Furniture - Daniel Kenneth

April 9, 2018

Putting shelves in the closet

Last weekend, I found my new table saw. By Friday night I finally got down to the workshop and put it together.

This closet has been a pain since we moved in. It didn’t have shelves and we always just stacked everything inside. Then all those things toppled over and we couldn’t shut the door.

Do you think anyone fixed it? Fast forward about 5 years and it still won’t close and we just keep walking past it every day.

Saturday morning I headed down to the shop and cut some wood for the shelves. Circular style saws scare me. I have used handheld for years and it has scared the bejezus out of me every time I use it. It always kicks back and I drop everything and go running while it’s soaring through the air.

My voice may have jumped a few octaves on some occasions. So far I haven’t cut anything off so I may still have some dignity left.

So I take all the wood I cut upstairs only to find out I cut everything wrong. I realized after remeasuring that I misread the little laser measuring thing. It said 2.0′ and not 20″. Everything was 4″ short. Of course, I only bought exactly how much wood I needed because I don’t make mistakes.

I threw things down and walked away for a bit. Shortly after I told my roommate how I screwed up and he pointed at his old bed he had just finished tearing apart. Glorious sideboards that were only slightly smaller than the boards I bought.

I dragged it down a few flights of stairs to the basement, removed all the metal hardware and started chopping his bed into pieces.

As you can see it all worked out in the end. Is it perfect? Nope.

Do I care? Nope. You can see some of the 4″ short pieces holding up those shelves.

I do have to go back and repaint all the replaced pieces. Only some of them got primed through the whole process. But for now, it is done. I have other shelves around the house to make and a fence to rebuild, so I’ll be back to finish painting this when I’m running around the house painting those things.

I’m just happy the vacuum and mops have a place to be now and they are not just randomly found around the house. Oh, and I’m happy the door shuts now.

August 23, 2017

Backyard Deck

It has taken me several weeks to finish, but I refinished the backyard deck. Most of it was scraping and sanding. Then an afternoon of painting. It turned out pretty well. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the dog destroys it with his giant paws. When that happens, I’m just going to burn it down, because I am not going through this again. That was way too much work in the hot summer sun.

Then, said dog, hurt his leg and ended up needing knee surgery.

This dog, right here.

He’s lucky he is so adorable because I had to spend my weekend building him a ramp so he could get to the yard and make his boom-booms. He’s not a small dog, so it had to be good enough for a 130-ish pound monster to walk up and down it.

He doesn’t much care for it but he’s getting better at using it. He kind of has too unless he wants to hold it in for 8 weeks while he recovers.

June 14, 2017

Painted TV Trays

I bought these TV trays on amazon about 3 years ago. They were in expensive and looked pretty nice. But let’s be honest, all these trays are cheap press boards and some printed sticker laminate.

After years of putting hot dinner plates and drinks on them, they started to show their age with some blister spots and peeling paper. They bothered me enough that I took on yet another project.

I started by peeling off the side stickers which were a thicker stock and suprisingly easy to do. Then I got out my heat gun and scraped the glue off. The top sticker was very thin and wasn’t going to come off like the sides. So, I got out my sander and gave it hell until the whole thing was smooth wood again.

Now I have 4 perfect canvas’ to start working on (after I wipe all the sawdust off).

I got out my gesso and gave them all 2 coats to bring them up to a bright white. I decided to paint the theme of Rick & Morty and picked out 4 images to work from.

I think they came out pretty well:

The only thing left to do was to give them that glossy protective coating.

April 19, 2017July 17, 2020

Silver and Purple

I had been looking for new bed side tables for my bedroom for quite some time. Nothing I was seeing had quite the configuration of drawers and cabinets I wanted. Then amazon’s daily deals had these up for $35 for 2 tables, which was hard to pass up. Sure they are probably super cheap quality, but I can work with that. What I didn’t notice from my phone was that the drawer was just a canvas box, not a drawer, which sucks. For $35, I can’t complain too much.

My room is deep purple and black. I’ve always liked the combination deep purple (or navy), silver and black so it was time to start adding silver. A trip to the Home Depot and I started painting these cheap particle boards metallic silver.

One of my art rooms is out of commission, which is a whole story in itself, so I took over the dining room table. No one needs to eat, right?

I forgot how long painting takes, especially if you want it to look nice. Sanding, priming, sanding, priming, sanding, painting, sanding, painting, and a glossy taco top coat or two (I <3 your channel Simply Nailogical) …. it was going to take some time to finish.

The “drawers” were plain canvas, which also didn’t go with my room. I gave fabric paints a try.

In the store, this looked quite dark in the bottle. Once applied it was very light in comparison even after several coats. So I was a little disappointed there, but at least it’s purple.

In the end, the bedside tables turned out pretty decent. Once I put them next to my bed I realized they were much too short. So… yeah, that was a waste of time. But at least I learned a few things along the way, specifically that I should measure better before I buy things.

Anyone need some short bedside tables??