Saturday, September 21, 2013

Under the Stairs Storage Solution!

I'm not a fan of wasted space. I'm a firm believer in "everything in its place and a place for everything." When I moved into my townhouse 3 years ago, I thought the space under the stairs would be great for storage since I didn't have a garage. I was right, but accessing anything that was stored there was nothing short of frustrating. And so began my quest to fix the problem...

Casters are pretty great
After a grand search, I finally decided to try the "Under Stairs Storage" that I found on Wood Workers Workshop. I'm not much of a carpenter, so I had to read the directions about 18 times before any of it made sense. Then my boyfriend helped me figure out what dimensions I would need since my stairs did not exactly match those in the guide.

Small cabinet pieces
Once I had the dimensions, I picked up supplies at Lowe's and kindly asked the nice guys to make the bigger cuts for me. The rest of the cuts were made by me and Jason on the patio with our mostly-still-brand-new circular saw. 

Larger cabinet pieces
You'll notice that I used a combination of plywood and MDF. The only reason for this is that I scored some free plywood, so I thought this was a good use for it. The process of measuring and cutting the boards was unbelievably stressful. At one point, I was sure the whole project was ruined because I didn't consider the extra length I would need to hide the casters in the front. 

Power tools!
My boyfriend convinced me somehow that everything would work out and so I measured some more and made more cuts. Little by little, the project started to take shape.

Small cabinet getting put together
 Once the pieces were together, it was just a matter of slathering on a few coats of paint.
Large cabinet almost finished
The sizes of the cabinets is a little off because of the mistakes I made; one is much larger than the next one down, but they actually fit really well in the space and I'm so happy the project is finished.


 I followed the basic ideas of the plan I mentioned above, but as for the number of shelves, I knew I wanted something different. As you can see, the larger cabinet has two shelves on one side, with an open shelf on top and another large shelf on the other side. I still need to organize everything in the shelves, but they look great!


I added pulls to complete the look and I'm thrilled! The original plans called for three cabinets, but I only did two. I wasn't sure my lack of skills would be able to produce anything at all, so I didn't want to overload myself. Right now, the left side is left open and it works as storage for the vacuum and broom.

Before
After
I might eventually tackle another cabinet, but for now, I love how this turned out! If you decide to try this out, please let me know so that maybe I can help you avoid my mistakes. :)



Saturday, September 7, 2013

Pumpkin Patch

It's only September, I know, but a friend of mine and I decided to get a head start on Autumn with a variety of pumpkin craftiness. I had sent her a list of several Pinterest options and we narrowed it down to three, which was about all we could handle in an afternoon.

The first ones on the list were glitter pumpkins. We bought some Dollar Tree pumpkins of different shapes and sizes along with glitter spray paint in orange, purple and green.


This was the easiest project since all it involved was spray painting some pumpkins and waiting for them to dry. Oh, and of course, washing your hands for about 23 minutes to get the excess glitter off.  They turned out exactly as anticipated, despite some tiny holes in the original pumpkins, but I figure we can just turn them around.


Next on the list was a Mod Podge pumpkin from Urban Daisies. This was the most time consuming of the bunch because each little piece of paper had to be Mod Podged (that's a verb, right?) onto the bumpy pumpkin and smoothed out with our fingers. We took off the stem so we could add a twig stem at the end.

The book we tore apart for this project was a Dollar Tree book, so I felt slightly less awful for ripping out the pages. We added some moss in green and purple from Michael's and a twig found in the yard for an added rustic look.


You can't really tell from the photos, but we used a shimmer Mod Podge which gave the paper a more aged, slightly shimmery look. The craziness of the moss is so fun. I {love} how these turned out!


Finally, we reached my favorite pumpkin from Everything Under the Moon. We bought the pumpkins from Michaels along with the most perfect yarn. Ever. Despite not being able to find my stash of glue sticks for the glue gun, we managed to secure the first piece of yarn to the top of the pumpkin (with household cement... which smelled like industrial strength stuff, so I figured it would hold). After that, it was as simple as wrapping the yarn around the pumpkin. I didn't keep count, but I assume it took about 487 revolutions and almost all of the yarn to complete.


Just like the last pumpkin, we took the stem off to make the wrapping easier. I didn't like the way it looked to just attach the stem back, so we added some moss to finish it off. We finished all three projects in less than 3 hours and had a blast catching up in the process. The pumpkins look so good, I'm not even going to wait until Autumn to display them. 



I'm glad I got to try a few of the projects from my ever growing list of Pinterest DIYs. There's always a great sense of accomplishment when you set out to do a project and it turns out better than expected. Here's to the upcoming season of Autumn and many more crafts!