The Right Furniture on a Budget.

Yesterday was a slow day in terms of productivity. I was working on a mock-up for a birth announcement for my great nephew whose due in September and a birthday card for a dear friend. I holding off on posting the first until I have a picture and details to go on the announcement, and on posting the second until my friend gets the card in the mail. I did however have a good day in terms of straightening up in TM, getting my Spellbinders organized and my Cricut Mats unstickied(I think I made this word up) and ready for a new coat of adhesive.

When TazMania, the structure, was finished, I had to explain to my DH that that was all well and good, but that I needed furniture to work on and to store things in. I wanted cabinets with doors (doors hide a multitude of disorganization). The cabinets also needed to be deep to hold scrapbooking stuff that needs a minimum of 12" of space on a shelf. When you start pricing that kind of furniture, you realize if you buy it, you're going to pay dearly for it. However, if you build it yourself, the only big investment is your time and hey, you don't have a job, what better use of your time.

My very first piece of new furniture for TM is my beautiful bowling alley table. I have dear friends that adopted me when I was in college. Mr. Billy(the male half of the couple) is one of the most amazing men I know, and also He can do ANYTHING! He bought several bowling alley lanes at a sale and has used them to build tables with. I was the proud recipient of one of them. The table top is the "alley" and the table is trimmed out with walnut. It's tall so that I can work standing up, which I do when I'm stamping.

What you're looking at on the left is a 4'x8' piece of birch that Mr. Billy routed the edges of for me, and that I then finished with a oak stain and polyurethane. The next picture is the underside of the board that DH has added lips(wooden strips) too. The lips make the board "fit" onto an old folding table(with a terrible top) that I had, and voila I have a huge table for crafting.
















With the completion of these pieces, I had a place to work on but no place to store anything. Once again Mr. Billy to the rescue. DH and I glued some of the remaining cedar boards together in strips to make a cedar cabinet(keep the bugs out) for my sewing supplies. We also purchased 4 sheets of birch for the cabinets for my scrap supplies. Mr. Billy had promised to make me cabinets, so we loaded up the cedar(couldn't convince DH to take it all) and headed to Mayhew to get some help on the cedar cabinet.
Mr. Billy has the space and all the tools plus the help of Willie. He and Willie(with a little assistance from DH and myself) had the cedar cabinet finished in no time. He sent us back home for the birch and before the day was out, I had 3 cabinets for TM with lots of space(all of the cabinets are at least 15" deep"). Of course, they had to be finished and you know whose job that was.
The last pic is of me actually varnishing the outside of the cedar cabinet doors(inside is unfinished and smells wonderful) and in the background you can see the crafting cabinets with the stain applied to the inside. We started TazMania at the end of June and at this stage it's the middle of November, and I'm finally in a light jacket. By this stage, I had moved everything that was crafting related out to TM and set it all on any surface available and in my house I was moving my office to my old sewing space and painting the office and converting it back to a guest bedroom. My younger DD, her DH and my DGS were coming for Thanksgiving and I was in full Taz Mode.

I know, I know, you want to see the inside of TM finished. All good things come with time( I kept telling myself that every day from June until November). That's show and tell for today. Off to pay bills and then to have some fun.