So, in our last episode, we had a padded box and we had stained feet and we had the triangular metal plates screwed into the bottom four corners for the feet. Now for the upholstery, where, as the saying goes, ‘the rubber meets the road’. I really do think this is what scares people away from doing this. I’m breaking this up into two parts because it is so photo heavy. (more…)
August, 2012:
I Otta(man) Finish This. Part 1
Ottoman Feet
When I bought the wood feet for the ottoman, they were hanging by plastic labels which had been stapled into the tops of the feet by the screw ends. My way of handling the finishing process of these was to haul out my trusty old (very very old) wood laundry rack and hang the feet by string through the hole in the labels. I could then swab the finish on them without their falling over, getting dirty and so on. I thought I was being very clever. (more…)
The Rise of the Ottoman (not the empire)
After I saw how popular the chair refinishing posts were, I figured that y’all are hungering after more upholstery yumminess. This is basically the next step up – an ottoman.
Yes, I realize the photo at the top looks like an empty box, but bear with me on this because that box is actually the foundation not only of an ottoman, but of a lot of other basic furniture. We are not going to go into how to build a box today – that is for the future, but trust me on this one: If you can embrace the box, you’ve got a houseful of furniture just waiting for you. (more…)
Garlic: Music wins again
Last year, at just about this time, I dug up the garlic and we discussed how to pick which garlic and which cloves to save to plant in the fall for the next year. How to choose garlic for seed
And I remarked in that post about how fantastically the variety called ‘Music’ is. And you can get it here: Music
Music
Garlic varieties
Music
Not that I don’t think there are other great garlic varieties out there. What grows well for someone in Missouri might not grow well for us here. But I can tell you that after another horrific summer (and this time it was not wet, dry, hot, wet. We had a horrible dry winter), this variety came out like a champ. As a matter of fact, we had very little snow this winter, so even though the cloves had a bit of growth in the fall, (and we actually had plenty of rain in the fall), they were uncovered all winter long and then went into the spring with no moisture in the soil. The spring was dry too and then we went into June and July up here with practically no rain at all and super high temperatures – the hottest July on record.
So, the garlic was stressed in a major way. And I could certainly tell the difference when I compared the other garlic that I grew in the same bed. Same bed, same soil, same growing conditions, same amount of moisture. Music won again. Big juicy bulbs with huge cloves. Very impressive performance given the heat and drought stress. The photo at the top is a “Music” bulb that I partially uncovered to take a photo so that you can see just how big and robust it is. That bulb was about 3″ across at the bottom. I can’t recommend this variety enough.
Pull up a chair: Done
Now, just as a reminder – it’s always good to look at where we start to see the difference from where we ended up – I started with four of these: Old bent-wood kitchen chairs that I had inherited many years ago. A lot of the finish had been rubbed off the backs; there was a certain amount of small repairs that had to be done on the spindles (thank you, wood putty), the seats needed to be completely redone with new foam and fabric and so on. To review what I did, see these:
Pull up a chair
Pull up a chair – part 2
Once I got the seats all done (and frankly, once you have all the foam and fabric pieces cut out, doing all the seats at one time is less than an hour), then it was back to the frames. The DH had really done all the heavy lifting on the repairs. The spindles in the backs had all popped out of their holes at the underside of the top of the back and he repaired that by frankly shoveling into the holes a whole lot of wood glue and wood putty, jamming the spindles back into the holes and then using rope wound around the seat and over the top of the back as a primitive sort of clamp to hold the spindles into the holes while everything dried and set. Then I took a craft knife and chipped off anything that squeezed out of the holes. (more…)
