small things big impact – home sweet home

Posted on May 9, 2015 by zefiart

Day 9 – Home sweet home

Of course, while doing making small changes which make a big difference, I couldn’t resist the new outdoor elves.

Firstly, I repainted the small shelf outside the house the same colour as the house and distressed it a bit to show the dark grey beneath.

Then I relocated the concrete HOME sign which I’d bought at Kmart a while ago from.

It looks really nice against the rusty tin cans, and its nice to see as you walk up to the steps.

Next I couldn’t resist adding some ‘junk’ to large shelf under the kitchen window.

You know the definition of junk, right?

Anyway…. I added some junk to the shelf. Cause I love having interesting things to look at. And there were a ton of holes in the shelf back anyway… it was asking for it!

I love it when I visit someone’s home and they have things to look at – little surprises in the garden, clever things on walls, interesting things in the house. Its like an adventure exploring homes like that.

I want that here, not just for visiting explorers, but for myself. It gives me joy to look at stuff I love, and having it out on walls or under shelves means its visible to enjoy, and not stored in boxes taking up space in the shed.

small things big impact – a bit of a toilet roll holder

Posted on May 3, 2015 by zefiart

Day 3 – a rustic toilet roll holder

When we first moved into this house, the toilet was almost an outhouse. It was on the porch, outside the house. It was, literally a “room with a view”. You could sit there, doing your business, and look out over the valley.

We really haven’t done anything with the toilet since then, other than bring it into the house by enclosing the small porch to make a mud room. Its still ‘outside’ the house and you still freeze your butt off going out there in winter, but its no longer “exposed”.

I’ve been wanting to improve the toilet since we moved in, but its never been a priority.

I mean, really… its not top of the list of places you want to show off, right?

I do have plans. I bought paintable wallpaper to do the walls, I plan to fix the weather damaged door, put in a shelf… all kinds of exciting things. Among which was a different toilet roll holder.

I’ve seen toilet roll holders made of non-toilet roll holder items and, being as we’re horse lovers, I always thought a bit would make a good one.

Among all of Wayne’s horsey things was this huge bit for a horse in harness. Its old and the colour is just gorgeous. You can’t really tell in the photos, but it has a green patina to it.

I did consider trying to cut the bit somehow to make it into a roll holder, but I didn’t want to ruin it… so I decided to use it as it is. That way I can recycle it at any time in the future.

Basically all I did was search my stash of junk for a bit of timber which was the right size to hold it. I found this hand sander thingy (I never know what to call these things yet I’ve done stuff with them before). I sanded it (ironic) and gave it a couple of coats of polyurethane, then added hooks underneath to hold the bit.

I had two options for the actual roll holding bit. One was this rusty metal spike (my favourite) or a piece of copper pipe I cut to size and flattened the ends so it would fit through the gaps.

I prefer the rusty spike, obviously.

I really dislike the brackets I have on it now, but it’ll have to do for now. They’re all I could find. I’ll be fixing this up when I finally ‘do’ the toilet.

Oh, I also put on a new toilet seat, but no need for photos of that. We all know what a toilet seat looks like.

These surely were two small changes that had big impact.

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moving forward on the house painting

Posted on April 6, 2015 by zefiart

We have a week off work for Easter. Naturally my list of projects to do is huge.

Massive.

Long even.

One thing I planned to do, providing it didn’t rain, was finish painting the outside of the house. Its not too much to want a single colour on all the walls…

Around here painting the house is more an ongoing project than a ‘do it once and don’t do it again for 10 years’ kind of thing.

I think I started painting the house about 4 years ago.

I’m a speedy worker.

Its still not finished by the way… the back porch needs the high areas done and, realistically, it needs another coat already due to the exposure on that side.

So, when we built the front porch I had painted all that front area (except the beams up above). Then we put in a new window in the kitchen and needed to patch walls. And we decided to enclose that area of the porch so there was a lot of raw wood to paint.

This past summer I gave all those spots an undercoat and thought that, really, how hard could it be to finish the job with a couple of topcoats?

One thing I’d been planning on from the start, was a window shelf for plants under the kitchen window. I had this little grey one from the living room so put it on the outside of the enclosed porch. The brackets need adjusting so its come off now, but I was dying to see what it looked like.

Kinda cute.

It sits above the gas bottles for our kitchen. Another project for that mythical ‘one day’ is to make a box to hide both the gas bottles and the rubbish bin. Two birds – hide the bottles and keep the bin safe from the dogs.

Not that my dogs rip open rubbish bags. They prefer live chickens… sigh.

I had bigger plans for the kitchen window. This old shelf was in the white timber shed which is being used just for storage. I got Wayne to remove it yesterday and with his help (its a heavy sucker) I screwed it onto the wall under the window.

All I did was give it a good scrub and a light sand to get rid of loose paint. I love the chippy look and the various colours showing through it.

One thing I’m doubting now is its position. I think I need to put it lower. The kitchen window isn’t deep and having the plants overlap the window so much makes the window look narrower, and from inside I feel like I’ve cut out some of the view.

What do you think? I’m thinking of lowering it by about 5-6in.

Another thing I plan to do is cut a frame for that window. All our other windows have aluminium frames which were blue and I’m (still) in the process of painting white. A frame around the window will tie it in with the other windows better.

So, after doing about 2 hours of work on the second coat this morning I had to stop. I felt exhausted, weak, had chills and a bit nauseous. I hope I’m not coming down with something. Not on my holiday!

I think I’ve done enough for today.

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Beyond The Picket Fence

a new/old labrador tray

Posted on April 5, 2015 by zefiart

A while ago a friend asked me to make her a tray featuring labradors. I considered her request and came up with the idea of doing a silhouette of a lab, super-imposed on a star in red, yellow and black. Something that would look like an old fuel sign.

I started by choosing a frame I thought would make a nice tray. I then cut a piece of plywood to fit into the frame I’d painted bright red.

I printed out my design on 2 sheets of A4 paper and (using the charcoal on the back method) traced it onto the plywood.

I painted the dog and background using my acrylic artist paints. I loved the natural colour of the plywood so I decided to leave the star unpainted rather than do it in yellow.

When the paint was dry I gave it a sand to make it look old and worn. I tried it in the red frame and didn’t really like it. There is such as thing as too much red.

So back to the drawing board. I cut some pieces of tassie oak I’d gotten for free from the hardware store – they were packers in pallets of products they were tossing out.

I did the steel wool in vinegar trick – I planned to age them with the vinegar solution then paint them and scuff them up to expose the aged timber.

Well… something went wrong. I have no idea what or why, but the wood turned black as soon as i painted the vinegar on it!

You can still see the grain, but its like I used black stain instead of vinegar. Wierd.

However, in my “go with the flow, all accidents are happy little adventures” frame of mind I decided to go with it and make it work.

I painted the bottom of the plywood grey and painted a bit of the vinegar solution over the sanded areas to age it. It went black too. But it works for me. It looks old and abused.

Then I made my first mistake.

I painted some of the vinegar on the sanded red areas. It left distinct stains.

Oops.

Go with the flow. Its all part of the adventure, right?

I stained the entire red area with vinegar to try to smooth it out. The blackness bled into the star.

Ooops again.

I sanded it out, did a bit more sanding, then decided it was good to go. Its just a bit more ‘abused’ than it was before.

Since this is a tray, and trays are used to carry drinks and food, I gave it a coat of estapol for protection. That’s causing the shine in the photos. Please look beyond that. I’m sure some use will take care of that.

I found a couple of old bent handles I had in my collection – they’d been removed from a couple of drawers I’d used in another project.

I used some pre-rusted washers under the handles when screwing them in place, cause the smallest black screws I had were a tad too long. Didn’t want the pointy end of the screws sticking out on the inside of the tray!

It worked. I actually love the little rusty outline around the handles.

The photos are giving the black a rather blue tinge which isn’t there in real life. Its come up quite good. I hope my friend likes it… Do you friend?

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not too much of a good thing

Posted on March 9, 2015 by zefiart

There’s one thing you can definitely say about my blog – I never flood you with posts!

I’m a considerate blogger. I don’t bury my followers in post after post, making it hard for them to keep up with all the things happening in my life while they let things in their lives slide.

Yeah right.

More like I just don’t always have interesting things to share. I mean, do you really care that I recently remembered that I know the words to La Marseillaise but didn’t actually know what they meant till I googled it? (Pretty bloody actually.) That I can pledge allegiance to the American flag when I’m not American? That I can quote entire scenes from Monty Python movies?

My brain is full of trivia and stuff.

Not all of it useful.

One of my workmates said she’d really like to look inside my head sometimes, but I’m sure not everyone feels that way… according to Wayne its like an explosion in an op shop in there, and he should know. He has to live with me.

There’s a million ideas and plans in there, all in a jumble. Kinda like a hard drive which saves bits of files here, there and everywhere. The main problem is finding and sorting the bits into some order, then putting realistic timeframes on them. It overwhelms me.

I’m not really good at that.

I’m great at collecting things (thank you Pinterest for giving me a backup for my brain), but not good at prioritizing.

I work in spits and spurts. I get an idea and do it. I get another idea and it remains locked in my head for years till I do something about it, if ever.

Eg: the chests of drawers I did recently which I lived with for years till I felt the need to work on them. The wardrobe (will share soon) is the same. The kitchen shelves… still in my head.

Yet sometimes I’ll get a sudden rush of blood to the head and I’ll hare off and start cutting wood and pounding nails.

And usually these spur of the moment jobs are ones that weren’t even on the To Do list.

So, since I have nothing much to say of value right now, I thought I’d share some pretty photos of the garden before things hibernate for winter.

Succulents in a rusty galvanised bucket.

Armeria in a rusty ammo box with a metal poodle.

A rusty seat with some succulents I tossed a corner near the garage.

A rusty bin with succulents.

A steamer pot with an interesting succulent.

Have you noticed I have a lot of succulents? They’re the only things that survive the hot sun on the porch. One project on the muddled To Do list in the hard drive that is my brain is a shelf outside the kitchen window for my succulent collection…

Ok. That sentence actually made sense inside my head…

The cute timber shed garden patch is beginning to look like it was meant to be there.

I’m inordinately proud of my delphiniums. I got the seeds and when nothing happened I tossed the pot into the garden. A year later I got flowers!

Another surprise was the nigella which appeared near the garage this year though I never had it before.

The old wood heater from the shed is now a home for many succulents, on top and inside.

Our yard might not be the prettiest one around, with the weeds in the lawn and the bald spots where I poisoned them, but I love my flowers and the little pockets of rusty pieces I’ve created.

I enjoy my garden.

what happened to the drawers?

Posted on February 14, 2015 by zefiart

So what happened to the drawers when I decided to make over the tallboy into a linen cupboard?

They became hat and coat racks of course!

First some destruction was called for. I got out the hammer and clobbered the drawers till they came apart.

I then removed the timber knobs and filled the holes. I gave them all a light sand and went through my paint pots to find colours that were similar but not the same. I painted them all in shades of greeny blue.

Yeah, for those who’re observant, there are only four drawer fronts there. There is another one but I didn’t need it for the project I was working on. It’ll appear somewhere else later on no doubt.

I used different hooks – these hooks were sent to me by a good friend in the USA (we can’t get them here) and they’re perfect for hats.

I put the hat racks up high and the coat racks underneath. I had to stagger them in order to fit them on the mud room wall. You can see where I had to put the electrical cable over the top one. Ugh. Not pretty, but here in real life, as opposed to decorating blog-land, things like that happen.

The coat racks have mismatched hooks collected from tip shops over time.

I’d originally planned to paint the entire mudroom antique white. Now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to like the rustic timber look.

I’ll paint the pine lined ceiling white and I’ll probably repaint the two house walls to match the outside of the house. But I’d already started undercoating the left side wall (with the window and sink) back when I was sure I wanted it all white. I guess I’ll paint that wall to match the other two. That will leave one weathered timber wall. It’ll be a feature wall.

I love the way the coat and hat racks look on the old timber anyway.

I also found a home for my crystal dripping tap wall art. Its been in the casita since I made it cause it needs somewhere out of the wind. I added another hat hook to it and voila, another handy spot for a hat!

This one’s on the wall I have to paint (plus you can see the terrible paint job someone did on the toilet door!) so it’ll stand out more. But that also means it’ll have to come off one day. I hope I never have to take the other ones off. Ever.

…Am I the only one who manages to twist the top off screws?

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a kettle collection and an old cupboard

Posted on February 8, 2015 by zefiart

I love my depression cupboard.

Wayne and I bought it on a spending spree when we bought the farm. Up till yesterday it lived in the guest room holding linen.

It wasn’t very good for holding linen and I didn’t like it in there so I decided to replace it and put it where I can see it and enjoy it.

Its actually not in great condition. The top bit needs to be re-attached properly (right now its got huge nails that’ve been hammered in randomly but have come loose) and the base has rotted away in parts… it probably spent a lot of time in someone’s damp shed. Thankfully its not musty.

And it still has the remnants of the sold sticker on it cause I never saw it often enough that it would bother me enough to get out the eucalyptus oil to remove it.

I love it cause its made of old crates. When you open it up inside you can see them. During the depression a lot of furniture was made from crates cause they were easily available. Back then stuff came in real wood boxes, not cardboard and polystyrene.

Today old crates cost almost as much as a new lounge suite.

So, the old cupboard is now on the front porch, in the enclosed area protected from the weather, and it holds the broom, steam mop and vacuum cleaner, as well as all kinds of stuff which don’t need to be in the pantry: cleaning products, light globes, etc.

And the top now holds my collection of old kettles and some of my succulents.

Of course, where it is it covers the bottom half of the window, but I don’t mind that. I love the way the light comes in over the kettles.

And I love the way you can see the crates writing through the window.

I’m thinking of making a small doily curtain for the top part of the window to finish off the quaint look.

One day, when I get around to more sewing projects.

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cleaning and organising – heap of change challenge

Posted on January 19, 2015 by zefiart

You know how most people do spring cleaning? Well, turns out that most of the world (the DIY, decor blogging world) do their spring cleaning at the start of a new year no matter what season it is in their hemisphere.

Kinda like “new year, clean house”.

Whatever.

It made sense in my head…

Anyway, Donna at Funky Junk challenged everyone who wanted to participate in a clean up challenge. The Heap of Change Challenge. (For details, and to join in, click image below.)

Join in! You can never have enough cleaning/organising/tidying in your life.

Its one of those jobs you can do every day for the rest of your life.

Its depressing when you think about it.

Anyway… one job I’ve been putting off for ages is organising the casita. For the uninitiated, the casita is the original old house on the farm which we use as a shed. It was used as a shearing shed by previous owners. For us its a horse feed room, storage room, tack room, laundry, workshop, grooming room and I-have-something-and-nowhere-to-put-it room.

The large main room is my workshop basically so I have a ton of stuff my own stuff in there. Then about a year ago when I organised my office, I moved everything from the office to the storage room in the casita.

My office looked great (for a while, but more on that disaster area later) however, this is what the casita looked like.

Really.

Hope you have a high tolerance for chaos.

I am not a hoarder. I am not a hoarder. I am not a hoarder…

There was an upper cupboard in the store room on this wall but we removed it so I could use it in the workshop. Obviously all the stuff in the cupboard had to go somewhere!

Finding anything was a nightmare.

This is what my workbench looked like. The new/old workbench that Wayne had in his shed and wanted to get rid of. I love it cause of its heavy, industrial iron legs.

Basically, when I want to actually do any work in the casita I have to shove things over, step over electrical cords, trip over boxes, etc. The fact that I’m able to do anything in there at all is testament to my incredible talents.

Ha.

Ready for the afters? Well, I’ll disappoint you. I spent all weekend working on that sucker and I’m still not even halfway there. I’m taking everything out of the store room and finding a place for it.

I have boxes for things to donate, I have rubbish bags I’m filling ruthlessly, I have boxes for things I plan to sell or give away. I’m trying to recycle and use anything I have on hand for storage and I’m sorting things into areas of related items. Maybe one day I’ll actually be able to start a project and know exactly where everything I need is.

I’ll share some pics for now, kinda like teasers of organisation to come.

However… there will never be any great reveal labelled organised clean and tidy perfection within an inch of its life photos in this workshop makeover. Its just not that kind of area. Its messy and dusty and not photogenic.

It has broken windows mended with bits of wire mesh, lots of cobwebs, hay from the feed room, hair from the grooming room, mouse droppings, sometimes possum droppings, unlined walls, groovy old wallpaper, severe drafts and half finished or half demolished areas.

So, put away your expectations of pretty, control your OCD and just enjoy the bits that don’t look too bad.

Like this beautifully rusty old biscuit tin holding my hammers.

On the right of the hammer box is the farm fresh sign with baskets I had in the kitchen for a while. I something better for the kitchen, so now my baskets are holding bits and pieces in the casita. Rulers, straight edges, whatever is long and straight.

My used paint brushes, scrapers and other paint related implements are now hanging off rake heads. Not only are they all in one place, but they can drip dry there and the bristles don’t get smooshed.

Below the rake head hanging system I put narrow shelves where the wall lining ended abruptly. Someone either stopped putting timber lining on the wall when they got to that spot, or they stopped ripping it off. Either way, there was a huge gap down there where things would disappear, never to be seen again. With the little shelves I kill two birds with one stone. While I don’t condone killing any birds, this stops things from falling into the gap and doubles my small paint tin space.

A cute galvanised box holds all tapes and my tape measures are all now in a cake tin.

The cubby shelf unit needs more drawers and I’m using anything I have for now. Mostly cardboard boxes cut to fit and labelled. Ignore the blue tape labels. They’re the ones I couldn’t remove. Yet.

See the timber box with knob top right? That is the worst-made box in the universe.

I made it.

Eh.

Its not labelled but it holds knobs. I figured that was self explanatory.

And yeah, second one down holds more knobs, in case you’re wondering.

I decided that the roof was storage space just waiting to be pressed into service. I’ve started hanging baskets and light fittings up there. As well as light-fittings-to-be.

This is a corner cupboard from my old kitchen. I put an MDF top on it and some furniture legs and it now holds my power tools. I added a pretty curtain to keep the worst of the dust off them. Who said you can’t have pretty in a workshop?

I even nailed pleats into it!

This cute little shelf is something I picked up at a tip shop. I used milk paint and almost all of it flaked off one side …I couldn’t be bothered sanding and painting it again. Its now part of the workshop.

Notice the graffiti and the old playing card wallpaper? Cool, huh?

I hope to do more sorting and organising this weekend and hopefully one day soon I’ll have some more finished pics of imperfection to share.

rusty rustic lamp – take two

Posted on January 13, 2015 by zefiart

What do you do when you have a desk lamp without a base? I bought an old desk lamp from a garage sale, you know, the kind you’d see everywhere in the 80s which clamped onto the side of the desk.

I saw it, thought “hey, I can fix that” and took it home. Wayne made a base for me and I did use it for a while, but really, that base was overkill. I got a hernia moving it.

So, when cleaning out the office for its makeover (see it here and here) oh-so-long ago, I took the lamp apart and started on the road to remaking it.

The idea was to make it industrial looking to go with the industrial/rustic desk I had planned for Wayne.

I did finish the desk, he’s been using it since before Christmas and I promise I WILL take photos as soon as he leaves the house long enough for me to clean up his office area…

Anyway, I was saying, I had the desk finished but the lamp was still in bits in the casita.

I went out there this afternoon on a whim and finished it.

Five minutes. That’s all it took. Eight months and five minutes.

See, I’d run into a problem. I had this round rusty metal wheel thingy I’d picked up at a tip shop ages ago and I knew I wanted to make that the base. However, it had a pokey outey bit on the bottom so it wouldn’t sit flat. And the other side of the wheel thingy was boring so I had to find a way to have the whole thing sit flat with the good side up.

I thought a block of wood was the way to go when I started working on it. I drilled a hole in the wood to poke through the long screw on the lamp. The screw thing was too long for the wood block so I cut it shorter using the angle grinder. I found that I’d stuffed up the block of wood cause I drilled it one width all the way through so there was nowhere for the nuts to hold on…

That’s when I sat it in a corner and proceeded to ignore it.

Until today.

Today I went into the casita and thought “I must have something I can use as a base which will be easier to screw the lamp onto”.

In fact there were a few things…

In the end I selected a small wooden bowl from my collection of wooden bowls (cause you never know when you’ll need one). I drilled a hole in it where I guessed the middle was, just wide enough for the screw, then piled the lamp, the wheel thingy and the wooden bowl on top of one another and screwed them together using a couple of nuts.

Its pretty stable. The wheel thingy (yes, that is the technical term) is really heavy so won’t overbalance.

Gotta love the green mossy patina… I didn’t clean it. I just blew the worst of the dust off it. I also didn’t seal it as the rust doesn’t come off on your hands.

There was only one more thing I did to the lamp… It had a couple of scratches on the rim of the lamp so I painted it with black chalkboard paint. Now I can leave notes to Wayne on his lamp!

This is how it looks in the corner of the kitchen. One day I promise I’ll take a photo of it in its new home on Wayne’s new/old/industrial/rustic desk.

Not bad for an ~~eight month~~ five minute job, huh?

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the laziest christmas tree in the universe

Posted on December 26, 2014 by zefiart

Ok, since I mentioned my poor attempt at Christmas decorating, I thought I’d share my pathetic ‘tree’ for this year.

I was going to build a tree out of old timber or a pallet, which would have required sawing, nailing, measuring, assembling… but while searching my scrap pile I saw this piece of door I’d been using to spray paint items on. You can see some gold, white and black…

I checked it. It was rough, it took chalk… So much easier than building a tree!