My First piece of Furniture

This is the first piece for furniture I have ever made. It is made of plywood, some molding, and a piece of wanes coding we got for free. I still don't know what to call it, I know it has a name. It is a bench/coat rack with storage for hats, gloves and scarves below.

I made the design with some of Dan's ideas and pictures of similar things online. So I did not follow a pattern, I made it up. I am so proud of my self, I have built other things, decks and help with building a house, but I have never made something from scratch. Here are all the pictures of the progression of me making it. Oh Dan picked out the colors, well not picked them out, but gave me the idea of using the colors of a rug I bought for the entry way. It worked perfect, he is so smart :)

This took me about 2 weeks to make after work every day and one weekend. It cost under $100 to make with all the materials, that is buying a hammer, paint brushes, screws, plywood, paint, drop cloth, molding and hooks. I think most things like this cost about $300, so I think I did pretty well :)

These are my drawings of what I was going to do (I don't know if you can read it)

As you can tell I did not have much space to work, but luckily our hall way and entry room were big enough to work :)

this is the bare bones of the bench. It is made out of mostly 3/4 inch plywood and some 1/2 inch screwed together for the sides and bottom support.

This is after I put the seat on.

Now I am putting the wanes coating on to make it look fancy.

I know this is a great picture of me :) Dan snapped it at the right time.

Now I have gotten the molding and the shelf at the top on and wood brackets to hold it up.

Then I primed it all and part of the drawers (I ran out of primer).

Then the first color on and being messy about it :)

Then I put on the dark brown and taped off the molding with electric tape. I did not have painters tape and I didnt want to spent the $7 a roll for it. I already had the electric tape and it worked fine.

I also started to paint the drawers on the inside and bottom.

Then the final product with the front molding painted with out the drawers. Some of the hooks are a little crooked, but you can barely tell. There are going to be coats on it anyway :)

I decided to paint the front a totally different color so the green drawers stood out more.

And now when we come home from work we can kick off our shoes and hang our coats up on something I made. Thanks Mom and Dad for all the skills you gave me to make this. Now Dan is telling me we need a shop for me when we get our own house, I say YES to that :) I love building thing

Our New House

Here are a few pictures of our old apartment. It was a one bedroom with a small living area and one bathroom.

This is our old living room :(

This is our old kitchen, dining room, office area :(

This was our bathroom area :(

And our bedroom :(

Now we have a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house with a huge kitchen, living room, entry room, laundry room, walk in closet and a little yard (not fenced). We love it! We can actually relax when we get home rather than trip over each other on our way through the door :) And we can have people over because we have 2 queen size guest beds.

This is our kitchen.

This is the other side of the kitchen and you can see part of the dining room.

This is the laundry room, which has another door the outside behind the hamper.

This is the door off the living room.

This is the living room, with the free entertainment center we got off of craigslist again.

Here are the curtains I made for our front and side doors. They let light in, but do not let anyone see in:)

This is our extra room in the front, this is all that is in it besides my new piece of furniture I made, tools and leftover wood.

This is was an old cork board we got for free from craigslist with a queen size bed. It was pretty beat up, so I decided to cover it up with fabric and put some ribbon on it so we can put up pictures and cards we get.

Here is the view from the front door looking into the kitchen before we moved anything in.

This is looking at our front door before we moved anything in.

This is a head board we got for free also with the bed and I reupholstered it. Before it was a mustard yellow velvet form the 70's, it was ugly. I found some cheep fabric and changed it. I have never had a head board before, it looks like we have a real bed now, even though it is on the floor :) Dan and I tried to have it up on just a metal frame, but that lasted about 5 min. Just lying in bed if you moved your head or hand it squeaked loud. So we took the bed apart in the first few minutes after getting in bed. Some day we will get a real bed frame :)

This is our master bathroom! I think with this and our walk in closet together it is as big as our old bed room :)

Well that is our new house. Dan and I love it so much and are so comfortable now, it is a million times better than our apartment.