Built-in bookcase: Episode 4

I feel like I keep saying the bookcase is almost finished.  And then it's not.  So this time, I will just say that it's in a state the one *might* consider finished.  There's certainly still some things about it that I'd like to change eventually, but the most important thing is that it's fully painted and performing its intended function - which is much more than I've been able to say about it for the last two months!

And once again, I have the husband of a friend to thank for helping out (shout-out to Alex Jude!).  I've been on pause with this for a week or so because once the painting was done and dried, I started trying to put all the shelves back up, and ran into some issues because the new coat of paint made some of the shelves a little wonky when trying to fit them back in.  Alex came over with his sander to help shave down the sides, but after we had done the very first one of them, we discovered that all the rest of them worked just fine with no sanding.  Cue my shame at having dragged him over to my house to help out :( 

Here's the old girl in all her freshly white-painted glory (as with all of my pictures, just try to ignore the clutter):

Hooray!  And just because I feel like the most satisfying part of any home improvement blog post is the before and after, here's a little slideshow of the bookcase painting project from beginning to (temporary) end:

I love how the white totally pops in these pictures!  I'll leave it like this for a while until the walls are painted (coming up early May, hopefully!).  Then once I see how that looks, I might decide to paint the back of the bookcase a nice orange-y accent color.  But for now, I'm just going to enjoy having this done and having all the books back where they're supposed to be.

If all goes as planned, future blog posts about the bookcase should include finding a way to hide all the cords, buying new hinges and re-hanging the cabinet doors, and maybe painting the back wall accent color.  Sigh...so much to do still!

Square pegs in round holes

It's time to finally close the loop on the project that started all this home improvement nonsense, my bedroom dresser.  It started like this:

 Then I painted it, and added some flashy new hardware that I picked up at the antique store and spray-painted:

It sat this way for probably at least 4 (maybe 5?) months, waiting for me to finish up the remaining hardware on the drawer on top.  You may recall that one of the weird things about the piece was the odd measurements of the original hardware - which was pretty old - and the fact that there were two different kinds of hardware on it.

I don't really have a good reason for the hold-up on getting the knobs.  At first I was being indecisive about choosing some knobs that would sufficiently match the awesomeness of the huge pulls on the bottom half of the piece.  This was truly a case where there are just too many options - unlike finding pulls with 1" apart screws, which was an epic project (see my previous post on the subject).  There are literally a million and five places to buy cabinet knobs, and they're all probably fine, but I psyched myself out over-thinking it.  Incidentally, this is also probably why my brilliant golf career didn't pan out.

Then I found these nice Art Deco-y square knobs (the ones I eventually bought), but just couldn't pull the trigger on buying them, and kind of got distracted with other projects.  So I've been inching the top dresser drawer open with my fingertips for several months now, which was fine, but always struck me as being a little bit ridiculous every time I did it.  I would just think to myself, "Go and order the stupid things already!" and promptly forget about it again.

So FINALLY I bought them, FINALLY I spray-painted them, and FINALLY I installed them.  And I do quite like them.  If I had my way I'd have those big open square ones on each and every drawer, but since that wasn't an option, this was the next best thing, I think.  I like that they kind of look like they're the middle part of the big open ones.  In retrospect, I wish I had taken a picture closer up of the knobs so you could get a better look at them, because the sides are angled in a cool way, rather than just being a boring old square - so the idea of the little knobs being taken out of the middle of the big pulls really fits even from that perspective.  Ah well, you'll have to come over and see it sometime.

Case closed!