make wierd things, cause I have to. I have to find ways to fix my mistakes!

I bought some concave trim. Naturally, my overhang was too big for the smaller trim, too small for the next one up.

I opted for the bigger one, cut to length (almost length… I cut them a bit short… it never ends).

I was left with gaps. No problem. I know how to fill gaps!

Ok, so its not perfect, but its still a lot prettier to look at than what I’d been looking at for the last 4.5 years.

I also changed the handles. The rusty rings weren’t working for me. I found these old bronze handles in my collection and they’re perfect.

So here is that side of the bedroom, with the bin chandelier and the wardrobe. The mirror sits on the floor behind the door cause its just too heavy and I don’t want to put it inside a wardrobe door and stuff up the hinges. I think I may have done that already with all the doors on and off so many times…

At least I can now cross ‘finish the wardrobe’ off my To Do List. It was becoming a permanent fixture there.

scarf organisation

Posted on June 14, 2015 by zefiart

Everything in our home is multipurpose. I mean, it can (and often has) been used previously in many places and for many different uses.

Take this little pig with her piglets. She once lived in the kitchen to hold keys. The old enamel house number is from Wayne’s childhood home, it also lived in the kitchen at one stage.

Now, they’re together again as part of my new scarf hanger.

This was a quick and easy project that took me weeks to photograph and share. Between us, we have a zillion coats, jackets, beanies, hats and scarves. I made a whole lot of coat racks to hold the hats and coats, I put up an antique coat rack which I got from my grandmother’s house in Greece for our scarves and beanies… but I wanted to keep my prettier scarves separate from the practical warm ones.

I looked around at what I had and found this chippy bit of timber lining. All I did to this was wash it and scrape off the loose bits of paint.

I found a thin leather belt I’d collected from a tip shop, and a small bit of leather which was probably some kind of collar, maybe… also from a tip shop. I cut these to the right length to make loops to hold scarves. Mainly cause I didn’t have anything I liked to act as hooks for this project.

I left the buckles on a couple of the leather straps just for something different.

I added the pig for other odds and ends and added the number just because.

Its the first thing you see when you walk into the mudroom, hanging between the door to the house and the door to the toilet. Below it, on a small cabinet, is a rustic box Wayne revived, now holding gloves. That box used to be my ‘in house’ toolbox in a previous life.

So there you go. A little something new for the house to make life a little more organised.

I hope.

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the baby booty experiment

Posted on May 26, 2015 by zefiart

I’ve never made baby booties before, but I’ve done a ton of work with felt and blanket stitch. And I’m always up for trying something new.

So when a friend at work became a grandma for the first time I thought it’d be a good time to try my hand at baby booties.

First I looked up felt booties on Pinterest and I found a few different styles and patterns. I picked this easy one, then took liberties with it.

The result is these cute little booties which are just perfect if the little baby’s feet are slightly different sizes.

Eh.

Its handmade, right? It doesn’t have to be perfect…!

rustic rooster

Posted on May 25, 2015 by zefiart

I’m tired so this post will be big on photos and light on witticisms.

I’m having trouble keeping my eyelids open… I apologise, however I did want to share my second entry in the Art From Trash exhibition.

This entry is about 70% recycled and 30% art. I really wanted to combine my art with my trash.

I used a piece of thin MDF which I got off the back of a 2nd hand frame, I decoupaged pages from an old book onto it. I then drew this gorgeous rooster on it using pastels.

Once the artwork was finished I sprayed it with matt picture varnish to set the pastels so they don’t smudge. And then I framed it.

I’ve had these bits of wood in the casita since we bought the farm. They’ve obviously come off an old house… probably this one. I’m thinking they’re door or window frames.

Whatever, I loved the chippy look so I kept them thinking I’d make something out of them one day. And the day came!

I’m not a particularly good framer. In fact, I suck at it. But I did what I could, I used small brackets at the back to hold the frame together, then I used old hardware on the front of the frame to add a bit more rust to my rustic…

My rooster is for sale, hopefully he’ll find a good home cause I really don’t have the space for him at home.

Then again, I can always make space…

travelling sidetable with serving tray top

Posted on May 22, 2015 by zefiart

I did say I had some stuff to share… well, here is the first one. I call it the Travelling Sidetable and its one of my entries in the current Hobart City Council Art From Trash exhibition which opened yesterday. I know it wouldn’t really have made a difference but it didn’t feel right to share this till the exhibition opened.

I’ve had this little suitcase for some years now. I used it to store craft supplies for the first couple of years, then its been in the shed waiting for a makeover since.

The top was ripped when I got it so I always planned to make it into a side table, but I left it under a window one day and the poodles jumped all over it totally destroying the top, ripping it off the sides and pretty much making it beyond repair.

I ripped what was left of the top off but kept the rim with the locks. I glued the cream edging back on and glued the top to the bottom as well to make it one solid piece.

The inside wasn’t in bad condition but I’d had a craft glue spill that lifted some of the lining when I pulled it off, so the inside needed something to jazz it up. A friend gave me some educational magazines aimed at kids in the 60’s. They were so old fashioned and the cheap paper had yellowed… they were perfect! I used some articles and illustrations from those inside. I loved the colours and some of the headlines.

Of course it needed a new top. I had found that the packers used between products in pallets were usually offcuts of tasmanian oak. The hardware store throws these out so I scavenged some pieces from their pile. I glued and clamped them together, then traced the suitcase shape on the back, allowing for about an inch overhang all round. I reinforced the back with strips of timber, both to hold the slats together and to ‘lock’ the top in place on the suitcase.

I sanded the top and gave it a few coats of leftover polyurethane from when I did my kitchen, office and hallway floors. That made the colours really pop.

In order to fit legs on it, I cut some thick MDF and used liquid nails and some button head screws to attach it securely to the bottom of the suitcase. The legs came from the tip shop and they already had castors on them which was a bonus. I just cleaned them up and rubbed some dark wax on them.

Meanwhile, I cut up what was left of an old belt I’d used to make handles on a tray ages ago and used small screws to attach each handle, effectively making the top into a handy tray.