Farewell to the School Year

Today was the last day of Preschool for this school year.

I about started to cry when we got into the school and some of the decorations were already taken down (Things like the kids' name tags since the teachers were giving them to the kids...) 


I've just loved watching the kids learn so much and make new friends over the last nine months, and the teachers have been beyond awesome. Even though Oakley is going back next year, and Elliot will be going the year after, I'm really going to miss them. They put so much extra time and effort in making sure everybody is learning and able to keep up with the rest of the class all while making it look like effortless fun to the kids.


"Graduation" is tomorrow, and before this year, I'd always thought that preschool or kindergarten graduations were just about the dumbest thing out there, but now I'm seeing that it's a step where your "baby" goes from toddler to a mini-grown up. I don't know how I'm going to hold it together tomorrow. I'm not usually one to be emotional, but this just seems like such a final and abrupt end to the school year. I know I'm being a big sissy about it, but there it is.

Table Refinish and Office Organization

A few years ago at a yard sale, I bought this table for $15.

These pictures do not do justice to how ugly this table was, but it had potential.

Lots of ugly red and yellow crackle paint. Yuck.

 The day I bought it, I had big plans of refinishing it, but I had a baby, then we moved, and it sat in the basement, mostly unused for almost five years. Yup, I really got on the ball with that project!


But, I'm actually really glad I didn't just finish it the way I was originally thinking I would so many years ago since I came across such a neat idea on Pinterest a few weeks ago. (If I knew how to be fancy and link it, I would.... if you follow me on Pinterest, you'll see the pin though.)


I dragged the table upstairs (and out of the pile of cardboard boxes that house most of my crafting supplies) and started sanding off what I'm pretty sure was lead paint. I started with a palm sander that had pretty light-weight grit paper on it, and the paint wasn't even budging, so I called my husband and asked if there was heavier paper for it, or something else I should be using. He suggested some heavy duty paint stripping chemical that he had, and I went to work on that. Now, luckily, my brother-in-law was visiting and pretty bored that day, so after the chemical sat for a while, he grabbed a scrapper and helped me scrape off the paint for the next few hours. Whoever owned this table before me had  stained it with really goopy stain, painted a few coats of exterior (lead?) paint, a few coats of the gross yellow paint, the crackle finish, and then some varnish. There were some serious layers to this table.


We scraped and scraped, and sanded and sanded, using the palm sander more, a belt sander, sandpaper, and a little dremel sander. Literally my whole day was spent on stripping this table. (Thanks for the help, Brian!)

The beautiful natural wood underneath the layers of paint.

Pattern that I hand-painted on the middle section of the table.

I spray painted the legs a crisp white, using a primer + paint spray I found so I wouldn't have to try and sand the curved legs. That just seemed like an extra headache, and the legs weren't coated nearly as heavily as the top had been. I then looked for stencils at the store, but not finding any I liked, I bought template paper and looked online. I found this cool pattern, and after trying to cut it out twice, realized there wasn't a way to cut out all the parts and have it be in one piece to be able to use it was a stencil, so I sketched it out and painted it by hand, which took so much longer, but I loved the pattern.


I was hesitant to do the next step since the table was looking so nice already, but the light wood just really wasn't what I wanted for the space, so I took a deep breath and put on ebony stain right over the hours of sanding and painting.

This isn't a great picture, but you get the idea of what it looks like.

The cool thing about doing it this way, is that the stain brings out the grain of the wood beautifully, and only slightly colours the paint that is "stenciled." I'm glad I only painted the pattern on the middle part of the table, even if that decision was originally made out of laziness.

Again, sorry about the poor pictures. The garage doesn't have optimum lighting.

My sewing machine's new home!

I mentioned earlier that most of my crafting supplies were stored in cardboard boxes.... Except for my scrapbooking supplies, everything else has been kept in boxes from when we moved into our house. It's really a pain to get to whatever I need and I never meant for it to stay that way for so long, but sometimes there are just more important things to do than finding a suitable home for things you use only a few times a year. My mom was awesome enough for Mother's Day to spoil me with some storage cubbies for all my crafting/quilting stuff.

We're slowly working on getting the basement finished, but now the office is actually usable! (The table looks oddly small in that last picture.) I got rid of a bunch of odds and ends that I haven't touched in years, and spent most of yesterday cleaning out things so that I don't look like a "Hoarder:The Early Years." The only thing I haven't put back yet is my scrapbooking stuff, since it takes up so much room and it's really tricky to work on with kids. I've been mostly sewing lately, and that's something I can put down easily if I need to quit unexpectedly.

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I love having the top six spaces for current quilting projects, so they can be neatly sorted out (and labeled for easy access!) The cubbies and the fabric drawers in them are from the Martha Stewart line at Home Depot. 

The rest of the cubbies house painting, drawing, stamping, cricut-ing, clay, stationary and hair flower making supplies. 


I then, to my husband's great delight, went the extra mile and organized all our bookselves and purged them of books that we were never going to read again or simply had outgrown. And I organized all my fabric by colour, and got rid of scraps that were too tiny to do anything with, and fabric that I had been given that I just honestly wasn't ever going to use.

Fabric in the bins on the left, books arranged by owner, use and subject.

It may not seem all "wow" to anyone reading this, but trust me, this is a huge improvement to the chaos that was our "office" before yesterday. Also, you have to picture it with you know, walls, and decorations and some day even, matching bookshelves. 


Next weekend we're thinking of tackling the mountain of tote boxes in the basement.... I'm looking forward to having a functioning basement that isn't just for storage even if it is just unfinished (though framed!) space. Meanwhile, I get to keep looking/dreaming about what the bathroom, kitchenette, and den area will look like when it's not only concrete floors and 2x4s. :)


Have you done any fun or long-overdue projects lately?