Pot Rack

Our kitchen cupboards would make Martha Stewart weep tears of despair. Hell, they’d make Ozzy Osbourne weep tears of despair. They were like one of those cartoons where the kid’s mother opens his bedroom closet and an avalanche of toys come flooding out. I really wanted one of those old-bed-frame-hanging-from-the-ceiling pot racks, but given our real estate agent’s strong feelings about Blu-tac, I suspect she wouldn’t be handing out lollipops for hooks in the ceiling. I went to the tip shop with $5 in my pocket, and as usual it obliged.

I didn’t bother taking a proper ‘before’ photo, since I was fairly certain there’d be nothing that would warrant an ‘after’ photo anyway.

This is why I don’t measure things: because even when I do, I still get it home and discover it’s THREE CENTIMETRES TOO WIDE. We ended up tearing the entire thing apart with a crowbar and a very large hammer, sawing a few centimetres off the shelves and rebuilding it, which also allowed me to pick the heights of the shelves to suit the implements. 

The advantage of having torn the side off was having extra bits of wood, so I measured and sawed them to the length between two of the shelves and nailed them in as cooking-tray dividers. I placed the cup hooks through the technical method of holding the pot approximately where I wanted it, marking the spot with pencil and screwing the hook in. I also put three on the side facing the oven so I wouldn't have to wrestle with the drawers every time I wanted a spatula, which often literally do not open because they're so crammed with every half-melted kitchen implement my mother no longer wanted.

The pot lids are sitting in some kind of plate drainer, but balancing them in there is like playing a particularly delicate game of Jenga, so eventually I’ll have to find something wider. The back of the rack has no bracing: it’s sandwiched in so tightly it doesn’t matter, but if it was standing alone, it’d crumble like a nail-studded pack of cards.

The first time we dragged it into the kitchen, we discovered that we couldn’t actually open the kitchen cupboard to the left of it. I cheerfully declared that we could drink from Tupperware containers from now on, but Lawrence suspected my housemates wouldn’t share the sentiment, so we dragged it back out and hacked off most of the uprights of the top left shelf. The part that remains used to hold our mixing bowl, back in the happy days when we actually had one.

Martha Stewart can now redirect her wrath to the hideous 1950s browny-yellow shagpile carpet in the living room.

Picture Book Decoupage Desk

As with so many projects, this started with nothing on tv, an empty wallet, a $2 Scout Auction purchase and a promise to Nan to do something about that dreadful desk, dear. The craft room is picture-book themed, with a memorial frame for Stories Bookshop, a quote from Neil Gaiman’s poem Instructions and illustrations hanging on the walls.

So, in the absence of illicit drug use or brain damage, why did it take me an hour to figure out that hey, maybe I should decorate with a picture book? I picked one of my favourites, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day. Ironically, it almost became a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, because Zoe's scanner drivers don't work with Windows 7 so I spent three hours trying to come up with an alternate way of making it work, then eventually gave up, photocopied the book pages, pieced them together and hoped for the best.

"He also said to watch out for the books on his desk, and I was careful as could be except for my elbow." I always related to this one - my elbows went off on frolics of their own, too.

‘Best’ is not exactly what I got, but it’s better than a whack on the nose with a rusty poker. Which is what I would have got if Nan had found out I still hadn’t painted a year and a half later.

Recovered Chest

This is the colour my mother affectionately calls “calf shit brown”.

It matched our carpet, and that is not a good thing.

The vinyl, unfortunately, was held on by more staples than the population of Beijing. If you wiggle the screwdriver completely underneath the staple and jerk it up hard, it’ll come flying out. However, our lounge room carpet is big and shaggy and vacuum-resistant, and I didn’t want to spend the next six months on my stomach with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass. Instead, I did it the slow way – popping each staple half out with a screwdriver and yanking the rest with pliers. I spent hours doing this, until I felt like a sadistic dentist and even a lecture on the laws regarding boundary fences seemed like an exciting alternative. Eventually I went ‘meh, what am I, Anthropologie?’ and yanked the vinyl off, leaving the rest of the staples in.

After painting the bottom, I removed the hinges and recovered the top with regular cotton material. It wrinkles a little when somebody sits on it – you really have to pull the material tight when you’re stapling, like you’re trying to win a tug-of-war or somebody’s trying to take your last bag of Doritos.

I’m not sure why I didn’t paint it brown to match the tree trunks, but I think this may have been around the time that a friend hid the tin because every time I saw it I started lamenting about all the things I could have bought with that money (“twenty-two double cheeseburgers and an apple pie!”)

Batman Furniture

Two days before his birthday, I sent Lyndon this email: ‘Start preparing tearful speeches about how you couldn't possibly deserve a friend as incredible as me, because I just finished your birthday present and it is exceptionally cool.’

In hindsight, I might have oversold it a little.

After two hours in the secondhand bookshop flipping though Batman comics to find the ones with the best VENGEANCE IS MINE catchphrases, I was ready to start. I bought four comics for both pieces of furniture and it was plenty, even after I accidentally stepped on a couple of pages. I did a cursory sand of both the table and chair before I started gluing, but Mod Podge is strong enough to decoupage the surface of the moon, so it’s probably not essential.

With uncharacteristic generosity, I’d volunteered to play taxi for Zoe and Jess, so I had until 2 a.m. to play with the layout. I didn’t want to lay them out overlapping like Bombus does, because then you wouldn’t be able to read the soulful declarations of ‘AND THAT ELEGANT COMBINATION SPELLS YOUR DOOM!’, so I had a lot of piecing together to do. I worked from the centre out, starting with my favourite strips and filling in the gaps later, always trying to make sure I had a variation of colour, to the maximum extent possible in a comic where the hero never changes his clothes.

For the chair, I’d worked a ten-hour day and wanted to go watch Gilmore Girls, so I slapped strips on with even less planning than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and it turned out just as well as the table. I’m still not sure whether to be pleased or distressed. 

 This time I wrapped the strips around the edge and underneath so it looked good from the side as well. My experience with corners is that you’re probably going to end up with a wrinkle, so succumb to the inevitable and just keep it small.

I’d thought it might be too lumpy to sit on, but I didn’t overlap the strips excessively, and after a few coats of varnish it was almost smooth. I started both off with Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Spray Varnish, then five coats of polyurethane, which is not as excessive as it seems given that beer-and-chocolate encrusting is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. Since Nan might be reading this, I’m obliged to tell you that you should sand lightly between coats of varnish.

I’m pretty happy with them – they’re not bad for someone who was pronouncing decoupage “de-coop-adge” just a couple of weeks earlier.

Chest of Drawers

This furniture makeover was essentially the equivalent of buying a rat-infested sewer and building a million-dollar house in it, complete with outdoor swimming pool.

I picked up the chest of drawers at the Scout Auction for $2 a couple of years ago, and it was expensive at the price. I then spent $45 on way more paint than I actually needed and another $15 on material.

I did four coats of white undercoat, trying to cover up the old green and purple paint – yes, green and purple on the same piece of furniture – when it finally occurred to me that I was about to paint it brown, so it didn’t actually need to be perfectly white before I started the top coats. (Where were you when I needed you, Captain Obvious?)

Because I hate wrapping corners, I was planning to cover only the face of the drawers with material. This was an insanely bad idea, because it meant I was going to have to somehow cut a straight line along all four edges without the material fraying, all to save cutting a few corners. Luckily, I always cut material ridiculously too big so I was able to change plans when I realised I was stupid.

Never cut the corners before you start gluing, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up with random squares missing from the front and sides where your cuts didn’t actually come anywhere near aligning with the corners. When you do glue, put the Mod Podge only on the front of the drawer so it doesn’t get on the material you’re about to cut the corners out of., since scissors and glue hate each other with the intensity of Batman and the Joker. I painted the glue and smoothed the material in sections, since it dries quickly. I suggest you don’t attempt to sit and chat to Zoe while gluing, at least not if you want your material on the right way up.

                                                                                                                 

The corners I cut out in half-squares, which mostly worked fine, but if you cut on the wrong angle you get little slivers of drawer showing through. I feel like there’s an industry-approved way of doing this that the internet is conspiring to hide from me.

Mum, I would know how to do this properly if you hadn’t spoilt me by covering all my high school books for me.

To reattach the drawer handles, just feel the fabric until you find the hole and punch the screw through it from the top, then remove: it doesn’t matter if the material frays a little, since it’ll be covered by the handle anyway. (Yes, I also hide my junk under my bed and sweep dust under rugs.) For the love of all things holy, do not put the drawers back in before you try to move it back to its home, unless you’re training for the Olympic weightlifting team.

 The handles, which I had to peel daisy stickers off, are incredibly crappy, but since I’ve already spent far too much on this project, I give the same excuse I always give when something’s clearly dodgy – “it’s post-modernist”.

When Lawrence came over a couple of days later, he squinted at it and said “Oh, did I lend you my paint?” He has four litres of exactly the same colour.

That was a dark day in our household.

Cable Spool Table

The day I saw this cable spool table on Country Living, I emailed Lawrence and told him that I needed a handyman, but that since I couldn’t find one I’d have to settle for that bloke who uses a hammer to fix sewing machines. At this point, I was still so unskilled in DIY that I’d only passed high school woodwork by sweet-talking a boy into doing it for me, so it was lucky he accepted my request.

Dowel is apparently the approximate cost of solid ivory, so we used curtain rods from Spotlight instead. As instructed, we drilled holes in the bottom of the spool the same diameter as the rods, and hammered them through. The problem is, of course, that if you drill the holes on a slight angle, the rods will also be on a slight angle. If you drill them on a sharp angle, the rods will look like a cheap version of the Leaning Tower.

We also drilled holes on the top: not all the way through, but deep enough to squirt in some glue and stick in the rods, to make sure they wouldn’t slide around. It also helps force them straighter.

I would have liked the natural wood look, but this is what I was working with:

After endless belt-sanding, Zoe voted for blue or green paint, but given that it was going next to yellow curtains and brown carpet, I went with Lyndon’s suggestion of brown. When we move, I’ll repaint - if I’ve overcome my phobia of the paint section by then. (Fun fact: our local store is called The Paint Shop, and its helpful slogan, in case anybody was still confused, is “It’s where you buy paint!”)

But this wasn’t a pretty, petite cable spool like the one of the tutorial: this was the Hagrid of cable spools, and when I put my books and records on they were, comparatively speaking, the size of Professor Flitwick. I wanted to do something to make all that gaping emptiness look deliberate (“I meant to do that!”), so I decided to spray paint a short quote around the top of the interior. Eventually I settled on ‘the world is quiet here’: it seemed appropriate for our house, since three of its four residents met while working in a children’s bookshop.

(I was also strongly considering “we are all mad here”, which would have described our household just as well.) I wish the idea had occurred to me before we put the rods in, because measuring, taping the stencil in place and spray painting with them as obstacles was like trying to clap with your hands tied together: it should be easy, but you just don’t have the room. As a result, the paint job turned out….distressed. (“I meant to do that!”)

The last step was attaching the castors, scrounged from Dad’s garage and finally something was just the perfect size. We chipped the wood off the outside of the castors, leaving just the metal, which fitted snugly inside the curtain rods, with a healthy helping of glue to seal the deal. This meant we didn’t have to drill right through and have the books sitting on an unsightly bolt. We were planning to use four to make it more stable but Lawrence broke one, so I have to chase people away when they try to sit on it.

I like it. Which will make life difficult, because I’m going to have to pick my next house based on whether it’s big enough to accommodate this behemoth.

Music Tables

I was getting to that point with my dad and my brother of buying them gag gifts like a “Jar of Nothing” for Christmas, yes, actually paying money for a jar whose sole attribute was having nothing in it, simply because I had no idea what to get them. Enter decoupaged tables (or, in my brother’s case, a plant stand that I thought was a table).

This was my first adventure in decoupage, and in hindsight, it’s amazing that it wasn’t my last. Once I’d printed and cut my pieces of paper, I started by laying them out in various ways and taking photos so I could compare which I liked better.

It all went to hell after that.

Despite my careful planning, the pieces of paper have more gaps than a felon’s alibi, thanks to my complete inability to cut in a straight line. In some places I had to overlap more than I wanted to and lost lyrics.

  

I’d decided to use sheet music around the edges, but the edges were curved and the corners were, astonishingly, round, and the paper was too thick to be manipulated easily – I should have switched to regular paper rather than card. 

And if I’d thought the corners were bad, just wait until I got to the legs at the bottom.

If there’s some kind of round hole punch that would have helped in this situation, I want one, because I had to cut a haphazard circle, squish it around the leg, figure out roughly how much more needed to come off and hack haphazardly at it again.

I evidently had faith in my inkjet printer that bordered on the religious, because I decided to paint the heavy-duty varnish on without sealing the ink with papercraft spray varnish first. See that, erm, artistically smeared section at the top? Yeah. That’s what happens.

 But it’s the thought that counts, right?

The finished product is less than perfect, but given that it’s a table and its sole purpose is to be covered by stuff, I guess that’s okay.

Caleb had the benefit of being second, so his wasn’t quite so bad. Which you might actually have been able to tell if I hadn’t been getting slap-happy with the flash that day.

I’d learnt my lesson from Dad’s, and overlapped until gaps were physically impossible. I had fun with the middle section, since it was all songs we'd both liked and some songs we'd danced around in our underwear to. I’m not sure if this was meant to be artistically slanted or if I was still high on varnish fumes and sleep deprivation.

I do have to confess, though, I quite like the base.

So. Better than a Jar of Nothing? The jury’s still out.