I have a lot of art. This is what happens when you’re an art major – you end up with a lot of art, and not enough time/space/money to hang it all on the walls. Which means I have 3 separate portfolios full of pieces that I want to keep, but don’t have room for. And most of it’s on paper, which mean storing it flat is the optimal solution. So I started looking for flat files – things like this:

That beautiful 5-drawer flat file? Costs nearly $700 dollars. A metal version costs more. I do not have $700 to spend on flat files.
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Here is the much-delayed final result of the desk refinishing project – it’s been done and in use for more than a month now, and is holding up perfectly, as well as being much easier to clean than the painted top was.

It even goes with my dining chair, with the half painted/half wood look happening. Maybe I should replace the lid of my art drawers, too (the ones to the right of the desk).

Note for the future: when painting objects white, consider that maybe a highly-used piece of furniture might not wear well with a white surface. My desk has been looking less and less nice recently – also, I evidently exude paint-thinner from my wrists, since the paint had actually completely worn away in the two spots at the edge of the desk where I rest my arms when typing. I needed to repaint at the very least, and I’m not prone to repeating mistakes. My new plan: strip the paint and ancient varnish, stain the top dark, and re-varnish.

Conveniently, I got a sander for Christmas! So I started with a chemical stripper to get the paint off – this is what it looked like after two rounds of stripping:

And then another round of stripping to get varnish off, followed by a wipe-down with mineral spirits:

The varnish wasn’t really coming up, so I decided to switch from chemical to mechanical: my new sander!

Look at that – it works! I used 80-grit paper to get the varnish off, then shifted to finer grit papers to get a final finish of 220-grit.

And then I vacuumed everything in the room to de-dust before starting the refinishing process. I did this whole thing in the studio because I really have no way to get my desk down into the basement alone, so there was a thin layer of sawdust on the entire room, despite the sander’s integrated dust-collection system. Once everything was dust-free, I did a first coat of the same stain from the bookcase project:

Tomorrow, I’ll do a second coat, and then it’ll be time for varnish.

My studio plan has always contained a very large table – a workspace for whatever thing I happen to be working on. I wanted it to be standing-height, since a lot of things are easier with a taller table, and I wanted it to be a surface I didn’t care much about injuring. So I decided that attaching legs to a door would be the simplest and least expensive solution. On one of many trips to IKEA, I acquired four adjustable-height table legs ($60), and on a trip to Habitat, a hollow-core door ($3). My mother kindly let me hijack her and her car to transport these objects, because IKEA is more fun with someone else, and doors don’t fit in my car. Once the table was home, I screwed the legs on, and flipped it over to stand on its own. And promptly flipped it right back over and unscrewed the legs. Each leg took five screws, too.

Did you notice the words “hollow-core door” up there? That means a door that’s basically air inside. Not entirely, there’s a grid structure that gives it some rigidity, but each actual side of the door is only a fraction of an inch thick. There are solid pieces of wood on all sides, but I’d screwed the legs into the door far enough from the edges that I hadn’t hit a single solid piece of wood. When I flipped the table over, it made a really worrisome creaking, cracking noise, like maybe that very thin piece of wood was not going to handle the stresses of holding table legs. So I moved them out to the very corners, making sure that at least two screws went into a nice solid edge. This time when I flipped the table over, it only made a little bitty creaky noise, like the screws that only went into the thin part weren’t thrilled, but the other ones were going to do their jobs. So now I have a table, and it is really useful, as I will describe in the next post. (Just don’t lie under the table to see all the holes from the first time I screwed the legs on!)

Here’s a shot of it covered in stuff – my studio is a bit of a disaster area at the moment, between the not-quite finished upholstery project, my mom’s birthday present, and Chaucer’s love for pillow stuffing.

As you all know, just from having seen previous photos in this blog even if you don’t know me, I have cats. Two cats, Dante and Chaucer. And they are fuzzy and wonderful. But they also like to climb things. Bookcases, dressers, people who stand still for too long… and, of course, their cat tree. This is an object I built five years ago, when I first got Dante and had access to the sculpture studio at college. It was functional… but fairly ugly. To the point that I had to do a lot of searching just to find this photo of it, because every time I’ve taken a shot to show off the new house, I’ve moved the cat tree out of the shot. So forgive the ridiculous messiness of this photo – it was taken on moving day, when the cats were confined to the guest bedroom so they wouldn’t escape.

So then I saw this cat tree online that a guy built, starting from an IKEA Stolmen post – it’s a modular closet shelving system, but the important thing is that it uses a sturdy vertical pole, held in place mainly by pressure between the floor and the ceiling, and you can buy brackets to attach shelves to it, at whatever height you choose. So I took the idea of a series of platforms, deciding on two big ones for lounging, and four little ones for traveling between the big platforms. Continue reading →

As you can see in this photo of the studio, there’s this tiny little bookshelf on a wall that’s way too big for it, so I wanted to replace it with a wider bookshelf, maybe 4 feet wide, with a very tall bottom shelf where my sketchbooks would fit – that one all the way to the left is 14″ tall, and that’s the only shelf in my entire house that will hold it. So I started searching for bookshelves. And discovered that bookshelves of that size are pretty much uniformly expensive, particularly if you want one not made of mdf. I think mdf is awesome and really useful, but it’s also amazingly heavy, and I’d decided I’d rather have a bookcase made of real wood – even cheap, soft wood, like pine.

So rather than spend $200 on a bookcase, I decided to build one. It didn’t even occur to me until halfway through the building process that I’d never built a bookcase before, and perhaps I should have had a bit more trepidation, but I think this is where my artistic history serves me well. I don’t look at an idea and think something like “hm, I’ve never built a mobile before, perhaps I should reconsider” – I just decide to do it, and the worst that can happen is that it’s not a very good mobile. Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking about the studio a lot since I moved in. What would my ideal space be? What did I know I wanted, from previous experience, and what did I know to avoid? I knew that my computer would be on the desk it’s always been on – the teacher’s desk my parents got me as a kid, that’s been hauled with me across states and apartments and now into this house. Also, my art drawers had to stay – they hold an unexpectedly large quantity of useful stuff, and though they’re a fairly hideous fake wood veneer, they’re really useful. And I wanted a magnetic wall. This is kind of a weird thing, but I’d randomly done a magnetic wall in my first apartment, painted with incredibly bright stripes, and I loved being able to stick up whatever random sketch I’d just done as inspiration, or change out wallet-sized photos of nephews without any complications.

Now that the sliding door was in, it was time to move forward. Also, with my newfound free time, I figured I could go ahead and paint, since paint is relatively cheap. I had to figure out what I was going to do about the wall the door was in – it obviously needed to be repainted, but I don’t have the wall color that the entire house is painted. So I needed to match the beige somehow, and figure out if the whole room was going to be beige (other than the closet, of course), or if I was going to make another wall brightly colored as well. I kept thinking about lime green, but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. I have really great associations with lime green – my favorite classes at Creative Circus were in the green room, and my favorite prof at ASC always makes me think of lime green for some reason – it’s just perfectly her color. Continue reading →

One of the first things I knew I wanted to do in this house was add a sliding door to the studio. For one thing, there’s no access to the backyard without going out the kitchen door and walking around the side of the house, and I think that’s weird. Also, I really wanted my studio to have lots and lots of natural light, and replacing a window with a door would help with that (along with the skylight, of course). It had to wait until a lot of necessary work happened first- the roof, piers in the basement, and A/C replacement, and there are only so many contractor-type people I can handle at a time. But in November, the time had finally come. I got some quotes, picked a door, and was ready for it to happen. So of course the door got back-ordered. For eight weeks. Finally, in the middle of December, the door came in, and a crew of guys came and knocked a big hole in the side of my house… and put a door into it! They also moved an outlet that was in the space the door took up, and added an outdoor outlet, which will be really useful when I build a patio out there and want electricity.

Here’s the studio before the sliding door:

after skylight, before sliding door

And here it is after, during our freak snowstorm (sorry it’s not at the same angle, but you get the idea):

As you can see, it needed its trim and the wall around it painted, but that is another post.

So it’s been a while since I posted, because life happened, and the holidays, and anyway. This is the tale of weekend number 9. On Friday morning I looked at my closet, and decided that it was time to shorten the curtains I’m using as doors for it (I’ll tell you in a moment of my newly-discovered and intense hatred of sliding doors). This meant I needed to set up my sewing machine. As aforementioned in this blog, the kitchen table is covered in stuff and therefore unusable. My art desk, assembled because of the kitchen table situation, is a high desk, so you can’t use a pedal sewing machine on it. So clearly, this meant I was going to have to build the closet desk in the studio. Continue reading →