Living Room Cabinets Re-Finished

We are finally done re-finishing the built-in cabinets in our living room. It really was not a big project, but with a baby and work commitments, it seemed to take weeks. The original cabinets (shown below) were in good shape, but the back walls of the cabinets needed a refresh, we wanted to get rid of the orange tone of the stain, and we wanted to get rid of the wooden shelves.

We already told you how we re-stained the cabinets and the doors. We also removed the old wallpaper and painted the back walls of the cabinets. We then ordered glass shelves and installed them to replace the old wooden shelves. We then re-installed the re-finished doors.

I think the finished product looks great, and some day we will fill those shelves with nice things (I don't know if we have any? haha). We still need to install baseboards, re-paint the room, and re-face the brick fireplace, and then we can take a true "after photo" of the living room.

Staining the Cabinet Doors

We have been slowly making progress on refinishing the built-in cabinets in the living room. I decided to dis-assemble the doors to refinish them, as I did not want to accidentally break the leaded glass during sanding. It took about 10 minutes to dis-assemble the four doors.

I then sanded (60, 80 and 120 grit), stained (oil-based) and finished (oil-based semi-gloss polyurethane) the wood pieces, which took about five hours spread out over four nights. The sanding was a bit faster with everything disassembled, and I did not have to tape off the glass when applying the stain/polyurethane. Once everything was dry, I re-assembled the cabinets with 18 gauge 3/4" finish nails, and filled the nail holes with wood putty to match the stain. This re-assembly process took about one televised hockey game (translation: 2.5 hours), including cleaning both sides of the glass.

All four doors are now waiting patiently to be re-installed.

Where Should We Put This Mirror?

I built this mirror out of an old mirror and some scrap wood (more on that, as well as some better photos, later). However, we are having some trouble deciding where to hang it. The plan was to hang this mirror over the fireplace, but I didn't really factor in the added size of the new frame, so it might actually be too big for that space. The other option is to hang it vertically in the front hall. If neither of these options work, we really don't have a place for a mirror of this size in our house right now. Any thoughts on which location looks better?

1) Over the fireplace - This is where I want to put it as long as it won't look ridiculous. There would be about 1.5" from the top of the frame to the ceiling and 1.5" from the bottom of the frame to the top of the two higher cabinets (12" to the lower/middle mantle piece).

2) Front hall - The mirror actually fits well into this space and would reflect light into our living room. The door and trim to the left will be painted white soon and will be replaced altogether some day. The only issue presented by adding a mirror here is that we really need a place to hang keys/leashes/coats in the front hall, so adding a mirror here would take away the wall space needed for a rack.

Built-in Cabinets Stained

We got to work on the next phase of beautifying the fireplace in our living room. I spent most of last weekend sanding and staining the built-in cabinets. First, I had to remove the leaded glass doors and wood shelves (which will be replaced with glass shelves), and then add some extra support to the middle of the cabinets (the wood shelves were somewhat important to the structure, and glass shelves won't be able to play this same role). Most of the cabinets were sanded using 60, 80 and 120 grit sandpaper. The dentil moulding was too tight for the palm sander though, so I scraped off the old finish with a wood chisel and then tried to smooth it out as much as possible with sandpaper. I then applied the same stain and polyurethane that we used on the stairs.

Next up, we need to remove some old wallpaper and paint the back of the cabinets. We will then install glass shelves, install under cabinet lighting, and re-install the leaded glass doors.

Two Very Different Rugs

After months of occasionally looking at area rugs and never finding anything that we liked for the living room, we finally forced ourselves to get it done last week. We visited a few of the chain carpet and home improvement stores, as well as a few independent stores, and didn't find anything that called to us. Finally, we decided to visit Pollock's Carpet Market in Meredith's old neighbourhood of Roncesvalles, and found a few rugs that we liked.

We decided on this modern rug because we liked the combination of colours. We were both nervous that it might be a bit too busy, but we decided to go for it anyways.

I was proud of us for making such a bold purchase, but Meredith decided that the "amoeba" rug was not welcoming and had to go. We went back in search of another rug that we had seen that was more traditional, but would still blend with some of our more contemporary furniture. I think that was a great decision, as the new rug looks great and will not overpower the rest of the room.

Please note that these are not photos of the "finished" living room ... we still have a lot of work to do with the fireplace, bookshelves, trim and artwork, but we thought we would share our rug purchase.

Plans for a Beautiful Fireplace

Here is a photo of our fireplace from the day we bought the house. Being the focal point of the living room, we knew that we had a lot of work to improve this look (especially the ugly red brick).


Here is a photo of the fireplace today. We installed a new slate tile hearth (smaller than the original hearth) and new hardwood floors, so we are making progress.


We have some plans for the built-in bookshelves surrounding the fireplace. We are about 90% sure that we are going to sand the woodwork and stain it to match the floors (and stairs and doors, which will be stained at the same time). We also plan to clean up the back of the display area and replace the wooden shelves with glass shelves.

The most dramatic change will be in covering the awful brick. We have been talking about covering the fireplace wall with stone from floor to ceiling, which would cover the brick, as well as the plaster above the mantle. Meredith sent me this photo months ago ... no matter how hard I work, I don't think our living room will look like this. ;-)


Unfortunately, I do not have the skill to do this type of stone work and make nice, clean, consistent mortar lines. I also think this look may not quite suit our house, which we have kept as a "craftsman" style as much as we can, while also adding in some more modern furniture.

We are now strongly considering installing stack stone on this wall; I am not sure if that is the real name, but see the photos below for samples. This stone can be installed similar to tile, and is typically installed without any mortar or grout lines, so it would be quite an easy install. We have seen some veneers that have a darker mix of stones that range from copper all the way to black, so these would hopefully bring together the tones from the wood, slate, etc. My only apprehension with this stone is that it might be kind of trendy, but I'm hoping that is not the case since it is made of natural stone (as opposed to some of the fake stone veneers from previous decades that now look very dated and tacky). Here are some inspiration photos.



The fireplaces in the above photos look great, but I think the mitred corners look a little fake. I prefer the corners in the following photo, as the corner pieces are interlaced, giving it a more finished look.


I am not sure when we plan to complete this work. It would be nice to do it once the trimwork is intalled so that the living room will be finished, but it will most likely be delayed for some time with projects in the basement and backyard requiring a lot of work over the next six months.

Our Toy Castle

Let's face it... our girl loves her toys already and we're not anticipating the toys to disappear anytime soon! Our house now looks like a toy factory. Fortunately, Andrew has built Mackenzie's bedroom to be very toy friendly and organized. She can get everything all over the floor all she wants and then it is very easy for me to pick up and put things away at night. Her new favourite activities are pulling all of the books out of her little book cubby holes and playing with Elmo Live. Mackenzie's room usually looks 10x messier than it does in the pic below but this gives the general idea (you can see how handy the cubby holes are in the background.. not to mention the fact that they're pure fun for little miss curious):

So, bedroom = easy peasy. The current issue is the living room! Wowsers. Mackenzie loves to wake up at the ripe hour of 5am typically (I'm lucky to get a 6am day..) so we're downstairs bright and early (actually it's pretty pitch black outside as you can see by the tone of the pix below). So we need toys downstairs too! It usually ends up looking a little like this (excuse the ugly fireplace - we will be redoing this):


Our basement is not yet finished but I imagine when it is finished, we will move a lot of the toys down there and hopefully have some good toy storage options down there. But until that HUGE project is completed, what to do with our family room?? It would be nice to have some easy toy storage somewhere like in her room. I've just started browsing online and see some options that I've cut & paste below (no sources as I just google imaged quickly) but if you have any neat ideas let us know!