New Hobby for Mama

A long time ago I came across this blog. She's a mom in Alaska who has a passion for building furniture. She'll take designs from places like Pottery Barn and create plans that complete with shopping and cut list for the lumber. I excitedly showed Josh but the difficult part is that we don't have the kinds of tools needed to try out this new hobby. Not knowing if I'd even like it, I didn't want to invest in the tools. Another thing was that we just don't have the work space for tools like that. After a while I gave up the idea. Recently, while surfing Ana White's blog, I found a link to another blog. This one was geared more towards refinishing furniture. The initial investment in a few tools was way less than building so I was off to Craigslists to find my first project.

I found this solid maple head and foot board for Maddy's big girl bed. I bought the ebook from the Perfectly Imperfect blog for inspiration and for tips. While reading it, there was this great looking piece that I wanted to copy for a night table for Maddy. We bought the head and foot board, along with rails fro $30 and the bed side table for $10. Along the way, I decided that I wanted to add some decorative balls to the bed posts and those ended up costing the same as the bed, but I'm really happy with the finished look.

In my excitement to get started, I forgot to take true "before" pictures. The bedside table was roughly the same colour of the maple bed and in really good shape. There was also another footer on the original that I pried off because it made the whole table too tall for the bed. The bed wasn't too bad, but did have some scratches and dings here and there that I needed to use wood filler.

Here are the pictures that I remembered to take along the way:

The head board here is how it came, the foot board has been sanded.

The foot board sanded and with the holes filled in

Here is my set-up ready to start painting. I later learned that the drop sheet was no where near big enough for spray painting. Oops!!
I don't recommend spray painting. It was way more work setting up and cleaning up afterwards. In the end I had to use a brush to even things out anyway. Oh well, lessons learned along the way.

Staining the top of the bedside table. That stuff is stinky, probably shouldn't have been doing that inside the house.

Ta da! The finished piece. Maddy got to choose the new knob for the table. It almost cost as much as the table.

It was a lot of work with sanding and prepping for paint and then during the painting process I sanded in between every coat in order to get a nice smooth finish. I quite happy with the finished product and it's especially satisfying to know that we were able to get good quality, hardwood furniture for a fraction of the cost.

Stay tuned for my next few projects...