It gets worse before it gets better...

This week I got on a roll and decided to strip our kitchen table and re-finish it. This was a bad idea. I had no idea how much time it was going to take.

I began sanding it on Saturday and our neighbor saw me in the garage. Being a woodworker, he was intrigued so he came over to talk to me. He quickly noticed I was going to destroy the table. WOOPS. So he put me on the correct path of using a stripper and wood after wash product so I did not change the shape of the table.

I ran out to Home Depot and grabbed everything he told me to get. $75 later I was back in business. Sunday I began to use the stripper. This stuff is nasty and hard on the hands. So with heavy duty rubber gloves and goggles I proceeded.

Fist the stripper (Parker giggles when I say this) was applied using a "Chip" brush. This lifts up the seal and stain in minutes. I then would scrape it off with a shovel type tool. FYI if you wait too long it dries out and does not work, and if you go too soon it does not work either.

After a days worth of work I got most of the base done and the table top was next. This process makes the wood look horrible and destroyed. I was basically in tears while doing this thinking I had ruined this really nice table. After our neighbor came by to check on me he told me I was on the right track so I proceeded. I came to the conclusion it just had to get worse before it got better.

Here is what it looked like after the first and second and third round of using the stripper.

As you can see there were a lot of chemicals involved. Not very earth friendly I know.

As you can see here the wood looked damaged, and uneven. There was a lot of flaking and residue left after this first step.

The base looking nice from far away.

I will follow up with steps two and three later this week. I think you all will be super impressed with my skills.

Loaded...

After we got the shelves all painted and installed we went over the cracks that the brackets and the shelves themselves created between them with some paintable caulking. It was tedious and messy but totally worth it. I think that it really finished out the look of the shelves.

After that dried we went ahead and loaded up the shelves with what we had lying around the house. This is a first attempt and for sure not the way it will stay. But we are working on it.

Top shelf has already changed pretty drastically, and we are going to add more cookbooks to the bottom self.

Here you can wee more depth of the shelves. We have a munch more practical stuff we should be putting out there but for now we are sticking to pretty stuff.

Now we have these finished I am going to move around the kitchen and see if we can empty out some of the cabinets we want to empty out so we can knock out the WHOLE WALL we want to knock out! I know we are nuts. I am hopping it comes out pretty though! More on the wall removal as we get to it.

So what you do you think? I think it is coming along okay for now.

Shelf the issue

As Parker and I get settled into the new house we are trying to take note of all the pending progects we would like to do and how we want to go about them. Out first large project will be renovating the kitchen. We have had lots of thoughts about how to go about doing that but for now we are just going to work with what we have and try and prepare our space for the upcoming changes.

To get started on making those changes we decieded we wanted to add more function storage space to the kitchen and what better or easier) way to do this but than to build the very trendy open kitchen shelves we have seen all over the place. We started out with a bare wall in the dining area of our eat in kitchen. The walls are a light grey so we thought white white white shelves would really "pop".

And here is what we ended up with:

What do you think?

We used the plans we found very well documented on younghouselove.com. I have been following their blog for years and I finally get to try out some of their great projects! We started with bare wood and stock brakcets from Home Depot. Sanded them down three times, then primed and painted them with paint we already owned. It really helped that we had all the painting stuff already otherwise I think it would have been better to just buy these shelves.

We wanted wide, thick and usable shelves that we could really load up so that they would act like really substitutes for kitchen cabinets. They are attached to the walls in the studs and then anchored into the wall in the middle with 75 pound drywall anchors. I don't think this babies are going anywhere anytime soon.

Our dishes and lots of other good stuff fit on these shelves. We don't like the gap between the bracket and the shelf though. We will be fixing that soon.

The sanding was well worth it but as you can see here they are not perfect. But I think they still came out great for our first fully DIY project.