...Into a great looking storage solution for our kitchen.

Our "white hutch," as we've come to know it in our household, has been a veritable Swiss Army Knife of kitchen furniture. From wine glass storage behind the upper glass doors to miscellaneous cookbooks/recipes/food scale/juicer/whatever else we could fit in there storage in the bottom cabinet, it was about as full as we could make it. Over the years we've asked a lot of out trusty white hutch, and It was clear that this hardworking piece had seen better days. 

The paint was chipped, scuffed, and dirty, the doors were not closing properly, some of the hardware was starting to pull loose, and Alex had gotten overzealous with his application of caulk that was now cracking and looking tired. I'm not being critical of Alex's caulk skills here, just ask him and he'll gladly admit that he was "just learning" in these early days. 

In addition, the bead board in the back of the cabinet still retained the red accent color, selected to complement our old floral window treatments in the kitchen and sun porch. Today, the red bead board backing just wasn't going to work with our new "London Fog" gray (or should I say "gray") color.

Since our big epiphany over the weekend which includes moving this lovingly restored kitchen furniture to our sun porch, it was high time we give it a little facelift to allow it to blend with our decor. To tackle this side project, I got to work taping off the back of the cabinet. 

The red we had applied is called "Red Red Wine," and is the same color red that coats our dining room walls. To ease the transition to its next color, I decided to apply a quick coat of primer. While I was at it, Alex removed the caulk that was looking bad and sanded all of the rough areas that needed a little help. I continued with priming and touched up some of the areas in the worst shape.

Though I was painting the red in the upper visible areas, I decided I could leave the red in place in the lower cabinets. This area really isn't seen, and I like the idea of a reminder of colors from the past. Call it sentimental, it just comforts me to know it's there.

During the entire process, I always had a friendly helper very nearby.

Alex removed all fo the hardware and screws and set them aside for future reinstall. One thing we learned long ago is to place all of your different types of screws on pieces of tape. This keeps them all in one place, keeps them organized by type, and makes sure you don't have any unfortunate drops that could end up in lost hardware fasteners.

I mentioned all of the stuff we were able to fit inside of this cabinet when it was fully stocked, and though we were fully aware of what was in there, when we removed everything and put it in the dining room we were still shocked. There were glasses, bottles, cookbooks, cookware boxes, and small kitchen appliances all over the place.

From the dining room tables to the buffet to the floor, the hutch's innards were seemingly everywhere. This is the very reason we decided it was high time to add a little bit of kitchen storage by way of IKEA cabinets.

My efforts continued on the hutch painting and I completed the exterior and interior painting over the course of two evenings. I decided to go with an all white color to match the trim throughout the room and the house. The color isn't a true white, as it has a bit of cream to it, but it matches the IKEA cabinets quite nicely. And yes, in case you're wondering, wearing overalls when you paint does tend to help the process along quite a bit, and you always have better results. (It just scares me that I used to wear these overalls as a "real outfit" when I was in college. Yikes!)

We completed the whole project by shoving a few toothpicks in the hinge screw locations to better secure the doors in place. Before we knew it, we have a completely refreshed, great looking, and upgraded "White Hutch" to continue serving a critical purpose in our kitchen.

We're quite happy with the end results of the quick facelift, and with the continued use of our diamond in the rough eBay find in the sun porch. The new room houses the piece quite nicely and it really seems to work well along that long gray wall. Now we can add a check mark next to this item on our long list of things that "just need a little attention" while we're doing our quick and temporary kitchen update. Hopefully it will be in good shape and will keep working well in the sun porch and anywhere else we decide to use it for many many years to come. 

The next step will be to find lighting as well as two small chairs that we can angle on either side of the hutch to provide additional seating in this room.

Do you have any pieces in your house that you love, but just need to give it a little love to whip it back into fighting shape? This is definitely another case of "what took us so long to do this project?" But then we remember just how much junk we had to unload and then reload to get it all back in place.

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We had painted the cabinets as soon as we moved into the house, painted the counter tops with textured spray paint to give it a "stone" look, and installed under cabinet lighting to brighten the room. It was looking good, but there was an issue.

At 10' x 11', our kitchen is, by standards of our 15 foot wide house, a large room. But the cabinets were all installed along two walls with the sink in the corner, cramming all of the workable space for the kitchen into a tight area. Add to it the fact that our cabinets fall several feet shy of the 10' ceilings, and you've got a recipe for insufficient storage and an uninteresting layout.

To remedy this situation, Wendy and I started scouring eBay for something old and cool that we could use as a kitchen storage hutch. We looked for several weeks and finally stumbled on a cabinet that had salvaged from the porch of an old home in South Carolina. Here's one of the original auction photos that made us say "Hey, that piece of dirty junk would look great in our house."

The cabinet looked to be in a little bit of rough shape, but we won the auction none-the-less. About a week later a freight shipper showed up with what I referred to as "the single most disgusting thing we've ever received in the mail."

To say this cabinet was filthy was an absolute understatement. It was covered in grime, the paint was peeling and flaking, the hardware was rusted, one pane of glass missing, and the interior was full of spider webs and eggs. I think Wendy's face in the photos above says it all.

Since this was going in the kitchen, we knew we were going to need to clean things up. The paint was in such bad shape that a simple scrub down wasn't going to cut it. Instead we launched into a full scale disassembly and paint stripping process.

Using Peel Away 1, we stripped all of the paint from the cabinet pieces. It was a tedious process, but there wasn't any way I was going to live with the paint in the horrible condition it was in.

After stripping was complete, I took the pieces of the cabinet to the back yard for a thorough sanding and reassembly.

Sanding was a mess -- mostly because I hadn't discovered shop Vac HEPA filters yet -- just look at the ground. But once we were all done we had a clean cabinet just waiting for a few necessary upgrades.

After putting the whole thing back together, we added a baseboard piece to the bottom to conceal the patch that was necessary to make the cabinet sit level. If you look at the photo above you can see the right side of the cabinet is propped up on several pieces of wood. One of the legs was about six inches shorter than the other side, so without this bit of cabinet surgery, we really didn't have a viable candidate for a kitchen cabinet.

We painted the whole cabinet with the same color white as the kitchen cabinets so that it would work with what we already had.

I'm not joking when I say that painting this whole cabinet seemed to take FOR-EV-ER!

To contrast with the white paint on the cabinet, we painted a sheet of plywood bead board in the same red as our dining room (Behr's Red Red Wine) and nailed it to the back of the cabinet. This added a bit of interest to the back of the open areas and also offered a significant amount of necessary rigidity and structure to the previously wobbly cabinet.

We were feeling quite good about our progress, but we knew the top was missing a little something.

To bring some authenticity to the finished product, we bought some salvaged wavy glass to install in the upper cabinet glass doors and picked up a handful of butterfly hinges and turn latches to complete the whole look of an antique cabinet. We also applied a crown detail to the top of the cabinet to add the missing something we mentioned earlier.

The final step was to sand the wood filler on the crown and apply the final bit of paint. Through our efforts we had turned a disgusting cabinet eBay find into a functional and attractive storage solution for our kitchen. 

It was really fulfilling to know that we could take a pice of furniture that looked to be beyond its useful life and transform it back into something that could become a nice addition to our home. The exact cost escapes me at the moment, but I believe the cost of the auction, shipping, and the various supplies, paint, hardware, and glass necessary to complete the rebuild came in at about $350. Not too shabby for a cabinet that we're still using nine years later and still absolutely love. Take one more look at what it started as when we saw it on eBay.

What's the most disgusting thing you've ever purchased from the Internet or picked up as a Craig's List find? Were you successful in your mission to transform the item? Or did you end up with something that would still find it's destiny in the trash?  

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When planning for the celebration of All Hallows' Eve, one of the most important elements is obviously the selection of your costume. Nothing says "I go all out" like an over the top costume that shows significant effort, planning, creativity, or commitment. In a previous post we outlined our costume selections since moving to DC. Some years we've gone the couples route, others on our own, but if you can see anything from our costumes, we always try to do something that we enjoy individually because the whole point of Halloween is the fun.

This year Wendy was taking a bit too long to decide on her costume, so I decided to do a costume on my own. I actually started putting together my costume about six or seven months ago. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and the proper amount of lead time is necessary when you want a good looking costume. So what did I decide to go as this year? I went with another sport theme (I do like the sports themes) and put together a very accurate 1960's Cleveland Browns costume.

This all goes back to a movie that was released in 2008 and that I saw in 2010 called "The Express." A true story about running back Ernie Davis, the first African American Heismann Trophy winner in 1962. Ernie Davis was signed to play for the Cleveland Browns and several scenes in the movie depicted the Browns in a 1962 game.

I've always loved period style costumes, so when I saw an auction listing for one of the jerseys and pants from the movie. I figured this would make a good costume so I waited and waited until it got to a low enough price that I thought was fair and I snapped them up. With that, I was on my way to a costume I knew I would love!

Once I had the jersey and pants, I needed the next most important piece of the uniform, the helmet. As luck would have it, in my youth I used to spend too much money on things I didn't need. One of those things was an old school Cleveland Browns replica helmet. When I went home over the summer I grabbed it from my parents' basement and brought it back with us.

Next I turned my focus to the socks. The signature orange, brown, and white socks that have been a staple in the Browns uniform since the team was founded. After an exhaustive search on the Internet, I caught a lucky break on eBay. A user had an auction for three pair of authentic game equipment socks. Lucky for me, the socks today's aren't significantly different than they were 50 years ago.

Shoes are the next critical element of a football uniform, and cleats from the 1960s are fairly distinctive. I started looking around for vintage cleats expecting to get a pair and then remove the studs from the shoes. However, as long as I searched, I couldn't find a reasonably priced pair. They were all over $50 plus shipping. After another very lengthy search, I finally found a pair of all black Converse that would fit the bill nicely. They aren't perfect, but they will absolutely do.

And finally, to round out that football look, I needed pads. Shoulder pads, knee pads, thigh pads, without them the uniform would just look deflated. One more time, I turned to the wonderful eBay. I was able to find a pair of vintage shoulder pads for about $10. They are worn and no longer flexible, and many of the leather items were torn, but they have that vintage look to them of large square shoulders.   

The thigh pads and knee pads are standard football pads that fit in pockets built into the pants.

Putting the whole costume together it turned out pretty solidly. The helmet is a bit tight, so it hurts my ears a little bit when I'm pulling it off, but otherwise, the whole thing is a pretty perfect fit.

No football costume is complete without a ball and a little Heismann pose.

So what do you think? Wendy says "Lame!" But I really like it. And like I said, the whole point of Halloween is putting together a costume that looks great, but also one that you like and makes you happy. This costume took several months and lots of searching to assemble, bit it gave me something that I really enjoyed putting together. I've wanted to be a Cleveland Brown since I was a kid, and I finally had my shot.

What are you going to be dressing up as this year? Is it a group costume, an individual, meticulously constructed over a long period of time, or bought as a simple package? No matter what, as long as you're dressing up, it should be a fun time. 

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After cutting the hole in the door and hanging the door in place, my paranoid self didn't feel comfortable with a hole in a location that could allow someone to lift open the new mail slot and take a look around. 

Of equal or greater concern was the possibility the burglars with freakishly small hands could reach through the slot and unlock the front door. Please disregard the fact that we live on a busy street and someone would be bound to notice them finagling their arm through a mail slot just 1 1/4" tall. Also ignore the fact that we are diligent about using our security system and are installing a secondary deadbolt. No matter, I still didn't feel good about it.

After some great suggestions and inspiration from our readers, we finally landed on a solution from eBay. The solution is a cast iron mail chute slot from an old building. This is the entry point for a mail drop that you might find in an office building. You know, the glass covered mail chutes you would see as a kid and would just want so badly to see a letter fly by from an upper floor?

We figured that when inverted and affixed to the back of the door, this decorative mail chute would offer the perfect shield to obscure any would-be peepers or small handed robbers. 

When we received the mail chute slot it was covered in a rich patina of rust and flaking paint. The back of the slot had a date of 1932 cast into the back of it, so it did come out of an older building of some sort. Though it was lovely, it didn't fit with the clean look of the glossy black door. So Alex cleaned it up on the wire wheel.

The end result of a few minutes on the wheel was a beautifully clean and great looking guard for the back of our door. Here it is installed with four screws that Alex darkened up to make it look antique.

From the outside looking in, the most you could possibly see when opening the slot is the floor of the hallway. And there is no way you could get your hand inside of the slot to even come close to the lock. (You can't get much mail through it either, but we have a backup plan of installing our larger, former mail slot in one of the anterior french doors.)

This triumph acts as yet another eBay success in our home. Just goes to show that a little bit of creativity and sometimes a re-purposed item or two can solve just about any home dilemma...even ones revolving around a personal neurosis.

A fun sidenote: While my other half was holding down the fort during the WEEK OF ALEX and I was away on business, I had the opportunity to meet Meg Whitman, the former President and CEO of eBay. I mentioned to her that eBay is a great resource for antique/salvaged hardware, and was able to personally thank her on behalf of those of us completing historic renovations. Too cool!

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The truth is, any renovation that ends up looking "right" typically takes a considerable amount of effort, time, research, perserverence, and some luck. Sure, the right tools for the job, knowing where to shop for hardware or specialty supplies, and previous experience can help considerably. But sometimes, no matter what you have working in your favor, things just don't go the way you want or plan for it to go.

Such is the case with our "new" antique mail slot for our restored front door. If you recall, after a long search we finally purchased a slightly ornate and very cool mail slot from eBay.

When the mail slot arrived we were very excited and launched right into the installation process. I carefully measured and cut the hole in the center of one of the door's panels and felt like we were on the way. But that's when the problems started.

First, I noticed that the mail slot was actually broken. Yep, one of the hinges on the flap was partially worn away/broken off and once the flap opened to a certain point, it would come off of the hinge pin. The spring was also broken.

Then I realized that the mail slot was designed in such a way that made it nearly impossible to install without a minor but noticeable gap between the top of the mail slot and the door. In order for the flap to open, it would need to open up into the door area which would require the hole in the door to extend up above the top of the mail slot. If you can't image what I'm trying to describe, and you don't get what I'm saying from the photo below, trust me, it would have looked horrible.

End result...WE'RE SO FRUSTRATED!!!

Rather than invest even more time into a flawed aspect of the front door project, we decided to cut our losses on the mail slot we had purchased for $75 from eBay (money than we wanted to spend in the first place), and opted to begin a search for another mail slot that would fit the bill.

Any time I'm looking for some antique salvaged architectural hardware, I start my search at my usual architectural salvage Internet storefronts. There are a handful of places that I use quite often and have had quite a bit of luck with in the past. These websites frequently add items and, even when they don't have exactly what I'm looking for, offer a great starting point for research. I prefer these locations since they are authentic dealers and do not deal in reproductions.

Mowery Antiques - Mowery has a good selection with detailed photos and descriptions. I've used them for hinges and a few other things around the house. They have good prices and unique items to choose from. The mail slot we originally wanted is actually on their website, but it was sold and the status wasn't updated. Oh well.

Ed Donaldson Hardware Restorations -  Another great site, typically updated at the beginning of each month, and very well organized website. The prices are reasonable for fully restored and operational hardware. I've used this store for several hinges that have been hard to find in other locations.

Robinson's Antiques - Robinson's is more expensive than the first two I listed, but has some of the more "oddball" items that you may not find at the other stores.

Once I've exhausted those three locations, I sometimes look at the various reproduction hardware online stores for research purposes, places like House of Antique Hardware, Renovator's Supply, and Van Dykes Restorers, but my online search then typically turns to eBay for antique hardware.

Our new mail slot actually came from a seller on eBay. I started looking for a cast iron mail slot that would fit the opening that I already cut, and something that looked similar in style and age to the one we had already purchased. The mail slot I found, while not nearly as interesting of an outline as the first, maintains that Eastlake Victorian feel we enjoyed about the first one. Here's what we ended up with.

This one will actually work perfectly. The slot I already cut is exactly the correct size for this new one, and it will be able to mount on the door in nearly the same location as we had intended with the first one. Add to the situation that the spring is fully functional on this item, and we've got a good looking and fully functional mail slot that will work perfectly with our door, both in style and age. The main reason this one will work is because of the larger distance between the flap's hing and the top of the mail slot's surround. That 1/8" makes a huge difference.

We still have that "Merv the Perv" issue that Wendy covered previously. We had to come up with a solution that would obscure the view of a person outside if they push the mail slot open. We don't want them peering into our living space and up our stairwell. 

We had a couple of solutions suggested on the blog, and some from friends, but the most often suggested option was something like a large drawer pull or curved piece for the back of the door that would direct any mail down and keep prying eyes from seeing in. These were all great ideas, but I wanted something that would look like it had always been there.

While searching for our mail slot on eBay, I stumbled on a cast iron letter slot that came out of an old office building or hotel. The slot is actually a drop slot where one might have dropped their letters into a chute. I won the auction for the drop slot and when it came I held it up to the door and it looks perfect. 

By installing it "upside down" it will work exactly the way we intended it to. The ironic thing is that I never would have found this hardware item except for the fact that I was looking for a replacement mail slot. So in some ways, our very unfortunate and frustrating situation actually helped us get closer to our goal by steering us in the right direction to solve another problem.

I'll have another update a little later in the week to fill you in on the door progress. In brief, it is starting to really look good and take shape. Even though this project has not gone as smoothly as I had originally hoped, I feel like the end result will be great because we've not lost our cool while navigating the speed bumps. 

Do you do any antique hardware purchasing online? We have our favorite salvage yards in the area, but sometimes it is far easier to jump on the Internet to look for things rather than driving an hour or more for a shopping trip that may be fruitless. We're always looking for new shops online, so please share if you know of any.

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