Strawbridge Stuff

No, not houses. But this blog has moved to a new address:

click me—-> strawbridgestuff.com <—-click me

Hope you’ll come visit us there :)

xox, katie

Despite many of the recent posts, we ARE still building a bunch of furniture in addition to keeping the Goodwills of Indianapolis in business.  This post is about the latest addition to our dining room…this buffet!

Here’s a quick synopsis of how we did it [although the details might be a little sketchy because (a) Bryan did most of the building, not me, and (b) we’ve been working on this over the course of a couple months].

This was another build off Ana White’s website, but we made quite a few changes since we found that some of the measurements were a little “off” (could have been her error or ours…who knows).  Regardless, we tried to stick to the plans as much as possible and fake it when things didn’t work out quite right.

The nice thing about Ana’s website is that you get the entire cut list (i.e., what boards you’ll need, how many of each board, how long to buy/cut the boards, etc) right at the beginning of the plan, so you too can leave Lowe’s with a car looking like this:

We followed the directions as best we could and eventually went from this:

To this:

To this (big jump where I wasn’t around to take a bunch of pictures…oops!):

We got a little too confident early on and decided to stain the top (and one of the doors) before we really should have.  We later decided that we wanted to do an antique glaze-type finish on everything except the top (more on that below) so we stopped after that door on the right.

Once we had the basic structure built, I got to do some painting.  First, I gave the entire thing (except the top) a coat of the SAME old semi-gloss white that I use for everything in my house (our violin shelf, our dresser makeover, the bathroom stripes, and trim/staircase touch-ups).  Yeah…and we STILL have some left, even after using it on another recent project that will be coming soon to the blog!  Here’s the piece after a couple coats of white:

You can see I taped around the top to avoid getting paint on the surface we wanted to keep stained (to match our dining room table).  After that, we decided to see what would happen if we put stain on top of the paint and then immediately wiped it off. The look we were going for was something similar to our kitchen cabinets:

So, I held my breath (not wanting to ruin the buffet that we had, at this point, spent over 2 months working on), and did this:

Yikes. I was scared. But, I wiped it off with a clean rag and actually loved the result! I never worked on an area bigger than that space above, because I didn’t want the stain to have time to soak in and get too dark.  After doing most of the buffet, I took this picture which is a pretty accurate depiction of the glazed look we ended up getting: 

(Note: I hadn’t done the wine rack in the middle, which is why some of it still looks very white).  Here’s the buffet after I finished the staining:

The last thing to do was give the top another coat of stain.  My favorite thing about this project was that, when we stained the top the first time, we noticed that somehow we had ended up with fingerprints on the surface.  They aren’t totally obvious so I labeled them for you :)

At first, we were BUMMED about this (the same way we’re bummed about anything that makes us look like the rookies we are when it comes to this stuff).  We talked about sanding the entire top down, restaining, etc.  Then our friend Kevin came to town for our wedding and pointed out that it made it super unique and very much “ours”.  After that, we of course decided to leave it.  The second coat of stain didn’t cover them up, thankfully.

We finished it off with a coat of satin polyurethane (you can see in the picture above how much of a difference it makes as far as letting the wood grain show through) and some oil-rubbed bronze hardware, and this baby was finished! Here it is all decorated with empty picture frames (just waiting for those wedding pics!)

And, just as a point of reference, here’s the best shot I could get of the entire dining room. And yes, I moved the two chairs on the far side of the table out of the way to get the picture.  I thought I was being sneaky ‘til I noticed the chair and how visible it is awkwardly in the kitchen entryway. Oh well, too lazy to take another one…the secret’s out!

xox, katie

We’re back!  As alluded to in the previous post, we’ve been a little preoccupied for the last few weeks - we got married! WOO! We had a lovely celebration on October 1, and then spent a week in Jamaica.  Now we’ve been back for a few days and are enjoying settling into married life which, surprisingly, is not all that different than our life before.  I think it helped a lot that we’ve been living together for a while.  Controversial to some I guess, but I’m happy that we didn’t have any weird habits or other surprises to adjust to during our first weeks of marriage (not that we don’t have those issues…we definitely do…but at least we went into our wedding with full disclosure which is important for us lawyer-types).

Luckily for the hundreds tens of people who happen to read this blog, we still managed to keep busy with a few projects amidst all the wedding craziness.  I didn’t share these earlier because (1) I barely had time to do them, let alone blog about them, and (2) I didn’t want to ruin some surprises, especially ones concerning the wedding.  

One such project was a gift I wanted to make for my bridesmaids.  I first saw the idea of personalized hangers on some of the wedding blogs I’ve been stalking for the last year, and thought they were so cute!

You can buy them on etsy (like the one above), but they average ~$20 a pop + S&H and I wasn’t about to spend over $100 on 5 hangers.  So, I decided to give it a try on my own and gathered the following supplies:

Here’s what you’ll need:

1. Hangers (the kind without the bar across the bottom): I got this 5-pack at Wal-Mart for under $5
2. Wire (any gauge you want…I’d go thicker than the one I used)
3. A drill bit (slightly thicker than the size of the wire)
4. Drill
5. Hot glue gun
6. Needle nose pliers

First, I drilled two holes into the bottom of each hanger, one on each side, for the wire to attach.

Don’t drill all the way through the hanger. That would suck.

After I had all the holes drilled, I started on the names.  This is kind of a trial-and-error process, so I can’t really explain exactly how it should be done.  One tip that helped me was to see the names written in cursive and try to mimic it with the wire.

I printed this one, but for the others I just typed them and looked at my screen for reference.  Obviously I didn’t follow it exactly, but it helped.

As far as how much wire to use, that’s another thing where it just depends on the length of the name, the size of the letters, etc.  I started each name by cutting a ~3 foot length of wire, and began the first letter about 8 inches in from the left side (to allow some length to attach everything to the hanger).  Once you’re finished, you’ll have a name with lots of extra wire on either end, and you can measure/trim everything to fit.

In the above example, I trimmed the wire basically right where my index finger is.  You want to leave enough that it will fit in the hole you drilled, and will allow the name to be straight.  Bending the wire up at a 90 degree angle to meet the hole helps with this.

To make sure the wire stays in the hole, I put a dab of hot glue on the end of the wire and then held it in the hole for a few seconds ‘til it dried. Pretty simple.

That’s basically it! Here are most of the finished products:

They certainly aren’t as pretty as the ones you can buy, but they did the job of holding the dresses and the other bridesmaid gift:

These lovely robes from plumprettysugar.com!  I love this website - they have tons of pretty, feminine designs to choose from and I think they were a big hit.

PS: the pretty lady in the middle is Joanna…go check out her blog!

xox, katie