Picardy Project

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Of Course our List of Priority Projects Grew

We made a list of projects that were a high priority to get done

It seemed only natural that within a week or two of making this list it expanded. A lot

Yes, that’s right. We’re completely insane. With the art room and bedroom tasks completed it just makes sense to add even more to our plate 🙂 The next projects? Our hallway closet, our bedroom closet and maybe even getting to building our sports ticket table and our bed. Bah!

First thing will be finishing the first phase of the laundry room. That’s not too far off though with the floors installed and the walls texture. We just need to paint, bring in the storage, hang our bikes and return all of our CDs to their proper resting place. Easy, right?

Next up, the hallway closet
We’re in desperate need of more general home storage, so this one will be nice to get to. There is baby stuff out and about that we’d like to corral together so the house is less cluttered. Plus, we’ve got piles of shit in the front room that need a home. One day we’d actually like to be able to use the front room.
The next project? – Our bedroom closet

This closet isn’t really a necessity, but it would just be nice to get it done. Plus, the storage design we came up with really won’t take us very long to build, so it’ll be nice to just get it built and be able to check it off the list. You know I love list checking 🙂 Further down the line on our list, is building a bed for the room because this is our bed right now

We’ve had this king size mattress for about 9 months now and we have still not built a frame for it. We’d like to build a nice platform bed with some storage. We’re uncertain if we’ll build it with drawers or cubbies, but we’ll be building it with at least 6 drawers/cubbies for each of us so we’ll be able to finally get rid of at least Chris’ dresser and maybe mine too. And also be able to get out of bed properly – as in not rolling off a mattress and onto the floor…

And the final next project down the line? Our sports ticket table! Oh, what’s that? You don’t even know what I’m talking about? Well, that makes sense because we first thought about building this over a year ago, made some progress and then never worked on it again…All the wood has been sitting in our garage waiting to be worked on since last March. We are bad builders.

But we’ve taken the nails out of the wood

We’ve ran some pieces through the planer

And attached many of the pieces of the top together

As with most projects on this house we get sidetracked by something and then don’t return to the project for a LONG time. Which may be why our laundry room floor sat waiting to get installed for 3+ years. At least progress goes on somewhere else, right?

I am excited for 3 reasons to finally get this built: 1) Just to check it off the list because it’s been on there for a while 2) Because I have had this idea FOREVER and have been saving all my sports tickets for nearly 10 years

And I can’t wait to see them all laid out on the face of our future table to marvel at

We used to not have quite enough to fill out the entire top of the table, but because we’ve put off building this for so long we’ve (me, my dad and Chris) have collected many more tickets, so we shouldn’t have any problem filling it out. But possibly the most exciting reason I want to get this done is 3) so we can have family meals together. Right now Chris and I always sit at our coffee table in front of the TV and have dinner. That’s always been fine for the two of us. But now that Zoe is here I can’t wait to make meals more fun and about our family. She’s so tiny now she can’t really participate for meal time, but hopefully by the time she gets to eating solid foods we’ll have a table to slide her up to so that we can all enjoy every meal as a family. Growing up we always had meals together. It always sounds so strange to me when people mention that they ate meals separate from the rest of their family growing up – siblings in one place, mom in another, dad some place else. In both of my divorced family houses we always had meals together (even after various sports games/practices/excursions), and I loved that. I can’t wait to begin that tradition with Zoe.

Now, back to work. That list is long.

The Long List of Building

The list is LONG of things we’ll be building in the next couple of months. And I say couple of months because that might be how long it will take (more like couple + a couple more).

1. There is of course the sports ticket table…

…which we haven’t worked on in over 6 weeks. Yikes. We really gotta get on this one. After all, I’m sure we ALL want the front room done.

2. But to complete the front room we also need to build our free weight storage

Our free weights are just strewn all over the place so it would be nice to corral them all together. Then we just have to buff out those scratches from the fireplace tile…sigh…the front room we thought would be quick and easy.

3. Then there are all the TV room building projects we’ve decided to pile on ourselves 🙂 The hutch

That will one day look more like this (that’s the plan at least)

And so far things are looking good.

4. Then we have to build all the picture frames for our posters. But thankfully we’ve done that before and it won’t be too hard, just time consuming to build 10. Clearly I got ahead of myself with that idea.

5. Then we also decided to throw a coffee table into the TV room mix. Because we are idiots. I haven’t planned that one out yet. Despite Chris asking about it a few times. Maybe I should get on that…

6. We wanted to make our lives more exciting by building another few things around the house. There’s the really simple door to the crawl space under the addition

Remember the great new foundation Chris completed?

Yup, still needs that door.

7. And you might remember those compost containers we have in the above pic. We’ve thought about retiring the compost system. It’s just a tad smelly, it doesn’t make a ton of soil, and we’re able to put food scraps in our green container so the compost containers might be leaving us soon. In which case we’d be building a nice storage container for some of our sports equipment

Some place for basketballs, footballs, gloves, baseballs, the frisbe. You know, all that fun stuff.

8. And lastly, we need some new garage storage because this shelving system is looking a little crazy

Chris has been asking, “Have you designed a new garage bookcase?” for a few months now and I hadn’t gotten around to it because it freaked me out. Why? Because we had a grand idea of building it with a piano hinge so that it had a door attached to the top 2/3rds of the cabinet that could swing open and have 3 layers of storage – the physical cabinet and then the front and back of the piano hinge door. I wanted all the storage to be maximized in spacing with all the wood glue, wood stain, spray bottles, spray paint, but it also needed to be flexible for future stuff we’ll be putting there. The piano hinge door combined with the specific flexibility felt out of my comfort zone, but I finally buckled down and made a plan

Chris is now very excited.

So there you have it. Our 8 building projects either in the works or soon to be in the working. Yup. We’re nuts.

Sports Ticket Table Progress

Man, this table is taking a long time to build. I knew it would be hard to build a big ol’ honking wood table from scratch, but holy crap in my pants I didn’t think it would take this long. It’s fun, but it’s hard and laborious, but we’re certainly learning a lot along the way.

It all started with laying out all the boards to figure out what order we wanted things. Per the plan we’d made the table will be 72″ long by 42″ wide with a 30″ x 60″ inlay in the middle where all the sports tickets will be. Because of that layout, you’ll see the entirety of the boards on the two ends, but for all the middle boards you’ll only see 6″ of each end, otherwise the center area will have the sports tickets artwork/decoupage. So I wanted the outside boards to have some nice worn areas, nail holes, etc. to really highlight the reclaimed wood



We also made sure to mix around the widths of the boards so thick pieces weren’t all together and the thinner pieces weren’t grouped together either.

Once the layout was set I used a construction crayon to number all of them so we could keep them in the right order

Then we started joining together the sections.

We worked in about 12″ sections because that’s the maximum width that could go through the planer. We grabbed 3-4 boards at a time to work

We marked for our biscuit

Then got out the biscuit joiner

With all the spots cut for our future biscuits we slathered on the wood glue


Then we popped in our biscuit

And lined up the marks we’d made for the biscuits and slid the next board on top. We repeated the process for all 3-5 boards in each section and then brought out a bunch of clamps to pull everything into place and make sure things set strongly in place


We cleaned up as much glue as possible

And left things alone to set and repeated the process for all the other sections

This process took a couple days to complete because we only had so many clamps and well, we went a little nutty and used SEVEN for each section. But hey, no one wants their table to fall apart when they’re eating at it.

When things were dry we took the clamps off and ran them through the planer. We planed the bottom of each section first. The bottom didn’t need to be perfect, but we wanted things to be pretty flat and even (otherwise attaching the frame would be too difficult). Once the bottom was good enough we worked at planing the the top about 1/16th at a time to get all the boards planed to the same, smooth level



We propped them up to the side, out of the way as we completed each section

With all the sections planed (there are two more completed for 5 sections total) things needed to be moved inside to let them acclimate to the house’s temperature and humidity so there wouldn’t be any binding or twisting once the table was completely built and brought inside. Next up, joining it all together for a fabulous tabletop! 🙂

And remember, if you haven’t voted, please vote for Picardy Project HERE in the JDR Annual Blogger Awards in the Remodeling category!!! Chris and I would LOVE your vote! 🙂

We’ve Finally Resumed Building the Table

It’s been a while since we’ve worked on our sports ticket table, and we’ve finally returned to it.

When we last left off, the next step was removing all the nails so we could start planing things. We decided to start with the tabletop wood and so I moved it all into the garage and laid things out

Of course the first piece of wood we started inspecting had SO. MANY. NAILS.

We worked diligently until the death nail reared its ugly head

That one fucking nail seriously took us about 45 minutes to remove. I’m not kidding. We broke a chisel

Got the counter sink stuck

Yup, that’s the nail head and the counter sink jammed together (it took me about 5 minutes just to get the counter sink out)

But finally after all the jamming, prying, shoving, yelling, cussing, tool throwing, and yanking I ripped that mother fucker out

And chewed up the wood so much that there was a hole from one side to the other.

After searching around and figuring that all the nails were out we used a handy dandy nail finder that made noises that indicated there were still nails in it, but for the life of us we couldn’t find any. We weren’t really sure what to do because we didn’t want to plane the wood with nails in it because that would damage the knives, but because we’d only be taking a very small layer of wood off we reasoned that if we couldn’t see any nails, shaving off that top layer was probably safe.

So we apprehensively sent it through the planer

It looked awesome!!! And no damage to the knives done at all as no nails were hit. Phew!

We knew we’d have to plane the other side to make all the thicknesses of the boards the same so the table top was flat, but we decided to run all the wood through the tablesaw first (this would shave off a layer from the sides of the wood so it would be flat and we could join all the pieces together most effectively).

While Chris ran the wood through the table saw I stayed a step ahead by inspecting for nails first (and no piece of wood was nearly as challenging as that first one)

And after about 45 minutes of running each piece through the tablesaw twice (once on each side) we were left with some awesome pieces of wood


Next up, planing to the same thickness!

Starting to Prep our Ticket Table Wood

With the wonderful reclaimed wood for our future fabulous ticket table purchased, I set about getting it ready to be planed. That included inspecting for nails, taking said nails out (although I still haven’t quite gotten around to that one yet…) and cutting everything down to size.

A few evenings ago last week while Chris was working on the cabinet we’re building for my dad and Wendy I started inspecting the table top wood for the best 72″ to be cut down and used for the top (I actually measured out about 74″ so we have a bit of wiggle room). Not wanting to start cutting everything down at night (the sun was starting to set) I just made markings of where the cuts would go

The “K” was written on the side of the line we would keep and that will also be the face that will be the top of the table. At the same time I also inspected for nails and marked off where we’d need to remove them if I couldn’t do it easily right then

It was an easy task that didn’t take too long and I was lucky that we installed a good outdoor light so I could continue working after the sun went down


With all the table top wood marked and Chris at a good stopping point on the cabinet we called it a night and resumed the next day. I set up a little work station

And got to cutting

I cut down 16 2×4’s and 2×3’s for the table top, and once they were all cut down to about 74″ I laid them out to get an idea of what the top would look like (minus the glass and tickets of course)

Now that is a big, chunky, hulking table top! 🙂 And it’s actually about 6″ too wide, but after things get planed and sanded it’ll shrink down to size.

After I was done with the table top I sorted out the other wood by section and went through those as well looking for nails and making cut marks


And then I started cutting them down to size as well (cutting them 1-2″ longer than needed to be safe)

And soon, all the wood was cross cut

Now I just need to get off my tushy to rip all those nails out…

$75 or Several Thousand. Whichever.

It’s finally time to build my sports ticket table, yay!!!!! (I’m not sure whether I have enough sports tickets to fill it, but I’m very very very close). Originally I had wanted to paint the table once we had built it and then have the tickets inlay’ed in it. But one evening as Chris and I were tossing around ideas about it (and I was trying to figure out what a dining room table was supposed to look like) Chris came up with the idea of using reclaimed wood to build it and sealing it instead of painting it so we could see all of the imperfections and signs the wood’s past life. The idea immediately made me excited.

Because we’d be using great, old wood that had had a previous life I decided I wanted the table to be really chunky, hulking and solid. A big, beefy, wood table. You know, with a glass inlay in the center and 10 years worth of sports tickets sitting beneath it. Whatever floats your boat 🙂

After asking Chris construction questions, deciding what kinds of angles, trims and details we wanted I came up with a pretty simple design

The top will be constructed by 2×4’s laying on their sides (with a routered out center to inlay the glass). The top will be 72″ x 42″ with the 60″ x 30″ glass inlay in the center. The “feet” of the table will be 2 2×6’s sandwiched together with a simple design cut with a jigsaw to give it a little detail. The “spindles” will be 3 4×4’s on each side with a chamfer cut on all four corners. The top brace will be 2 2×4’s sandwiched together with a small detail cut out with a jigsaw. The entire table will be roughly 30″ tall.

Armed with the plan we headed to a local reuse place we’d been to while we were looking for the front room light that had old lumber. We hit the motherload

Once we got there and started looking through the wood our plans got modified a bit. The top would now be constructed with 2×3’s AND 2×4’s, the “spindles” would now be old pieces of subfloor ripped down to 2×4 size and sandwiched together, and the top braces would also be subfloor ripped down to 2×4 size instead of using actual 2×4’s (first because the 2×4 selection wasn’t super great, and second because we became enamored with the old subfloor). We loaded up the truck with lots and lots of wood and held our breath to get the total……$70! Both of our jaws sort of dropped in excitement as we were anticipating that it would be well over $100. Exciting!

We came home and unloaded all the wood

As we thought about all the work that was ahead of us to sand all the pieces and get them to the correct width and size to match up properly Chris sort of waxed poetic about how cool it would be to have a planer for this job. We both agreed that it would be A LOT easier and pretty fun. We sort of laughed about it, “Haha, those things are just so expensive though…” And then we started convincing ourselves that it would probably be a great idea to get one! 🙂 Oh jesus.

Sure, they’re a bit pricey (the DeWalt one Chris had his eye on was about $400), but we’ve got plans down the line to build a cabinet in the TV room, build a coffee table, build a bed, build a cabinet for the laundry room, build storage for the hallway…and wouldn’t it be cool to use MORE reclaimed wood??? Then we also forced ourselves to recognize that we’d been hoarding HD gift certificates for a long while now and seeing that this tool would be used to build projects for us but would ultimately be Chris’ I said I wouldn’t have any problem buying most of the tool with gift certificates if he paid the rest.

And that’s how we decided that it would totally be worth it to buy this planer


Isn’t it preeeeeeeetttty? 🙂 We used a Lowe’s 10% off coupon that HD accepted and used a bunch o’ gift certificates and then Chris paid about $100ish out of pocket for it. Score!

Now, that $400 (but Chris paid $100) planer tags on a hefty price to the $70 worth of wood table (but we need to buy just a little more wood for braces that we forgot about which we’re figuring will tack on another $5 for a grand total of $75 on wood). And then when you think about the fact that a large portion of the table top will be made up of sports tickets to games me, Chris and my dad have been to…


…well, I don’t even want to think about how many thousands of dollars all those tickets to all those games have cost. I would much rather like to think that this table only cost us $75 worth of reclaimed wood. It makes me feel a lot better about myself.