Power Tool Envy

Dining room table

2009-03-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I know it's been a while since I posted anything, but I've been trying to find pics of projects and have not devoted much time to this endeavor. So today I sat down with a really big stack of CD's. In said stack I found one CD in particular that had some of the projects I'd been wanting to post. This table was my first piece of furniture, built back in 2003.

To give a little background on the table and how it came about, back in November 2002, we moved from our first house (approx 1100 sq ft) to our second home (approx 2900 sq ft). With such a huge change in square footage, you can image how empty the house felt initially. One of our struggles was the dining room. When we moved in, we had a cool little chrome & formica dining room set (thing really hot item in the 1950's). The key word here would be 'little'--with both leaves in the table we could get 6-8 people around it, depending on how much elbow room you needed to eat. The little table was really neat and served us wonderfully for several years, but the dining room in the new house was... hmmm, how best to describe... HUGE! The dining room absolutely swallowed that table. We decided to get a bigger table and started looking around. Each time we went into a store looking for a big table, we came out with the worst case of sticker shock. If we were going to buy a table the size we wanted, we were going to spend way, way more than we could afford on it. After much sweet talking on my part, my sweetie finally consented to let me attempt my first 'from scratch' furniture item. :) I must say it turned out nicely... and it was big--we could sit 8 people with lots of elbow room and 12 if we got a little cozy.

This pic wasn't taken in the original dining room but in the dining room of the new house in D/FW. We felt like it was a little big for this room, so we eventually sold it and bought a smaller one that was better suited to the room. It was sad seeing it go, but it just didn't fit in the new house they way it did in the old one.

Where to start...

2008-12-17T20:01:00.000-08:00

So I've been going thru old pictures, trying to decide where to start. Initially, I thought about my first big project... the kitchen table. That table was huge--4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It was big enough to fit 8 people with ample room and it wasn't hard to comfortably fit 12 around it when the occasion called for it and the company liked one another. ;) Alas, I couldn't find any pictures on my pc that really did it justice and didn't want to mess with looking on a bunch of CDs for older pics. At some point, I'll go find some and post them, but not now... sorry.

Well, with the table off the list I think the next big job would have to be the master bathroom remodel in our old house in Bryan. I couldn't find much in the way of "before" pictures (probably on said CDs), but I think this one pretty much sums it up. This is what was left of the tile shower stall after the walls came out. And that big chunk of stuff I'm pulling off the floor is actually the shower pan. If you look closely, you can just see some of the roots that were growing into it from underneath the foundation of the house -- and no, they were not supposed to be growing there.
Well, after much demolition and rebuilding... what we ended up with is much different. The shower had to be raised up a bit to accommodate a bit of new drain pipe. Thus the step in front of the shower door and the (might I say) nice tile work around it. Hey, I didn't want to jack hammer the foundation out to move the drain pipe and the step was a nice way around that obstacle... so, sue me.

The row of whole tiles next to the step was added since this is where the original shower walls were. The new shower seemed smaller than the old one when looking from the outside but I think this was partly because the old shower had standard 2x4 walls covered in tile (nice and thick) and the new shower just had a pane of glass (much, much thinner). This meant that it didn't feel smaller when you were actually inside the shower.

While the shower was cool, the part I really enjoyed was the new vanity cabinet. Those of you who know me have probably heard all about it, but for those who haven't: the space where the new vanity sits originally had a custom built vanity and cabinet (with hamper) and we discovered post-demo that the space was not a standard size. Pre-fab cabinetry all comes in standard sizes so you just choose which parts you need in which sizes to fit your space... kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Well, the non-standard size space meant special ordering cabinetry, which was so not in the budget. The cabinets and cultured marble countertop that my Sweetie had been eyeing at Lowe's were going to put us back between $2,500-$3,000 and that just wasn't happening. So I decided to replace the old custom built vanity with a custom built vanity of my own.

The first pic shows the overall appearance a little better since you can see the floor, the cabinet, the countertop and the mirror & wall. I like the second one because you can see how pretty the granite countertop is (yes, I said "granite"). I have to give it to my Sweetie on this one... she absolutely refused to go back in with another formica laminate countertop and made a few calls to some shops in town. She found a place that did custom granite work for counters (kitchen and bath) as well as any other furniture you could imagine--tables, you name it. They normally did much bigger jobs than our little "just shy of 6 feet" vanity so we were able to buy a remnant from them, cheap. Basically, they charged us for the material and threw in the finished edge, the hole for the sink and the back/side splashes. Way cool!

These next two are of the vanity, again, but you get a better look at the cabinet front.

Well, this was a fun project and I was very pleased with the end result. The only down side to it is that we moved shortly after finishing the project--it was complete in April 2005 an we moved from Bryan to D/FW in August that year. We only got to enjoy it for about four months, but it was so nice.

Now, if I can just find a place to get cheap granite for the kitchen in our current house. Oh, how the Sweetie would love that! :)

So... here we are

2008-12-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

Well, I was looking for a way to share some of my past projects with friends and my Sweetie (see Mom's Baggage) suggested that I create a blog. So as I say in the title to this post... here we are. I'll warn you now that posts may not happen with the regularity that you might find elsewhere, but bare with me. I'm new to this, afterall. I'll soon have some pics posted of past projects and will try to make this venture more than just an online photo gallery.