As apart of our Labor Day “staycation,” we cleaned the house. While my wife worked to organize her sewing supplies, I was cleaning the workshop in the garage and fixing a few things around the house. I’ve been looking for something to do with the wood that I have leftover from the kitchen remodel, so we came up with a short list of things to do:

1. Cut out a shelf to hold my wife’s sewing supplies
2. Rebuild the wheel mounts for the driveway gate
3. Build a new magazine holder for the bathroom

It just doesn’t feel like a weekend unless I paint something white.

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I ended my last kitchen remodel update by saying, “we still have some little things to do in the room (build an island on wheels to rest beneath the matching pot rack, add shelves to the rear of the washer/dryer cabinet door to hold various sundries, and put a flat screen TV above the fridge), but that’s all cosmetic work.” Well, now the cosmetic work is done:

I gave myself the arbitrary deadline of before football season to finish the work. It seems I barely beat the bell, considering that the college football season kicks off tonight.

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I wanted to make a rolling island to match the pot rack I hung on the kitchen wall last month. Last weekend, I finally got up the courage (and the cash) to give it another try. This was the design:

This might look like an easy build, but the finish work and attention to detail made it quite difficult.

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I’m such an idiot. After we remodeled our kitchen, we had no use for our old sink (pictured here). It was a white, porcelain coated, cast iron, double-well sink. I’m sure it was pretty expensive, but we had no use for it anymore. You could say I’m the opposite of a pack rat; I hate holding onto anything that has no use or hasn’t been used in a couple of years. So I put our sink on the sidewalk in front of our house and it was gone in a couple of hours. A few days ago, I ran across this article and it hit me that I could have made a drink station like this out of the old sink:

Seriously, how cool would something like this look on your back porch?

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As you know from the last update, we encountered some unexpected grief from the kitchen sink. Once we got all of that sorted out, my wife and I were able to turn our focus back to finishing the room. We’ve been very busy with work and family lately, so we haven’t had more than a day or two where we could devote our attention to the house. I managed to get a little carpentry done after work, including building these 18″ deep shelves for the pantry:

The pantry space is over three feet deep. We figured there was no reason to install such deep shelves, as we wouldn’t be able to reach anything in the back. And we couldn’t treat it like a walk-in pantry with shallow shelves, because the space is only two feet wide. My wife balked at the idea of putting in a false backing, since we’d essentially be throwing away good storage space in an otherwise small room. She recommended that we put shelves in the back for things we seldom use (specialty appliances and seasonal china), and build a movable pantry to maximize the volume of the space. This solution is actually closer to her original design, except that the pantry moves on wheels instead of on expensive, heavy-duty slide rails.

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Years ago, my wife asked me to make her one of those pet food stations that you see everywhere these days. The ones in the store are overpriced, and I had enough scrap wood laying around to make one for free. My wife bought a few bowls and I cut out some holes in a 1″ x 10″ piece of lumber to drop them in. The piece evolved over the years. After we moved from DC to to our temporary condo in SC, we added feet to the feeder and my wife painted it yellow. During our recent kitchen remodel, my wife repainted it again to match the room:

It came out okay, but it would look better if the mangy animals didn’t spill their half-chewed food all over it.

As I’ve mentioned before, we decided to build a pot rack as part of our kitchen remodel. Our pots and pans take up way too much storage space in our new cabinets, and they look too nice to keep hidden. This was the design:

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We don’t have a lot to report. We’ve been hosting people in and out of the house a lot lately, and that trend will continue throughout the summer. After work last week, my wife and I found some time to cut and install the baseboards. Some of the cuts were difficult, especially where the cabinets meet the walls next to the stove. They still need a couple of coats of glossy white paint, but getting this trim work on the walls covered up the last traces of the old room:

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When we lived in our tiny basement apartment on Capitol Hill, we had to maximize every inch of space. We had a little patio that was sunken beneath the deck in the back yard, and there was a space that was too low to stand, but just right for sitting. So when my wife (fiancée at the time) was out of town planning our wedding, I made her this porch swing as an engagement present:

Actually, I presented it as a swing that would go with the porch on a house I would buy for her someday.

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We’re finally close to finishing the front porch. After we built a side table and footrest to go with our rocking chair, all we had left to do was build some planter boxes to flank the steps and give us a little privacy. I took care of that this past weekend. This was the original plan:

It’s designed to look like the terracotta pot is suspended by the upper lip, but it’ll really be sitting on cross bars inside the box.

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