Another pretty little tray

A few weeks ago, I made a little tray out of scrap wood. Then I decided to go poke around the flooring section of Home Depot and discovered they had 4x12 carrara marble tile, so I bought a bunch of that. I picked my favorite one and used the remaining mahogany I had to make this little tray for the kitchen. I LOVE carrara marble, but it's so fragile that it would have driven me batty having it in the kitchen as countertops. So I compromise and use it as an accent wherever I can.

I went with a darker stain, so it wasn't quite so orangey as the first one (though I love the vibrancy of a natural orange-toned wood.) I thought the dark would complement the color of the marble more. 

I also used spray lacquer on the marble and the wood, so any olive oil drips wouldn't discolor the marble. So far, so good.

It's so pretty; it makes me happy every time I look at it.

Attic cleanout + a fun little project

Last weekend I saw a little tray in a store and momentarily thought about buying it, before realizing I could make sometime similar (better) with some scrap material I had at home. So I kept my $20 and made for the garage.

During Attic Purge 2016, an activity that will hopefully never happen again, I found a few mahogany 1x2s that I'd bought four years ago for a project I ended up not using them on. Perfect. I'd been planning on digging into my scrap pile of assorted pine and fir, but this was way better.

Tangentially, here is a list of a few other things I found during Attic Purge 2016. Feel free to judge me, because some of this stuff is ridiculous:

• the remaining broken wax chunks of a peach candle I bought from Pier 1 in junior high, in a plastic ziplock bag
• a bag of receipts from 2007 and an envelope of coupons from about the same timeframe
• an entire unused huge box of crayons and three packages of markers (including bold colors, which I never liked)
• 4 boxes of staples, 2 hole punches and many packages of push pins, labels, manila folders, printer paper and other various office supplies. Like, enough to supply a small office, not just a handful of things for two people to use.
• college graduation tassels and an empty (hmmm...) diploma case
• a thumb drive that was approximately as big as my index finger
• the laptop lock that came with my IBM ThinkPad tank of a laptop from freshman year of college
• college notebooks and papers, including handwritten (!) exegesis of all of 1 and 2 Samuel and quite a bit of Spanish homework
• a jar of wine corks. Cheap wine, like Barefoot and $2 Chuck, from when we were first married. 
• an empty olive can. I think I liked the label. 9 years ago.
• the address stamp from our first place in Pasadena: 726 Lincoln Ave. 
• like 6 sets of sheets for a queen bed. We don't have a queen bed anymore. 
• a box of tupperware containers without lids

Now we have a way emptier attic neatly organized into clear giant tupperware containers, a pile of garbage in our garage to slowly get rid of, and a LOT of stuff we are donating. The attic got so ridiculous because when we moved to Bend five and a half years ago, it happened really fast, so we kind of ended up throwing a bunch of stuff in boxes and forgetting about it upstairs until now. Consequently, it was this odd little time capsule representing our college years to about 2008 or 2009. (Which, gag me, was 7 or 8 years ago.)

Anyway, back to the point. In the course of this project, I found the mahogany. And I made a tray out of that and some scrap tile from our slate countertops.

This little critter was surprisingly tricky to photograph. I mitered the corners, then glued the whole thing together and clamped it within an inch of its life using my sweet corner ratchet clamp. I "finished" it with some mineral oil, so it's not exactly designed for a life of hard use, but it sure came out pretty and I think it should be solid and sturdy. At least, I hope so; I gave it to a friend as a little gift.

I'm already working on the next one, using some 4"x12" carrara marble tile I picked up at Home Depot. I'm going to make a new little tray for our olive oil and salt and pepper in the kitchen. I'm going to stain the wood dark for contrast with the marble and then spray lacquer the whole thing, since the marble will look gross if oil penetrates the surface. Just waiting for a nice day to be able to stain outside, since Minwax smells horrible.

Hopefully Builder's Bargain is still selling those pieces of mahogany. The figuring is really beautiful; they're almost iridescent. And the whole bundle, 8 feet of that plus some mahogany dowels, was only $3. That's less than half of than Home Depot is charging PER FOOT.

I kind of thought about selling the trays on Etsy... thoughts?

Miscellaneous project roundup

I made this a couple months ago as a wedding present for our friends who recently got married and hauled it up to Seattle one weekend in October in a suitcase. It's fairly large, 1x2 feet, and it only fit in my huge rolling duffle (which we call the body bag, it's pretty big). It felt ridiculous packing that for a weekend, but you gotta do what you gotta do. (This also allowed me to take four jackets and six pairs of shoes, so I guess it worked out ok. Indecisive much?)

I'm thinking about making another one for myself :)

And...I don't remember when we finished this up. Probably also in October. Planted tiny arbor vitae shrubs along the back driveway, which will form a nice screen when they grow. I missed the privacy we had before the neighbors' 15-foot-tall shrubs died; the 6-foot fence just isn't the same. Plus the hedge was prettier. This should have a similar effect and also screen whatever's parked back there.

The Kitchen Picture Ledge

For the last two weekends, I've been working on the first project in forever that I have actually been excited about.

Here's what the kitchen looked like before, a few months ago.

Part of my fun came from paying hardly anything for the project (maybe like $25 in various wood and a few bucks in getting some prints made) and finally finding homes for art that I'd had for a long time and never could quite place. It also solved the issue of art in the kitchen, which I've been struggling with.

I knew whatever went up needed to unify the four wall spaces, because any way I diced it in my head, hanging a picture on each wall didn't really work, but it also seemed awkward to leave one wall blank (or only have a piece of art on one wall and leave the others blank). I toyed with the idea of gallery walls that wrapped all the way around, but while I and every other design junkie on Pinterest love a good gallery wall, it seemed like a chore to try to put one together and worried me that it might clutter the space.

Then one day, inspiration struck with this ledge. No unnecessary holes in the walls, adds a nice bit of contrast, unifies the space and is super easy to build. Bingo. I love it just as much as I'd hoped, and it'll be incredibly easy to swap out art when I run across something fun and new. Here's the one on the right side of the kitchen...

And on the left. The clock is probably going to get relocated, because it's hung too low for me to put anything underneath without it looking weird.

This afternoon, I successfully completed a subproject of this project: building a large frame with mitered corners for a 12"x18" of this picture I took, in this very kitchen. (Is this what people call "meta"? Not sure. Maybe.)

I accomplished this feat using this AMAZING ratchet corner clamp. This thing is brilliant and it's only $6 (which I didn't realize until just now...what a STEAL). I don't actually recall the last time I was so jazzed about a tool, though I do tend to get pretty darn enthusiastic about a good clamp. There's just nothing else that solves problems as effectively as a clamp doing what it was designed to do. 

 

I decided to go clamp shopping today after having an attempt at a mitered corner frame go seriously sideways on me yesterday evening. Literally and figuratively. There was a lot of muttering and prying and poorly placed glue and tacks from my staple gun (including almost one in my finger...don't tell Todd or I'll lose my air compressor privileges). It took forever and I ended up with three out of four neat-fitting sides, which, for those keeping track at home, is one fewer than the standard picture frame features. 

This afternoon, I cut and assembled two functional frames less time than it took me to screw up one frame yesterday. Right tool for the job makes all the difference :)

I'm about to become a picture-frame-making fool. I can get glass cut to size from Lowe's for pretty cheap and this clamp actually makes mitered corners fun. Something I never thought I'd say. 

Black (Walnut) Beauty

Last month, I finally made it to Rogue Pacific Lumber. I heard about it from the guy who owns Limestone Coffee in downtown Medford, because I chatted him up about the amazing slabs of wood they have for countertops at the coffee bar. He said they do a ton of reclaimed wood from all over the country. 

I adore reclaimed wood and quickly decided this was a place I needed to check out. After being taken around the lumber yard, I landed on this piece of black walnut (it's about twice as big as what you see on the countertop). Thought it'd make a great live-edge cutting board, and I was right. The grain is really beautiful, and the figuring in it doesn't come through well on "film" -- too bad. It's almost iridescent. 

All the oil is soaked in now so it's not shiny. I did about three heavy coats of mineral oil as a light finish, just a little something to protect against water soaking in. You can see how it's soaking in to the lighter wood on the right more than the darker stuff on the left.

I also had a little epiphany while I was looking at the $8 bottle of butcher block oil...I wonder if the mineral oil in the butcher block bottle in the woodworking section of Bimart is the same as the mineral oil in the pharmacy section of Bimart. A little googling indicated that it indeed was, so I picked up a $3 bottle of the other kind of mineral oil and used that. And that is just one of the many reasons I love Bimart.