Miscellanea Round Up

Work on the staircase continues apace, a very slow pace, but apace nonetheless.  I'm still scrubbing off the dried up stripper.  I've picked up some ebony stain and hope that staining time comes soon.

So, in light of the slow progress, I thought I'd show some of the projects we worked on over the summer and fall.

Summer was mostly dedicated to organizing the basement.  This is what it looked like when we moved in:

And that's pretty much how it stayed for a long while.  Yes, I have a pair of mannequin legs in my basement, don't you? We moved all of my art space stuff to a back room in the basement and piled up tons of holiday stuff up against a wall, but found it was getting in the way. 

So, we built a shelf under the basement stairs to store the holiday stuff:

Then I built two work benches:

And I built some lumber/mill work storage as well:

This game me the space to work on the cabinet.  We got this cabinet from the rehab next door.  Can you believe they were going to just throw it out?  I spent several days stripping it, cleaning it, then repainting it.  I did the same with the wooden sets of drawers that used to be the base of the desk at the old house.  The pulls are glass that I made in classes I took at the Visual Arts Center.

Okay, so the after is a pretty crappy iphone pic, but you can see where the cabinet ended up.  I still need to buy a marble desktop, but haven't gotten around to that yet.

The wonderful boys across the street donated an unpainted version of the skylight.  I stripped and reglazed it and had the old painted one replaced (who paints a sky light?).  Now we get light in there during the day.

We also painted the front door and shutters a lovely blue.  It's more of a French blue than an Aegean blue, but I still like it.  It's kinda quirky.  We also took out the filigree from the storm door, which streamlined and cleaned it up a bit. 

 And I finally got to install my hand of Fatima door knocker that I picked up in Greece a few years ago. 

We also stripped and painted the back door the same color.

Where we took out the old oven was a big hole that wasn't terribly useful.  P built me a sturdy shelf and now I have a place to put my most often used cookbooks.  We also beefed up the sides enough to put up my magnetic knife block.  It was awesome to finally have some place to put things.  

I finally got a mirror up in the downstairs powder room:

And the light I made a few years ago up in the master bedroom:

I also finished a transom to go in the master bedroom.  I haven't gotten a decent pic installed yet.  Here it is in process, before I had painted the wood frame.