Sewing Room – hammer and stitches

The house has been a pretty good creative outlet, but I’m beyond ready to get back to sewing. But first things first, I needed a proper table for drafting, cutting and sewing. I decided to go the route of making my own table rather than buying one, the cost was reasonable and it’s exactly what I needed.

Supply List

ClosetMaid 6 cube organizer (2) – $29.88 each Home Depot
¾ inch poplar plywood – $35.10 Home Depot
Behr semi-gloss paint in white – $27.48 Home Depot
Furniture glides 4 pack (2) – $3.97 each Hom Depot
Starrett Measure Stix (2) – $6.24 each Amazon
Paint tray and roller – already have
Drill and screws – already have
Sandpaper – already have
Total: $142.76

First step was to build the cubes that would be the base of the table. Buying the ClosetMaid cubes saved a lot effort and provides extra storage, one can never have too much storage. Building the cubes was pretty easy, Seth and I built both in less than an hour. Once they were finished we added furniture gliders to the bottom so I can easily move the table around the room when I need to. Four slides per side is enough for the table to move easily enought, we pre-drilled holes in each corner and then the sliders twisted right in.

Next was to complete the table top. I had the plywood cut down to size (3ft x 6ft) at Home Depot when we bought it. We do have a table saw, but one less step to do at home, and also solved the issue of fitting the whole piece in the car. I picked out paint when we bought the cubes, semi-gloss to best match the finish, then asked home depot to color match. Even though it’s just white, I really wanted to make sure the top and bottom pieces looked like they belonged together. A whole gallon of paint was plenty, but I’m sure we’ll be able to use it down the line with so many projects to go on the list.

I sanded all sides of the plywood with 100 grit sandpaper to prep for painting. I painted the table over a couple of hours, it was a great multitasking project since I had to wait about 20 minutes between each coat. I did five coats on the bottom side and seven coats on the top, I tried to get it as smooth and even as possible.

Once both sides were painted it was time to assemble. I marked six inches in from each side and 3 inches in from each end to ensure the table top lined up correctly with the cubes on both sides. Four screws from the underside of each cube connected the base to the top.

For the final touch I added measuring tape to both sides of the long edge, and done! The question is what will be my first sewing project?

The upstairs floors are 100% done, and they look Awesome! Now that it’s all said and done the floors were not really a hard project, but a very very tedious project. Sanding all the edges by hand required a lot of patience, but it felt good to finally check that off the list. Next step, cleaning, lots and lots of cleaning. As one would assume, it creates quite a mess. After our first round of sanding we came downstairs to find the entire living room covered in a thin layer or dust.

Once the floors were as clean as we could possibly get them it was time to stain. When we finally arrived at this step both Seth and myself were extremely nervous. It was a lot of build up getting to this point, and this is the part that would really show if we did a horrible job, or what if the color we chose was actually terrible in a large space? Thankfully neither of those things turned out to be true. In fact it was the easiest part of this whole project, very much like The Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off”. We got a nice rhythm going, Seth would wipe the stain into the floor and I would follow a minute after and wipe it off.

I think it only took us a little more than 2 hours to apply stain to the entire second floor, not bad. Then we took a break. It was a nice excuse to do nothing since we had to wait for the stain to dry and couldn’t be upstairs. Lastly, it was time for the polyurethane. So this is the quickest step in the floor process, but I would say the easiest to make mistakes. The polyurethane simply gets wiped on with an applicator that looks a lot like a mop. The tricky part is making sure you don’t miss spots and that it doesn’t pool anywhere. Seth took responsibility for the majority of this step, which I was totally okay with. He did a great job 🙂

Two coats of polyurethane later the floors were done! Again we were able to a take long break since we couldn’t walk on them for seven days. It is very liberating to actually not be able to work on any projects, I was happy for the week off. So now after the bathroom, that was the second hardest project upstairs. It should only get easier from here…fingers crossed.