Elf Table Rehab

So, this is not necessarily a "how-to" post, but rather a "how I did this" post.

In 2011 my boyfriend Chris gave me this AMAZING ancient coffee table for my birthday. He knows my love for weird furniture and gifted me this Elven floor table. (Is it an ACTUAL Elven table? probably not, but really, it totally is.) Its carved out of 3 pieces of solid wood. The top surface is key-holed blended into each curved spiral piece. Each spiral is 1 solid chunk of wood which is so awesome.

I love to sit on the floor, and it was perfect height for cross-legged table time. It lived in our apartment  as our main coffee table for a year. Although it is an extremely heavy and sturdy table.. wood rot, insects, and I'm sure thousands of years of elf use has worn the wood quite a bit. And by quite a bit I mean like... to a pulp.. like literally dusting off into non existence.

 There is absolutely no way that I could let this lil' gem go into disrepair, so I did my best to restore the wood damage and mend the table back into ethereal perfection.

So this is the end of the table as of 2012, I took a picture of it because I was scared it was going to get worse. (It did) At this point in time you cold poke the wood and little puffs of sawdust would come out of the holes. I think these are termite holes? Or maybe wood mosquitoes? I knew that wasn't right but I decided not to attack it until I knew how to fix it.

Here is the up close picture of it before I started the clean up. As you can see, it got a lot nastier.

So here was my plan of action, remove the damaged wood, attempt to keep as much in tact as possible, clean/sterilize the situation, fill, sand, and stain.

I set up a little work space on top of my rabbit cage (because that makes sense?) I had with me a few small chisels, wood cleaner, Windex (because you always need Windex), 100 grit- 220 girt sandpaper, lots of paper towels, wood filler,  and a putty knife.  After I had all my weapons of mass re-construction, i started to peel back small pieces of wood to get rid of all the soft pulpy parts.

... so... yeah... about a half in hour of slowly de-pulping this is what I was left with. Turns out the damage was mostly under the surface of the wood. I'm sure the polyurethane was the only thing keeping the outside of this from falling apart.

You can see from my pile that the inside wood just fell off into dust and the outside pulled off in strips. Even though I was panicked that the curve was so bad, I could tell that I still needed to get rid of more wood.

After about 15min more of ripping, I had come to a stopping point. This was it. -sigh- my poor elf-y table.

Luckily, the pulp stopped after about a 1/2 inch into the wood and once again there was hardwood. So thankfully the bug holes didn't go all the way through the spiral. So now I was left with a half inch hole filled trench across my freakin elf table.

I used 100 grit sandpaper to very carefully sand down the chippy parts of the soft wood. I wanted to leave a clean surface to have the wood fill adhere to. I got a can of canned air and blew into all the cracks to get out all the dust particles.

I did some research on what kind of wood filler to use, and I was recommended Minwax Latex Woodfill

This is a great product. It is very easy to use and mold, it is stainable, sandable, and easy to clean. It dries really fast and creates a hard surface. I bought a crap ton of it, because I didn't know what I was expecting. (I'll tell you by the end I used basically all of it.) I grabbed my putty knife and got to the fillin!

After about 2 hours of drying and adding more layers of putty, I created this monstrosity.

I left all of the woodfill dry over night, just to make sure it set into all the deep cracks. The next day I took the table outside and used 100 grit and 200 grit sandpaper to sand down the rough exterior. (I had to alternate sandpapers because I didn't want to ruin the wood stain around the puttied areas I wanted to blend it in with the good parts.)

Sanding results.

You can see in the last picture how well the wood fill hardened to fix the edge of the spiral. I was really happy with how it sanded down so perfectly. I was also happy to see that the fill got into all the drill holes and leveled out with the original wood. Yay! I also didn't hate some of the texture the fill left. The wood isn't perfect, so the textured wood fill gives the new part a bit of character.

I cleaned all the dust and sanding residue away and prepped for staining. I didn't find a wood stain that matched the original color, so I made a suicide color out of Minwax Ebony, Mahogany, and Cherry wood stain. By blending them all together and testing on a little corner, l I found a match!

LOOK! It looks so much better! See how the texture imperfections from the woodfill makes it blend in better with the old wood?

Obviously there is some differences in depth of color and sheen, but it is so much more stable and I know it will stop the damage from getting worse.

I don't know if this will be the last fix up on my Elf table, but for now I am really happy with the results. It is a perfect piece of imperfection and I hope it stays this way. :)

The Epic Window Seat Post

I have been putting off blogging about this project, simply because it took me so long to complete... and because there is bad blood between me and this house.

But I will suck it up and show you step by step how I made my sister a built-in window seat.

Okay, So this is my sister Tayler's  house. Its like... 8 years old, I think? It is SUPER CUTE, but when she bought it, it was very builder grade neutral boring biege-ish. It didn't really have a lot of character until she came in and painted every room a bright color, bought cool furniture and started decorating. She has been there just over a year and we decided we needed to start making it HER home. So she commissioned me to build her a built-in Window seat. I don't personally have any pictures of the interior of the house before I started building so I made you a diagram.

So here is a sky view of the main living space of her house. The main "room" is an open concept, living room, dining room, kitchen mix. The living room is to the front (right) of the house, the middle the dining room, the back (left) is her kitchen. The spacing and placement of Tay's furniture fills the space perfectly, except for the bank of windows in her dining room area. There is a recessed 2'x11' area of windows that center her dinning room table. She had floor to ceiling curtains that looked nice, but the area seems blank and boring. SO ALAS! My window seat position!

As with all of my projects I start with sketches and poorly thought out Ideas that I Sharpie onto paper plates, or scraps of paper. It was the same with this project. I showed Tayler what I thought about doing, A simple built-in with two cabinets underneath, that framed the windows.  I would match her trim, and paint it white to match the rest of the molding in the house. After lots of math, complaining, and measuring I took my first trip to the hardware store to buy supplies!

Here is me with like 8- 10' studs. This picture was taken July 12th --beginning of the project (I'm telling you this so you know how long this took me.)

Here you can see a pile of wood. Let me attempt to explain to you that horrific knowledge that I found out at this point in time. THIS HOUSE IS THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL. NO wall, NO corner, NO floor, NO VENT NO WINDOW NO TRIM NO NOTTHHHINNNGGG in this house is Level, square, or symmetrical. If you know anything about me, you should know that I HAVE to have things even and symmetrical or my brain will explode. The windows you see in the photos are "allegedly" the center of the recessed area. YEAH NO. They aren't level to the floor either, nor are the floors under the windows level. The space on either side of the windows are uneven by 2.25' and the stupid heat vent under the windows is 4" off in the other direction.

If It was up to me, I would have torn down this house and rebuild the whole damn thing correctly. But Tayler would not allow me to do so.... So i build this thing to fit her idiotic house.

What I decided to do was built the framing of the seat in 1 solid piece, that way it could be installed in one chunk and if she ever wanted to take it out 10 years from now she could at minimal effort. I measured my pieces to be 20" in height and roughly 50-53" wide (because of the dumb uneven house I had to split the differences) The height of her dining room chairs was 20" so that's what I went with. I built 2 rectangular boxes and connected the tops of them together with 2- 12' 2x4s. I left a 2 foot gap between the 2 cabinets so her air vent could still work properly.

I had these puppies SO square and SO level that I laughed manically for hours. This house has NOTHING on this window seat. Because I am a straight A gangsta' the framing slid seamlessly into the area in one solid piece.

In the photo on top here, you can see how helpful Tayler was in the process of building. She is good at watching and moral support.

Before I started to cover the Window seat a cut pieces of 1/2" MDF to fit the spaces inside the cabinets. I used a jigsaw to cut them to fit snug and slid them down the tops of the cabinets, securing them with finishing nails and wood glue. Once the bottoms of the cabinets were in, I could start measuring MDF to cover the outside of the Seat.

Before I put the top on, I had to frame out the spot where the heating vent was. I cut 2x4's at the height I wanted to leave open, and secured them to make a box. I then lined that area with MDF so no air would escape from the vents into the cabinets. Before I started with the face of the bench, I drilled the framing into the studs of her walls. NOT into the hardwood floors. If she would remove the bench I didn't want any damage done to the floors.

I cut a piece of MDF to match the top of the seat and placed it on there for now. I wanted to literally trace the openings of the cabinet doors on the back of the MDF so I would know EXACTLY where I needed to cut the openings. After I had my front pieces cut to size I secured the top seat board to the frame. If I placed the top on first, it would over hang on the front of the seat, making the top more seamless after painting.

Here is me using a jigsaw to cut the door openings. I then sanded the cuts a little, to get off all the rough edges.

SHABLAM! The fronts of the seat fit perfect over my openings and under the lip of the top. BOOM!
Now to work on the cabinet doors...

I decided to use hardwood for the door fronts because they are heavier and would be more durable to open and close constantly. I cut the door fronts about a half inch larger on each side of the door openings, so I would have room for hinges and for the doors to have room to rest on the front of the threshold. When I put the doors up to the seat I thought they looked boring, and needed some spiffing up. So I went and saw my Grandpa and we used his router table to router the edges of the doors.

If you don't know what a router is, It's basically a cool tool that takes a shape in drill-bit form and runs it against an straight edge of wood, and changes its shape. That's how you make crown molding and cool beveled edges on frames and door fronts. We decided just to round the edges a little and make them a bit softer. I think we wound up using a 1/4" bit, beveling in the corners a bit.

Next step I needed to take was making the built-in look BUILT IN. I wanted to match the house trim and run that all the way across the bench blending it in with the rest of the house. Because Tayler's house has a secret vendetta against me, no trim in this world matches the crap in her house. So I had to make it myself. Tayler's trim is some ridiculous 3" 1/16.8274823786472 in size with a quarter round base attached to it. So I found a 4" composite white trim that I cut down on a table saw to match the same height. I then got a few pieces of quarter round trim and tacked it to the front of the base trim. Thank the lord it wound up matching perfectly, or I may have just burned her house down and changed all the trim to standard builder grade easy stuff.

This is me being very smug that I beat Tayler's house. I am pleased with myself.

After priming the inside of her cabinets, I decided that the corner of her seat would look pretty fresh if I used a bit of toe trim to connect the top and front corner of the bench to the wall. So I added a bit of trim on each side of the bench to finish it into the wall. (you can see this trim on the left corner of the bench)

Paint Paint Paint!

3 coats later the bench is painted a nice gloss white! (It's not actually WHITE WHITE, I took a chip from her existing trim and had them color match it at Lowes. Turns out its actually some weird barn off white color, glad I took the time to check the color or it would have been weird)

You can see in this bottom picture how well all the trim matches up, and the the impact of the small trim I added on the top. I think it looks pretty nice.

Next I put on the door fronts. I bought 3 inch brushed nickle hinges (that matches the other hardware in the house)

Hurray! Its almost done!!! With all the tools cleaned up, dust, and tape gone it actually looks like it belongs there. :-)

Around this time I got an awesome coupon from Jo Ann's Fabrics that all their cushion foam was 50% off. So Tayler and I splurged and got 3" foam for the top of the bench. Supa' soft for the bunz. I learned during this process how cool it is to cut foam. You use a huge knife (I used a 8" serrated bread knife) to cut the foam. You place the knife on your cut line, and just drag it all the way through. Repeat the drag until it cuts cleanly through. BLEW.MY.MIND

After we got the foam topper, We went shopping for knobs for the doors. I told Tayler she could get something with color, or obnoxious detail because the white of the seat was so clean and non-distracting. She picked out these really cute round guys from Hobby Lobby. They were like $2.99 a piece.

Farther back view of the Window seat in context of other living spaces.

To finish up the foam seat on the bench I sewed a slip cover. We spend like 3 hours shopping for fabric, but decided to keep the color neutral and try and match the color of her couch and dining room chairs. We got a medium grey color.

I'll tell you it was a PAIN to sew this cover, and stuff the NO slip grippy foam into the casing. It took me a hilarious afternoon to get it put in correctly. The whole cover was 11.5' long by 2' wide by 3" thick.

Here we are sitting on the finished bench!!!!! This photo was taken on August 23 the final day of the project. -sigh-





Since it's completion we have added VERY loud colored throw pillows for the back of the seat.

I'm so glad I got the opportunity to do this project. It was a lot of fun and I learned a TON. Mostly about how poorly modern day houses are built... but also how to work with another person and fit their needs. I think this whole project cost about $275.00 to do. $100 for the lumber $100 for the trim and paint, and $75 for fabric and finishings.

I love window seats! YEEHAW!  I hope you enjoyed the process!