Project Completion!

Okay, the moment of truth. Melissa and I carried the finished cabinet up to its new home, the corner of our renovated bathroom. It fit fine but we had to shim up the legs a little to steady the wobbling.


I guess now I just sit back and hope the humidity change won’t mess up all the joins. Yikes.

What’s next? Hmmmm. Maybe some book shelves so we can finally unpack all those boxes of books in the guest room.

Hardware

I keep telling myself not to go to Restoration Hardware but I always do. Lowes, Home Depot, and Ace never seem to have anything unique but classy. We decided on chrome to match the other bathroom fixtures and picked out some vintage looking pulls and a knob. Similar to my other experiences at Restoration Hardware, when I was ready to install the hardware, I took a good look at it and noticed that they had once again given me the right pieces but with a variety of finishes. Those bozos have done this to me before. Apparently they expensive prices do not reflect any high degree of quality control.

Melissa went back to exchange the pieces as I went to Lowes to buy the correct length screws. Soon after she returned, I screwed them on and decided it was time to lug the thing up the bathroom...finally.

By the way, if you enlarge the above picture, you'll see my reflection. Pretty cool, huh?

Finish Work

Luckily, Melissa is a good painter and doesn’t mind the work. After some sanding, she taped up the cabinet and primed it with some Zinser 1-2-3, sanded some more with 320 grit, then painted the final 2 coats using some glossy white stuff we used for our bathroom trim.

It's always tough to decide how much to care about the cosmetics of furniture parts that rarely get seen (e.g., drawer backs, bottoms of stuff). We decided not to paint some of these parts. We also decided to polyurethane the inside of the cabinet and drawers instead of painting. Partly because it would be easier and partly for style. I get kind of sad seeing the wood covered up forever with paint. So at least we can enjoy the wood when we open the cabinet door or drawers.

After sanding the non-painted parts, I applied two coats of my favorite polyurethane, Minwax Wipe-On Poly. This is my favorite because it’s ready to go and doesn’t require cleaning or finding a brush.