About those Projects

We've had a bunch of unfinished furniture floating around our laundry room and extra bedroom for weeks now waiting to be stained and finished.  I finally decided to work on them this week and get them done.  I have to say, I hate this part of building furniture.  It is so hard to get it perfect.  Not that it is ever perfect, but I at least like all the visible surfaces to be fairly smooth and varnished evenly.

Bill and I hit a real snag when we had varnished the chairs and he went at one with the polyurethane.  The stain is so super dark that everything shows up on it.  I love how it has turned out, but on this chair Bill did, for some reason the polyurethane made whitish grey streaks all over the chair.  Hideous. And we have no idea why.  So we set it aside and finished some of the other staining.  The next morning I tried again with a similar result, though on a smaller scale.  I think the polyurethane must have gotten left out in the heat and is bad now. Very annoying.  I went over a picked up a new can from Lowe's and kept on going.  Apparently it is not just the polyurethane, but something with the varnish as well.  I don't really know.  You can see it on the picture with both nightstands on it. The drawer on the left has some grey streaks on it too.  I decided it was not worth redoing anything over, and the few places that ended up a bit streaky are not super noticeable.  It's do it yourself anyway so it's supposed to have character, right? :)

Anyway, I am just super glad to be done.  These are all the completed projects: two nightstands, an end table, 3 chairs, and a console table I designed myself with plans I had for a bigger one. I'm pretty proud of that.  I wanted to use the scraps we had since we have nowhere to put them when we go back to Utah.  I was able to design and build this with only 2 boards purchased. It cost $4. :)  I wanted a place to put our plants besides our kitchen table and then it will get used as an entryway table in our apartment in Utah for keys and purses and such. We have one more chair built, but it's the one with all the grey streaks, so it is going to get stained and refinished again before being put to use.  

Console table. The plants will go on it once it is fully dry and I have a cloth to put on the top so the plants don't hurt the finish.

The end table to match the one I built earlier this summer.

The nightstands. I love the knobs and they will look fantastic in our bedroom.

The chairs.  I have two more with all the pieces cut out but not put together and one that needs to be re-stained to fix the funny grey marks for a total of six.  I think I'm going to make some cushions for these chairs. Maybe in bright yellow or lime green or even turquoise.  I haven't decided yet.  I love super bright colors these days.

 You know what the real beauty of all this furniture is? We don't have to buy these things when we go back to Utah and need to furnish an apartment!  I figured it out and with all the furniture we made, the total price tag came up to a bit over $300. That doesn't include the sander and saw we bought, but those are going to last forever.  Bill's parents gave us a kitchen table that I have just started the process of refinishing. When that is done, we will have a table and 6 chairs, 2 end tables, a coffee table, a console table, and 2 nightstands. Not bad for $300.  And now I have some serious carpentry skills that I plan to use for many projects in the future.  Some of these are going to last a really long time. Others probably not so much just because of the low quality of wood we chose to buy.  I'll do that differently in the future.  I think the chairs will be the first to kick the bucket, but hey, they're pretty now and they work.