Painting the toilet seat again

When I first started doing this a couple years ago, I found that the new paint job would last about six months, based on the first two times.

But the third re-painting only lasted for three months, if that. I don’t know why.

I finally got around to the fourth re-painting, still using the original cans of spray primer and paint. After priming and painting, there was still a little of each left, but probably not enough for another round.

They cost $4 each, so the cost of each repainting is about $2, making the process cheaper than buying a new seat, although there is about 2.5 hours of labor involved each time.

I’m happy to have gotten this done, and will have to see how it holds up.

If you're going to do wood countertops...

...this is the way to do them.

I've used the spar urethane that they used on the countertop a few times before, and I like the stuff a lot. One project was a set of shelves with a projecting counter, built of 2x4s, 2x2s, 1x10s, and plywood, which I built for additional shelf and counter space in our tiny apartment kitchen. Several moves later, we still have it, but now it is serving as a somewhat wobbly workbench in the basement.

After reading her post, out of curiosity I went to see how well the urethane on the counter of that shelf had held up. Originally, I put two good coats on, and called it good. Now it is very much dented and scraped up by tools, but it is all still there, except for a couple of chips on the edge, and one place where someone sawed into it a little.

I also used the stuff on my plywood hot tub, the furo, way back when. I put at least ten coats on the inside. Spar urethane does not fill in gaps, I found, without some assistance (toothpicks, in this case). It did leak just a little after a few years of use, but it was set up in a shower, so it didn't matter.

The most recent project was the bathroom stool, where the urethane is holding up very nicely...unlike most of the other finishes in there.

Decoupaged wastebasket

I missed the opportunity to buy a plastic wastebasket in the color I wanted, while that color was still in style.  But there is more than one way to skin a horse....

I had a sheet of paper from one of my marbling-with-shaving-cream experiments (method described briefly here), marbled in the color that I wanted. I used decoupage medium to glue it to one side of our black wastebasket, and then sealed it with another coat of decoupage medium.

I don't know how to do this without the paper wrinkling to some extent, but the marbled pattern hides the wrinkles fairly well.

This wastebasket lives under our bathroom sink; now it is a welcome burst of color when I open the cabinet door.

There is room for improvement, though, in that the wastebasket still shows a strip of black at the bottom; I should have papered it from the bottom up rather than from the top down, since the top edge is usually covered by a plastic bag.

A pregnancy project: Making things stay put

Making room for a new baby mostly means making time for a new baby...with an emptier schedule, fewer commitments, and simpler housekeeping.   I did some work on the last point, to fix some things that seemed to never stay where I had put them.

One rocker had a seat cushion that ended up on the floor at least six times a day.  I used scrap pieces of denim to make ties for it, which I sewed onto the cushion by hand.  That was several months ago, and I haven't had to put it back even once.

Our bath towels were frequently sliding off their pegs. So I crocheted a loop onto a corner of each towel, using sturdy cotton yarn. The yarn has been in our stash for years, but the colors coordinated well with the bathroom colors. Now the towels stay put. I should note, though, that the pegs for the towels used by the younger children are horizontal, and they can easily get their towels down without ripping the loops off; in other situations, that might be a problem.

I have a crate that we are using for a piano bench, with a seat pad made of several layers of fabric, tied together quilt-fashion. This seat pad was also frequently found on the floor.  I used linen yarn to tie it directly to the crate, through the hand-hole. Now it sometimes is flipped down, but it is easy to flip back.

One of the children's winter coats did not have a loop inside the collar for hanging it up; I made one out of a scrap of bias tape, and sewed it in.