Fancy DIY planter

I've been wanting to make a planter or a tool box for some time now, lately my husband has been busy programming a chess game on the computer so figured I should do something productive as well. Plus my kitchen table really needed something cute:)

Here's how I made the planter. I bought a 2.5meter long (and about 14cm wide) wood plank and had the guy at the store cut it into five 50cm pieces. When I got home I measured and cut the two smaller pieces with my miter box to go on the shorter sides of my planter.

Then I cut my molding to go around the bottom of the planter like frame. I'm still not very good at this so once it's all glued together I usually have to add A LOT of wood filler to cover up my mistakes.

I just used wood glue to glue two long pieces together.

Then I added the long sides to the top of the base.

And then my two short end pieces..of course they did not fit properly at all, I think I need a new miter box, it's too worn and doesn't cut straight anymore....someday I'll have an electrical one:)

I tried to tighten the sides as much as I could to minimize the gap but in the end I still had to use tons of wood filler.

Once the glue was dry I added the molding to the bottom just like a frame. I gave the whole thing two coats of white acrylic paint, then I sanded it down on the sided and added some walnut distress ink with a sponge so the molding would stick out more. My kitchen is mostly white but there a few touches of green so I stayed with that theme.

I really like my planter, it's just what my table needed! Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

Linking up to these parties:

I want one of these!!

At the beginning of the month we were in Paris for my brothers wedding so the day after we decided to visit the city and I came across this at a book store:

An old wooden french wine box. It was just prefect and my mind was going 100mph thinking of what I could do with it. So my mission and everyone elses that was with us that day was to find a wooden wine box....

...well, we got a bit side tracked after a bit, there is just so much to see in Paris! That's ok though, my parents live in France and there is a wine store right by their house...I'll just go beg next time I'm there:)

The wagon wheel

In the previous post I finally showed you that old wagon wheel again which I bought in February, I worked on it on and off for about 3 months and in the end decided I really didn't like the finished look and I just put it away until I started decorating my IKEA shelf for the summer. So here's what happened to the wheel before it finally ended up on that shelf.

I started by cleaning the metal frame, I just used sand paper on all the metal parts, dont worry it is normal for the metal to actually look more rusty than it did before.

Then I put masking tape on all the wood areas that are close to metal.

I used black paint to paint the frame and the metal in the middle. Actually now that I look at this again I think the wheel looks fine like this! But I didn't leave it alone...I had big plans for this baby...

I had this nice turquoise varnish, I wanted to paint all the wood that color and then hang the wheel on one of the walls in the dinning room area and add the letter N E S W around it to make it look like a compass I probably would have added an inspirational quote as well. Anyway, when I saw what the varnish looked like on the wheel I was very disappointing, I think the wood was just too old and had so many holes in it that it just absorbed most of the varnish. I think I did three coats and it still looked yuk.

So then I painted it off white...I didn't like that I either so I sanded it down to make it look old again but I still didn't like that so I started staining it with a walnut stain.

Until it looked like in this last picture. I really hated it, I didn't have anywhere to put it and it was so far from my original idea that I just put it away and didn't think I'd ever use it...until summer came along, now I actually like my wheel! Ok, I could have done a better job of covering the black parts with masking tape during my project but I was so fed up with that wheel that I didn't even bother anymore...oh well.

A bit of summer

I've been seeing a lot of yellow and blue for summer this year and thought I'd give it a try, plus I needed something to go on that IKEA shelf (which I can't wait to get rid of). I used the mirror I'd found in Germany again but this time I opened the little shutters.

I also kept my little fence in the back because I like the color of the wood, it looks a bit old and has a beach feel to it, in my opinion.

It was hard to find something yellow that I liked so I just bought some cute tiny daffodils and glued them to a few branches.

I used two Jane Austin books here that were just the right color for my decor. I added some chicken wire to a frame after removing the glass and used a clothe pin to attach a picture to the chicken wire. The wagon wheel in the back was a thrift store find which I mentioned in an earlier post which I cleaned up and painted. Hope you enjoy!