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The finish is starting to grow on me. It seems that the Rustoleum enamel (oil based) has an absolutely amazing ability to level out.

The dust that I complained about previously appears to be specks of the silver paint that had been previously on there… I’m not quite sure how it go there, but it looks somewhat interesting and nice, sort of like a fine glitter mixed with the paint.

If it were not for the glitter I’d say it’s probably as mirror smooth as I could ever hope to get.

Here is a very bad photo (as always - the camera could not focus due to the gloss, haha) of what I’m talking about:

If you look closely at the vertical surfaces you can see the HORRID appearance that I’m hoping will clear up with the second coat of paint. I’m definitely not looking forward to ’scuffing’ the whole thing, but I also need to make up for really stupid mistakes I knew to avoid anyway.

I forgot to tack down the top of the table after I flipped it back over, thus it collected glittery dust that must have fallen from the bottom, which then resulted in the glittery appearance on the top. That was plain stupid, I knew to tack down any surface immediately before painting. That’s my theory on the glittery dust at least.

The second stupid mistake was that when I’d sanded down to bare MDF instead of just scuffing the surface down, I failed to reseal/prime the surface prior to painting. Again, I know better. I know that MDF acts like a sponge, that all surfaces need to be sealed first, I just didn’t do it… thinking that the enamel (and it’s thick like molassas) wouldn’t require it.

If I recall, I had the same problem with the edges the first time I painted with the Rustoleum ‘aluminum’ enamel. The second coat took care of it, but then that surface was primed first - albeit with super cheap wall primer.

I said earlier that I feel this piece has potential, and I still do, it’s just severely far aware from what I’m hoping to finally achieve. It’s a bit difficult for me to look past my personal involvement, in that I fucked up multiple times with this re-painting job… but already it looks like a more expensive piece of furniture… the silver & blue paint really looked cheap.

It appears my application method of using the 4″ foam brush seemed to have worked thanks to the superior leveling qualities of this paint in comparision to the horrid leveling quality of acrylic enamels I’ve used. I readied smooth paint rollers for the recoat that will take place sometime tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be needing those now.

If the edges still look like shit after the second coat of enamel I will have no choice but to strip it all off again (from the edges only), put on a good quality sealing primer, and then repainting… how horrid. I’m going to be very cynical here, but I’m very much expecting that I’ll need to totally redo the edges. I wish I could blame that level of mistake on breathing in all the paint fumes, unfortunately I cannot attribute that goof to solvent damaging by brain.

To recap: I built this coffee table, along with a coordinating side table and tv stand back in September/October of 2003 out of 3/4″ MDF, tons of screws, and gobs of yellow glue. ;) The MDF cost a total of $40, I cheated Home Depot out of the cutting fees (had them cut everything to size for me)… other costs were for paint, basically, so another $20. It was still a very wise investment, considering even Ikea furniture would cost upwards of 5X more than I spent. If you want to read more about that whole adventure the dizzying array of posts is right there in the archives. ;)

When you already have several projects going at the same time, why not add another one?

After casually running a paint scraper across the top of my coffee table and thus discovering just how easily the polycrylic will flake off, I decided to scrape it all off.

This morning I took it into the shed stripped off and sanded it to prepare for repainting. I wiped it down with mineral spirits to clean it. I think that was a horrible mistake. It seems to have soaked into the edges and not evaporated out as it was supposed to. Instead of the enamel staying on the surface it appears to be soaking in. More than likely I just didn’t give it enough time… but either way, oops. This should correct itself, hopefully, by the time the 24 hours rolls by for the recoat.

Something has interfered with the top surface. At first I thought it was air bubbles, but considering I didn’t have that problem anywhere else, errrr. I’m starting to think that even though I tacked it down multiple times, I failed to immediately prior to the coat of paint it’s probably dust. Damn, it looks fucking awful though, I must say. I’ll be sanding the surface down yet again, heh. At least it’ll be just the top, the other surfaces leveled nicely without too much horror show factor.

Painting the furniture black was an idea I’ve had for a little while, but actually doing it was a less than desirable option. Ohio Dave agreed that it would look good, or to quote, that it would “look classy.” I’m still dreading the rest of it, but it has potential to look good. As a triumph of observing the obvious, the gloss black is very dark, it changes the whole room. I’m not quite sure it’s for the good, but we’ll see… whenever the damn thing is finished. It’ll probably be a while before I do the side table and the tv stand, just to make sure I actually like the black.

I might just have to break down and pay the insane price for spray paint, lacquer, whatever… ugh.

I’m so excited to refinish my desk now. I’ve been wanting to do it for about a year, had intended to do it last summer, but never quite got around to it.

With all of the ‘construction’ in my bedroom I found myself looking for some sort of valet tray, box, or something similar to set things in. A year or two ago when I started finishing these little wooden boxes I’d also finished a wood letter tray and had been using that, it just wasn’t exactly what I’d been wanting.

Originally I found this really nice unfinished wooden box at the craft store, given that I had all of the supplies to finish it, I gave that a go. Unfortunately it wasn’t tall enough to close with all of my little items in it, but upon seeing the deep ebony stain change the wood to something quite amazing it sparked interest in my other wood items.
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I’ve written a bit about this Stolmen system, but now it’s actually finished enough to show everyone.

The photos are a bit on the crappy side, I didn’t want horrible flash glare and was hand holding at 1/4 of a second shutter, so…. a little blur, but you get the idea. I bought it all in phases, as I mentioned previously, so the sticker shock wasn’t too horrible; all told, it cost in the range of $390, which I guess isn’t too bad considering the tremendous storage gain.

I also switched over exclusively to wooden hangers, adding in the ‘nice’ boxes, and the lighting, and we’re closer to $500, but… I do think it’s worth it.

I’ve given myself so much storage I’m not quite sure what to do with it all yet. Right now all those boxes at the top are completely empty! With the four drawers, one of them holds all my wrapping paper (which is a lot more than I thought I had), one drawer is for socks, another for underwear, and the final being for t-shirts. There’s so much room in each drawer that it looks like I need to do some major shopping now.

Random, but I find myself missing the neat features of OS X whenever I’m using my Gentoo workstation (which is whenever I’m actually… well, working).

I found a little thing called skippy to give expose-esque functionality to the desktop, but I can’t figure out (yet) if it’s possible to do a hot-corner thing with it like OS X — I haven’t tried though. It is also horribly slow and doesn’t do automatic updates like the real thing, basically it’s just junk… good in theory, crap in comparision to the real Apple Expose. I do realize that one can install some bastardized X server that has all sorts of patches applied to it so that windows will update, etc, but hell, I had a difficult enough time when Gentoo just automatically swapped me to the ‘xorg’ X server, versus XFree… of course, aren’t they the same thing? Whatever, I don’t care, whatever works.

I’ve been ‘vacationing’ from reality as much as I can lately, for obvious reasons… basically that I would rather my mind just be totally shutdown. Read the rest of this entry »