Closet shelving becomes...

I was replacing old wooden closet shelves with the coated wire ones in order to get better ventilation in the closet. With a house built in 1954, when insulation in ciderblock homes was not required, this old Florida block house has moisture issues. Although I use a dehumidifier most of the year, the closets are better with a little more air flow than wooden shelves allowed. Once I took the wood out, it looks to be in pretty good condition aside from some flaking paint. You know what that means, don't you? Of course you know! I had to reuse it somehow.

Having recently built lots of cubbies for my desk (an earlier blog has photos and info.) and having a few cubbies left over my mind was spinning! First, I thought I would just make a vertical shelf. However, knowing I had fabric and foam waiting to be used up - bam!- a bench.
I used a putty knife to get a lot of the flaking paint off the shelves (it was flaking because latex was used over an oil based paint = guaranteed to flake!). And being as lazy, and opposed to extensive sanding, as I am I opted for a shellac based primer. That stuff sticks to almost anything unlike the water based primers. After priming the shelves, I popped in a few cubbies, equally spaced, and screwed it all together with wood screws (The wood you see behind it in the photo isn't a back to the bench. It's just propped up behind it to hide the 50+ projects in various stages of undone). Then I primed the whole thing with a based primer and painted it. Next, I cut a piece of foam to fit, used batting over the foam to soften the front edge and stapled it in place. Finally, I put the fabric on top and stapled it down. Tada a bench!



Peeling closet shelves



Assembled pre-primer and paint



Here it is all done. It's 52" long and fairly narrow at 14" deep. It's the perfect size of little bottomed visitors, putting on shoes and leashing the dog. I thought it would be nice to put all the Disney and child friendly videos in it for easy selection if we get little visitors . I have the option of adding some velcro and a piece of fabric if I want to put a curtain on it at a later date.

That's my latest - okay one of them - conversion of recycled materials. I hope you've enjoy today's project.

I'm off to create... somthing!

Carrousels

Carrousels? You ask. Yep, Carrousels. Many years ago someone got me a carrousel as a gift. Apparently, I was quite expressive about how much I liked it at the time because from that day forth it was determined that I would get lots and lots of carrousels as gifts. I don't think I've bought more than two carrousel related items in my collection of 30+ music boxes, statues, stained glass and pictures. The two things I bought were these prints which I framed over 10 yrs. ago. I've often thought of getting rid of my whole collection as it seems somewhat childish for someone in her mid 40s to have this collection. However, they've come to mean somethiing to me over the years. That something is that they represent life. How? Life is full of ups and downs every single day and the carrousels remind me that when life is in a full blown downward spiral and thing aren't going well at all that - in time - life will move back upward and all will be right in my world. Yep, that's why I keep them.

Over time these two pieces of fabric have gotten a bit sun bleached on the sides and the frames were too worn out to keep. I still really like the print so I took them out of the frames and cut off the border that was around them. I bought some blue cotton fabric for 25 cents at my local thrift store and a new shams started to be born. Initially, I was going to make pillows but I decided to make shams so that I could purchase pillow forms. That way as the pillows got yucky (that's a technical term), I can dispose of them and simply wash the shams. The plan is: once I get the print sewn onto the blue fabric, I'll put some lace or other trim around the image to clean up my cut lines. So far so good...

Thanks for stopping by!

I'm off to create ... something.