Keeping Busy with Projects

I've had an up and down time with being a stay at home wife these past couple of months.  I'll start a project that will literally take up all my time for a couple of weeks and then I would have a couple of weeks of total boredom while I figure my next project.  Having projects to do around the house is the only way to stay sane.

I've done a lot of projects.  From cleaning out old file cabinets to packing up things to store in the garage.  I have also been spending a lot of time doing Spring Cleaning.  That's taken up a lot of time because in reality we weren't able to clean our house as extensively as I would have liked when we first moved in. 

There were some home improvement projects that I completed that I have to say I was quite proud of.  I've mentioned some of these in a previous post.  Some of the caulking in our shower was getting moldy so I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees scraping out the junk, cleaning it up and then putting in new caulk.  At the same time our shower head was leaking and after some youtube searches discovered I needed to replace the cartridge behind the handle.  I handled that all by myself (pun intended).  I also took on a reupholstery project for our piano bench.  The one I'm most proud of is refinishing a damaged dresser that Sean had from his single days. 

It was really damaged with gouges, burn marks, missing sections and all around wear.  My handy skills at wood putty and sanding made it look almost like new.  We painted it a neutral color because it was to be baby's dresser and we didn't know what we were having at the time.  It ended up working out quite nicely because we ended up getting a gray crib to match the dresser.  This project ended up costing barely anything because we ended up using paint that we had left over from our rooms.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a complete "before" photo.  This was the dresser that we later learned was a art deco dresser designed to be affordable for the everyday American to buy.

Nice burn marks we had to get rid of.

Gouges all over especially on the curved edges.

Wear on the top of the dresser.

Some of the veneer was missing on the drawers

Pretty much all the drawers had damage like this.

This was our finished product.  I even lined the inside with colorful fabric.  We love everything about it and just so happens to match the crib that we bought.  Guess we unintentionally created a gray and white theme for our nursery.

Sean has been super busy over the last couple of months at work and has even worked weekends so I knew I couldn't rely on him to do some of these projects (although he did paint the dresser since those fumes would have been extra bad for me and baby).  I was very proud of myself for doing them and Sean was grateful that he didn't have to do them either.  :)