Cabin Fever Coat Rack

Wow it's been one crazy hectic winter for us and finally it appears Spring is on the horizon. Hooray with a capital H! While we burrowed in for the last of winter the Mr. decided to work on few more pallet projects to beat cabin fever. 

Out of the board cut-offs that remained from a few previous pallet wood projects, he was able to put together this little beauty of a Coat Rack/Hall Tree with a shelf.  Before it was even complete, it was quickly claimed by one of our friends to place in their entry way.....Trash to Treasure!

Overall it measures about 40 inches long, 16 inches high and has a 5 inch wide shelf along the top for display/storage. 

I thinned a medium color wood stain with some naphtha to add a little color contrast to the grain and texture.  An added benefit to stain tinting is the ability to even out the sometimes huge variance in color of the wood, because not all pallet wood is the same tone, age or species for that matter.  Finally, finished with a few coats of satin poly - extremely lightly sanding between coats.

In the end it was a great way to use up the cut ends of projects! 

It's been awhile since we posted some of our projects, forever amazed at how quickly life get's crazy & time passes. We'll be posting more of our winter projects soon.

Think Spring! ~K

Shoe Storage Solutions on Hometalk

A while back I began clipping great home project ideas on Hometalk, a one-stop shop for pinning all things home and garden.  You can not only see awesome project inspirations but find full how-to's, ask questions to the Hometalk community, and share your own DIY projects, what's not to love!  

I recently posted our Pallet Wood Shoe Storage Bench project.... to my surprise I was kindly invited to put together a Shoe Storage Ideas board of my favorite posts and you can see it by clicking on the image below.  Don't forget to follow Mystic Remake on Hometalk while you're there! 

Scrap Take 2 - Bookshelf

In these parts we are picky about our pallet wood.  It has to be hardwood, rough sawn and well worn. No ordinary pine need apply. Who knew all the options that existed when it came to picking up wood next to a dumpster?  

Our pile of primo pallet wood was cluttering our always full garage, so we came up with a plan to add a little storage to the vacant corner in our living room.  Game plan: make our shoe bench by our garage entry on steroids, height to be determined by the length of the boards we have, and at least 2 shelves.

It took a lot of elbow grease to hand sand the sliver nightmare away and not loose the character of the awesome rough sawn wood.  But it was worth it!

After the all the sanding, a little thinned stain to tint the wood, we sealed it with 3-4 coats of matte finish water-based poly. The matte finish offers protection for the wood, seals down the rough edges/burrs that were left (aka slivers) and maintains the non-glossy rough around the edges look we wanted. 

It looks rough to the touch, but in fact it's smooth like butter!

End product - the world's heaviest bookcase and finally a home {burlap bins} for the ever growing collection of Legos!! Next project: Create a lamp for new bookcase.....

Halloween Raven Mantel

Fall is our favorite season.  It brings one of our favorite holidays, Halloween! In true creepy fashion, this year we changed up the mantel and mixed the old reclaimed items we display all year with the some festive ones!

Raven & Skull Mantel

In our kitchen we put together our collection of un-used orange pumpkins...they somehow were multiplying in our basement I swear and made a Jack-O-Lantern stack with some orange christmas lights and a few drill holes.  They cast a neat orange glow at night from atop the cabinets!

Jack-O-Lantern Tower

Happy Halloween!

Made From Scrap - Storage Bench

Here's how DIY works at our house.  I come up with great ideas and hubby bears the burden of making it work. I asked him to jump on the pallet furniture band wagon, and I think I may have created a monster.  Pallet Project #1 consisted of a bench with shoe storage to place by our garage entry.  

Pile of scrap hardwood pallet pieces = indestructible bench for our mountains of shoes! 

Wave of the magic wand, a.k.a. AnaWhite pattern for a Spa Bench and few evenings of listening to the alternating sounds of the chop saw & hubby cursing the day he accepted my challenge to make something out of this pile of scrap! Voila!

Happy Dance...now how to make the shoes return to the baskets!