Something for Baby

 When we learned that a baby would be joining our family at the beginning of 2020, Shawn had grand plans to build a crib and changing table. But reality hit, and as you know, there's not much extra time when you're preparing for, and taking care of a little one. :)

   Still, he made time to build a beautiful changing table/dresser, that our little girl can use for a long time. 

He used one of our favorite wood combinations, birch and walnut (or maybe it's just mine), and started with a pattern, but ended up with a design all his own. I picked out the jadeite hardware, and I think it goes  with the mid century modern look pretty well. :)

Our Biggest Project Yet

   The first Christmas Shawn and I were married, he wanted to build each of my family something. For my dad, he made a tool box for his remote control things, for my mom, a storage ottoman, and for Becca, he thought it would be cool to make a chair (which evolved into a loveseat).
   We had never made anything that big before, but with his woodworking skills, and me working at an upholstery shop, why not?
 
    We had to pretty much design it from scratch, because googling "how to make a loveseat" doesn't come up with anything very helpful. We found one frame picture that gave us a jumping off point, and we also knew it had to fit upstairs where my sister's room is.

Once we got it all put together, we brought it over to the upholstery shop.

First came the springs.

Then a layer of decking on the seat, and webbing on the back.

Cardboard over the arms

Decking on the back, and carpet pad over the seat

Time to start padding it!

The grey, velvet material Becca picked out was really soft and fun to work with.

Shawn helped figure out the button design on the backrest.

  The roll of material was narrower then the width of the back, so my boss had the idea to add a panel in the middle. It blended in nicely!

We had ordered a brand with the logo Becca designed for us, and her loveseat was the first project we got to use it on!

Shawn made the arm fronts with curly maple, and the legs with soft maple. The stain we used was "Bombay Mahogany",  which ended up being a little redder then our test sample, but still looked pretty nice.

We finished it up the middle of November, and delivered it to it's new home.

It ended up being slightly too big to fit in Becca's room, but it did fit in the hallway, so now she has a sitting room out there. :) 

Happy New Year from our little family! 

(Baby should be making her appearance in a couple weeks!)

An overdue project

We finally finished a project, and then I forgot to post about it! Oh well, here we go. :)

   After seeing the lovely storage ottoman Shawn made for our apartment, my mom thought she would like one in her house too. So we decided to make her one as a Christmas present...the Christmas before last? And we finally finished it this June :)

   You see, Shawn gets lots of fun ideas for projects, so there's usually a few going on at once. And he likes trying new ideas out, which sometimes take a little longer to finish. But that's all part of of learning and growing in a skill, right? Practice, practice, practice!

Instead of having the whole thing upholstered like ours, Shawn wanted to try making a panel design with oak trim, accented with narrower walnut trim.

Do you think he has enough clamps? :P 

 (he doesn't think so)

As he finished up the base with some coats of poly, I upholstered the lid.

 We were able to surprise my mom when we brought it along on a weekend trip. She hadn't seen any pictures of it in progress, but she loved how it turned out!