What Have I Been Up To?

It's a question I frequently ask myself somedays......

Things have been busy here since we got back from our camping trip. DS#1 left for Scout camp the day after we got back from the family camping trip. It was a challenge to unpack, do his laundry, re-pack the things he'd need for his week away and be out the door the next day, but we did manage. It's a bit of a blur, really.

Since DS#2 was going to be without one of his best playmates for the week, we decided to sign him up for a day camp. He really wanted to do a computer camp this year, so he went to this cool one where he made a bunch of neat animated movies, he filmed his own movie in stop frames (a la Wallace and Gromit-style) with Lego and built a really cool Mars rover out of Lego - it was motorized too. He had lots of fun.

As for me - well, I first decided that I wanted to get back to working out again. My knee has started bothering me again and I know it's because I'm not getting enough exercise, so off I went to the gym like a good girl and renewed my expired membership. A few hours on treadmill and bike later and I'm a bit sore around the edges, but feeling good that I'm making an effort. Maybe I can drop some of the extra poundage I've picked up lately too. If I could just stay out of the Fudgee-o's.... *sigh*

Seeing as the gym wasn't taking up my *entire* day, I finally started on a little project that's been sitting in my garage for a few months (what can I say, sometimes it takes me a while to get going!).... DH and I were lucky enough to receive this old filing cabinet for free from a neighbour of my in-laws - they were throwing it out. Now I can understand why - it's really, really ugly but I just knew I'd think of something to do with it. So, into the garage it went. I spent some time web-surfing and looking for ideas of just what to do with the darned thing and how to go about it properly....

Here it is just as I was beginning its transformation:


I took this just after I finished sanding the exterior. I pulled out all the drawers because I had another plan for them:

You can see better in this picture just how butt-ugly-brown this cabinet was. It was really ugly. (as an aside, why do they make filing cabinets so gosh-darned ugly? Would a little colour and style *kill* them????)

So, step one involved these two handy tools:

Ah, spray primer, how do I love thee? Plus my little trigger-thingy. I discovered many years ago that spraying something without the trigger-thingy (that's the technical term, dontchya know?) causes much elbow pain. Trigger-thingy prevents it entirely. Worth every penny.

Anyhoo, I now had a cabinet that looks like this:

Still pretty ugly, but it couldn't get much worse....... It took me a can and a half of spray primer to get it to this point.....

Next up was the real paint - but oh, what colour to choose? Well, this cabinet is going to live in the basement office - a rather dim and dreary place overall, being that it lacks real windows and has a really bad light in it (DH picked it out without my knowledge or approval - I hate it!)...... Our office furniture is very dark (almost black) and the walls are a non-descript beige colour (again chosen my DH without me - dratted man!), but I do have a bright red drawer system for holding my office supplies. I really like the splash of red - brightens up the place immesurably. So, I picked this can of paint:


Actually I picked this can of paint 4 times. Red doesn't cover that well. Ask me how I know. Go on. You know you want to. Thankfully Home Depot is close by.

And you know what else I learned? If you don't cover yourself properly, you end up looking like you've got a sunburn. Really. Try it. Sunburn without the pain. It'll also make people look at you funny. I can't be entirely sure that's not a normal occurrence in my case, but you never know.....

So, cabinet painted, sunburned-look accomplished and 3 blistered-fingers later, I decided it was time to work on the cabinet drawer fronts. I really didn't want to paint them (take a wild guess at to why!) and I wanted to break up all the red. More web-surfing and inspiration strikes again - fabric! And, one of my ultra-favorite items, Super 77 spray adhesive (now having admitted publicly that I really like this product, it will be promptly discontinued and will vanish from all stores on the planet....):

I fell in love with this fabric and what's better - it was on SALE! So, $20 later I still have enough left to play with for something else.

So, after removing as much hardware as possible from the drawer fronts (okay, I could only take off the handles....), I created a paper template of the front of the drawer - cutting out holes for the latch and the spot where you can insert a label on the drawer (does is have a name?). I transferred the holes to the fabric, cut out holes and sprayed enough glue to last a few lifetimes. We won't talk about just how many hours it took to do this, okay? Nor will we talk about how many times I glued my fingers together, nor about why there is a lone flip-flop in the middle of the garage floor and why it won't move.

With a little help from DH to wrestle the drawers back into the cabinet frame, I was finally able to see the finished product all together:


Ain't it purty? Just funky enough to make it interesting.... I'm quite pleased with the whole thing, although my spray-paint job isn't the best (it's quite streaky in spots). Hopefully with the crappy lighting in the basement, no one will notice???

My in-laws are coming tomorrow (both DS' are off having a mini-holiday with their grandparents), so hopefully DH and my FIL and wrestle the thing down into the basement where it can be filled with all kinds of handy things.

As for stitching (what? This is a stitching blog? Who'd a thunk it?), I have been working away at a model, so I've nothing to show. Model work can be slow sometimes, especially when there is a fair bit of back-and-forth about the design. I'm lucky to be able to have so much input to the design itself and the chart layout and instructions. Hopefully at the end of the day it'll equate into a superior project for both the designer and stitcher.

Off to tidy up a bit after the spray-paint extravaganza!