q is for quandie

You all have met my handyman neighbor Ken.

Ken is the guy that does all of my furniture repairs.  He’s also built custom pieces for me, like the shelves in my pantry.

He actually even built the shelves in my living room for the people who owned my house before Mr. Q and I bought it 28 years ago.

Ken likes projects.  He prefers them to be small because he likes that feeling of completion he gets when a project is finished, and he doesn’t like that feeling of something hanging over his head that isn’t done yet.  I can relate to that myself.  That’s partly why I love painting furniture.  You can finish a piece in a weekend, it doesn’t drag on for weeks and weeks.

I feel like it’s my duty as a good neighbor to continually provide Ken with lots of small projects to keep him feeling useful.  If he’s not working on projects for me, then he’s working on something for his wife Arlene or for nnK across the street.  Really, the poor man.  He has three women giving him to-do lists!

I have to laugh because Ken has really gotten the hang of my whole blogging thing.  He knows that I like to get a ‘before’ photo of every piece, and he’s starting to remind me to get ‘in progress’ photos too.  So a while back when he was working on the Little Speckled Frog dresser for me he phoned me and asked if I’d like to pop over and get some photos while he had the top off.  Heck yeah.

Here is the top of the dresser and its drawers set aside in Ken’s basement workshop.

The problem with this dresser was that it was what I like to call a bit wonky.  I judge wonky-ness by putting my hands on the top of the dresser and trying to wiggle it side to side.  It shouldn’t wiggle or have any give.  But this one did.  When a dresser is wonky, I send it over to Ken and he shores it up.

In this case, he took the top off and added some additional structural support along the sides just under the top and just inside the side of the dresser.

Here that is from another angle.

He did this on both sides of the dresser.

Then he re-glued the top back on.

He also had to build some of the bottom sides of the drawers back up.  You’ll often see this in old dressers, the sides wear away over time from gliding on those runners.  Once they get worn down, the drawers no longer open and close smoothly because they sort of fall down in the back.

So Ken cut away the portion that was worn down and fit a new piece of wood into that spot (you are looking at the side of an upside down drawer in the above photo).

One of the drawers also needed an entirely new bottom.

Are you noticing anything while looking at these repair photos?  Like how neat and orderly Ken’s workshop is?  Every tool has a place it belongs.

Some of his storage ideas are quite creative.  Just check out this method of storing dowel rods.

Each can is labeled with the dowel size.

Gold Medal soda?  Does anyone remember that brand?  I believe it was local to Minnesota.

Additional cans have been cut down and mounted above to keep the dowels in place.

It’s ingenious, right?  Plus it’s environmentally sound because he just used old cans that would have been thrown away, not to mention it’s pretty thrifty.  Ken was recycling before it was cool.

Ken’s storage system for screws, nut, bolts and other hardware is similarly clever.

He’s taken old cans that various products like paint thinner came in, cut the sides off and turned them into little drawers.

He custom built the wood cabinet with cubby holes of the precisely right size for them.

Here’s one last clever idea from Ken’s workshop.  He’s made some ‘cushions’ for his vice.  They look like this …

There are two of them, and Ken cut the rectangle shaped notch so that they fit into his vice like this …

The purpose of these is to protect whatever item he is holding with the vice.  For example, a drawer.

In this way the drawer doesn’t get dented or dinged up from the metal vice that is holding it firmly in place.

Pretty clever, right?

Ken has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve.  I’m trying my best to learn some of them so that I can eventually repair my own pieces, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get there.

But in the meantime, Ken did an awesome job on the Little Speckled Frog dresser and it’s sturdy as can be now.  Hopefully it will find a new home soon.

I hope you enjoyed Little Speckled Frog week.  I’ve got tons of projects in the hopper for next week because I’ll be taking a little stay-cation.  I have the full week off from the day job and I plan to devote some time to getting some things crossed off my to-do list.  So be sure to stay tuned!

I just added a new category to my blog.  By the way, did you know that q is for quandie is categorized?  If you are reading this blog on the website (as opposed to on Facebook, or via email if you are a follower) just look over to the right.  Just under where it says “stuff.” you can bring up a pull-down menu of my categories.  Want to see just my posts about travel?  or gardening?  or my house?  Just click on the appropriate category and posts about that subject will come up.

So, like I said, I just added a new category called ‘how to’.  At this point some of you might be thinking “well duh, there is a ton of ‘how to’ info on this blog already!” and that is true.  I just decided at this point that I might as well organize that info a little so you have an easy way to refer back to these posts.

You might think that painting stripes on furniture is fairly easy.  And you wouldn’t be totally wrong.  It is easy, if you keep a few simple tips in mind.  I’ve done a few striped pieces in my day, and as is par for the course, I learned by making mistakes.

One of my earliest striped pieces was this one.

If you’ll be attempting to stripe a piece like this, you want to make sure you account for that area between the two upper drawers.  The first time I painted this one, I had the drawers out of the dresser.  I wasn’t even thinking about that space.  So yes, the stripes on the upper right drawer did not line up!  Learned that one the hard way.

Once I got to this next one, I had that lesson down pat.

When you have a desk with a center drawer, you want to be sure to center your stripes on that middle drawer and then work your way outward.

Can you tell that I’m a fan of striped furniture?

So, let’s get to those tips.

To begin with paint your entire piece in your base color.  When choosing which paint to use, keep in mind that you’ll be using tape for your stripes.  If you use milk paint, chances are you will see exactly where your tape was when you pull it off.  Yep, learned that the hard way as well.  It’s not a good look, and for that reason I use either chalk paint or Fusion paint for stripe jobs.

Again because of the tape, I like to give my base coat at least 24 hours to dry well before continuing.

Next, gather your supplies.  You’ll need painting tape, a measuring tape, your stripe paint color, and coffee (that last one might not apply to everyone, but it’s a must for me).  You’ll also need a pencil, which I neglected to include in my photo.

 I like the delicate surface frog tape for taping over fresh paint (see, it even says that on the label!).

First find the middle of your drawer.  Always, always, always start in the middle and center your first stripe then work out to each side from there.

With the little speckled frog dresser my job was made exceedingly easy because the drawers were exactly 24″ wide.  Putting the middle at precisely 12″.  Easy, peasy.

Now, here’s a little secret.  The wide frog tape is 1.88″ wide (why, oh why, did they do that?), so I put 2.12″ between each stripe.  Why?  Because I can’t wrap my head around the math involved in 1.88″ wide and what that equals on the measuring tape (what would that even be?  can any of you tell me?).  Instead I make my marks every 4″.  And I have found that visually the stripes do not look like they are different widths.

So, what does that mean?  It means I find the middle, in this case at 12″.  Then I measure 1″ to the left of center (because my center stripe will be my base color and will be 2″ wide) and make a mark.  In this case, that was at 11″.  I make a faint pencil mark near the top of the drawer and another near the bottom of the drawer.  Then I use those two marks and line up the right side of my tape with them.

Important tip, don’t measure your next line from the tape.  Remember, it’s only 1.88″ wide and will throw off your measurements.  Work your way left from the center making marks at every 4″from your initial mark.  On my drawer that meant I had the initial mark at 11″, then marks at 7″ and 3″ from the left side of the drawer.  Now, for the other side, remember your center strip is 2″ wide, 1″ to each side of center.  From there make marks every 4″ (in my case at 13″, 17″ and 21″).  You’ll now be lining up the left side of your tape with the marks. This sounds a little more complicated than it really is.  And once you have your measurements, you can use them on every drawer if you are doing a piece like this one with stacked drawers.

Once your tape is all in place, be sure to press firmly along all of the edges to prevent your paint from bleeding under the tape.  I have heard that first painting another coat of your base coat to “seal” the edges works great for this as well, but I’ve never tried that.  I find that the Frog tape does a pretty good job without adding that extra step.

Normally I would paint a drawer with a horizontal motion, but you don’t want to do that here.  Use brush strokes that are parallel to your tape to avoid pushing paint under your tape.  I used two quick coats of Fusion’s Picket Fence on my project allowing about an hour of drying time between coats.

I remove the tape immediately after finishing the second coat, before the paint is dry.  I like to get that tape back off as soon as I can to avoid damaging the base coat.

And voila, striped drawers!

Load them back into your dresser, and you have something like this.

So, have I inspired any of you to try some stripes?