Jewelry Display

Last week someone asked a question about how to store Jewelry and I realized, I needed a way to not only store, but to display my favorite pieces.

Here is what I created:

Materials:

• Picture Frame, or materials to create your own (tutorial included below.) If you are creating your own, you'll also need a miter box/saw, wood glue, corner brackets and spackle/joint compound.
• Mesh, either wire or other material. I went with wire.
• Ribbon
• Staple Gun
• Scissors
• Jewelry
• Grommets would be awesome - and I plan to add them at some point. But I wanted to create this for as little as possible.

By now you may have realized I love working with reclaimed/recycled materials. So rather than buy a new frame, I decided to use the reclaimed molding I had left over from the Café Shelves I made this spring. I was pretty giddy about getting to use a left over reclaimed material...

First I cut 4 lengths of the molding on our compound miter saw:

I then assembled the frame using wood glue and staples. Yes, I said staples. Ok - I was in a rush and I thought they would hold. I'm going to pull out the parenting line, do as I say, not as I do... you should totally use corner brackets but I only had 3 in our tool box and I was NOT running out to buy anything else for this project. So staples and wood glue it was.

Fill the corners with spackle or joint compound:

Once the joints have dried and been sanded, paint the frame:

Once you've got all the paint on... you can take some off if you like by distressing in the method of your choice.

Next, cut a piece of wire mesh to the dimensions of your opening plus about an inch and a half all the way around and fold the edges up over the straight edge. Folding it is option, but it will keep you from finding any pointy wires as you handle this in the future.

Then with the pointy wires facing your frame, staple the mesh to the back of the frame.

Next you'll want to position your ribbon on the back of the frame and staple it into place. I like stapling with the ribbon down, that way when it is pulled up, you get a more finished look than seeing the raw staples... of course I've got them all over attaching the mesh to the frame, why that isn't a problem I have no idea. I'm strange that way I guess.

All that is left to do is to hang your jewelry display and pull that jewelry out of the jewelry box and feature it!

You'll note in the photos, I cut 2 small squares to allow me to hook a necklace and some bracelets to the wire. This is where the grommets would have been awesome, they would have totally finished it off.

The Leaning option, in case you don't have a hook handy... or you have to wait an hour for the 3M hook to cure and you're impatient like me.

Super Simple Storage Solution

During the summer I drink a lot of iced tea. A lot.

Sometime ago they started packaging Crystal Light products in new containers, these containers:

The labels come right off, they aren't glue at all - which means they can go from how they look above to this:

They are the perfect little storage solution for all kinds of little things... little things like this:

So now, in addition to feeding my iced tea addiction throughout the summer, I can collect these to use for all kinds of storage.

Kitchen Renovation - Section 3 COMPLETE!!!

Here we go again - section 3 of our kitchen renovation - COMPLETE!!!

This section was really difficult, definitely the most difficult thing we've tackled in a long time.

Here is what we did - the before:

Here is the after:

And here is some of what we did along the way, not a step by step or tutorial as I usually like to do, but I think this give a pretty good idea of what we were doing.

Painted the drawers, doors and frames of the cabinets, plus a few accessories. Since this was going to be the last time I pulled out the paint sprayer for a while I wanted to get the full use of it. (Yes, I had to paint the lazy susan from section 2 again, there were some pretty awful drips that had to be sanded and fixed)

We also had to remove the counter tops as well as the breakfast bar. Unfortunately, the breakfast bar revealed some pretty ugly workmanship that we had to go in and take out as well. Lucky for us, Bug got into the action. (I LOVE that our kids get into this too.)

Another challenge, cutting the perfect angle on the counter tops, it wasn't any sort of angle you could really measure and go from... so here is what we did. Made a template out of cardboard and cut the first part.

Then we put down another piece of cardboard, put the cut section on top of that, and then made the 2nd sections template from that:

Turned out to be a perfect solution:

(Please ignore the dust...)

Back to the breakfast bar. I knew there was going to be no way to cut the laminate counter top so that it would look good as a breakfast bar... if you go back to my post on our selection, you'll see we went with the butcher block and I'm so happy we did. It was a dream to cut an it looks amazing.

Here is how we cut it, we measured the depth we wanted, then measured the distance from the guide on our circular side to where the cut should be. Then we took a large 1x4" length of wood and clamped it to the butcher block:

(

Sorry, this picture is actually post cut - I forgot to take it before, but you get the idea don't you???

So why did we have the 1"x4"? - funny you should ask!

Because we were coupling them with these corbels:

To create our breakfast bar:

I'm in love!

We still have a lot of finish work to do, caulking, touch up painting, adding trim, painting above the counter tops and figuring out our back splash - but what we set out to do with this section, we completed... all in the span of memorial day weekend.

A few more pictures to enjoy:

Yes, we have a new sink and faucet - I'm not going to talk about those because we did EVERYTHING wrong installing them. The last think you should do is look to us for advice on that part of the kitchen. 

Yikes... and yes, those are my crutches in the background. Long story. Long painful story.

Kitchen Renovation - Section 2 COMPLETE!!!

We've completed section 2 of the kitchen, when we get to the after pictures here, you'll notice it might not look quite finished, but the finish work is going to come later. When removing the back splash, as we expected the wall sustained damage, rather than repairing it now, we are going to wait 'till we tackle section 3 and remove the remaining back splash then repair it all at the same time.

Also, we haven't added the trim, that will go on after the floor, or the hardware, that will be later so hardware for all 3 sections is done at the same time.

Ready to see the progression?

Before:

We removed the doors and drawers, they were sanded, primed and painted with a sprayer out in the garage:

In order to keep things moving as fast as possible, I put push pins on the back of the doors, so that the back could be painted, then the doors could be put right side up without the back touching the cardboard while wet.

Meanwhile, the frames were sanded, primed and painted with a roller inside, we decided to extend the white up onto the soffits to give the illusion that the cabinets were taller.

Also, I spray painted the hinges black:

We then replaced the counter top with the Ikea counter top, same as we used on section 1. I can't believe this entire section only cost $69!!!

Here is the after:

We still have a lot to do, but pulling this section together really makes so much of a difference!!!

I'll post some other details of this section in the next couple of days.

Staged Shelves

Things with the kitchen renovation have been moving slower than I had hoped, a mix of lack of proper motivation, time and help.

But I think I've almost got the items on the shelves arranged the way I want and I thought I'd share that little victory with you.

I picked up this bowl from a local artisan guild, it has me dreaming of leaning to throw pottery... that and pop corn, it is the perfect pop corn bowl so it also has me dreaming of pop corn a lot.

And I present - the original inspiration for the shelves, I needed a place to display these (the cook books not the creamer and sugar bowl):

You know how people talk about what they would take from their house in the event of fire, well these are on my list. And not because they are cookbooks, while I like cooking, I don't like it enough to get all jazzed up over a cookbook. I love them because of this:

And this:

See the 2nd line there? "The WGBH-TV Crew..." My dad was a part of that crew. The autographs above were to my parents, Pat is my mom, Mark, my dad. I didn't really know my dad, he died when I was 3, so having these cookbooks, this part of his career, means so much to me.

I'm so happy to have a place to display them know, they bring a smile to my face each time I see them.