Claiming Reclaimed Wood

Weathered wood. Barn wood. Reclaimed wood. It's beautiful no matter what you call it. 

I found the sides of an old, red grain truck in a friend's barn and quickly claimed the reclaimed wood!

Heavy. Oh, my, they were heavy but Juan Hauls-It-All helped me lug them home. My idea was to turn this room...

...into this room...

So I separated the boards, scrubbed them clean of dirt and bugs, and started planning the best way to use the limited supply of long boards.

The wall is 13 feet across with windows five and a half feet apart. The boards were 16 feel long. To make the boards go as far as possible with the smallest amount of seaming, I decided to rip some boards that were in almost unusable condition and use them to trim around the window. The trim work cut the between window width to five feet exactly, letting me get three boards from each 16 foot board.

To help wedge together the tongue and groove boards Juan showed me how to use a small jack and a long board. Every time I put a new board up, I also had to chop off five inches of the long board. I ended up with a very short board!

With that system in place, it was just a matter of working down the wall until I got under the windows. At that point I started working up from the bottom. I knew I would have to piece together one row of board and I didn't want it to be the bottom one. A whole board would make the bottom edge even and make working on the electrical boxes easier.

 

At Lowe's they sell a little blue see-through box called an outlet extension for a whole $1.39.

As its name implies, the box extends the original outlet box to make the outlet cover flush with the new wall surface. BE SURE TO TURN OFF THE ELECTRICITY AT THE FUSE BOX (or whatever they call those boxes nowadays) BEFORE PUTTING IN THESE EXTENDERS!  I figure if you're handy enough to be redoing wall surfaces, you'll easily be able to add these extenders!

Perfect is good enough!

Saddle up...

...up on the wall, that is.

This championship saddle was found at - where else - a garage sale. It was their grandpa's and they were tired of hauling it from house to house with every move they made. They had long ago cut the stirrups off for easier storage.

I saw a saddle mounted like this in a sales brochure once. They wanted well over a thousand dollars for it. For fifteen dollars I knew I had to try duplicating it. I burned out the motor of my jig saw and broke two jig blades and three hacksaw blades, but I finally had two separate pieces of saddle. I felt like a doctor just out of surgery.

Then I lined a frame with barnwood, built a shelf and covered it with burlap and the green saddle blanket, then screwed the saddle from the back onto the barnwood. The saddle was then lined with old rope to cover defects, and we hung our 3-D piece among other works of art behind the couch.

This piece is great for a western house. My challenge to you is to think of other things that can be cut in two and mounted in a frame for 3-D art.

Linked Up to Funky Junk Interiors.

(cont'd) The Landlady home:
Window treatments and
miscellaneous, darling details

I don't think I need to use words here. Just feast your eyes on these photos!



















Hope you enjoyed the tour. I know I did!

A whispering
friend

Snailmail brings us
Bills and junk,
Letters not so much,
And surprises very rarely.

But yesterday
A pale envelope
Whispered friendship
And delivered beauty.

I treasure both,
WhisperWoman.

Thank you.

Tweakin' a treasure!

Sometimes a garage sale find needs a little fine-tuning to fit into your decor. Take this rustic mirror I stole bought for only $2.00.

I liked the frame (barn wood is always good for me) but the shape was a little too cathedral for my taste.


So I turned the whole thing upside down...

...and added a set of deer horns that some dear had donated to my collection!

His distant cousin, a real turkey, volunteered the feather that hides a screw.

Hop over to Jen's Sanctuary Arts at Home Blog! She's hostessing her monthly make-over party today! The ideas at her place just keep on coming!

Curb-side crime!

Drive by junking, trash picking, dumpster diving − whatever you want to call it − doesn’t always work for me.

A couple of years ago I was garage sale-ing with my friend Joan when I found a bonanza of old lumber by a curb. It wasn’t discarded used privacy fencing. This lumber was the good stuff, old and weathered, time-worn and wonderful, big ol’ wide boards!

Some man was working through the pile and I asked him if I could pick some up. “Sure. Take all you want,” he said, so I hustled home, got IT Guy’s truck, and hurried back.

No man was around by that time but I donned my work gloves and started loading. I’d gotten the pickup halfway loaded when this woman tears out of the house yelling, “What are you doing?”

Long story short she let me take one load of lumber. She probably felt sorry for me because I was all red faced and teary eyed from getting caught stealing!

This cabinet is one of the pieces I made with the stolen boards. These pictures are my dusting photos. It's really embarrassing when one has to have photographs of one's junk in order to dust the shelves and put the crap things back where they belong.

Dusting photos sure make life simpler!

Shop at home!


UPDATE: Several of you have asked me what gnarly object I hung up in the second photo. It is not a dried up pelt. It is a lovely piece of driftwood captured at the Brazos River. You may continue reading while I improve my photography skills!

I learned a new term yesterday while visiting links at Sanctuary Art's Make-Over party. The term is "shop at home!" It means to see things you already have in a different light or with a new twist.

So yesterday when I was looking for some of this...



...to hang this...

...with this grouping...

...I found this!

Which thing in this mess in the shop am I speaking of?

This! It's a great old electric fence wire spool. It's been in our shop for years, after being in our barn for many more years.

It now sits on the counter of our guest bathroom and I love it.

I shopped at home!

Decorating with vintage advertising!

This cowboy's for you, Jamie!

This great piece of vintage advertising on denim is 13 feet long and 3 feet high. It just fits the wall in the hall leading to our guest bedrooms.

Someone used it as a paint cloth once upon a time but it's still a wonderful piece. I've had it for years but up to now I've been storing it at Renee's house.


Renee, of course, had not a clue it was mine and it took over a year for me to convince her of the fact. She has a horse painting that's mine too but there again, she thinks it's really hers, poor delusional woman.


Across the hall from the Lee Riders piece is an old mirrored door (remember those) that someone put into a homemade frame way before I bought it at an estate auction thirty years ago. The shelf currently holds a chalk painting of my youngest son that I did an eon ago.


The boxes I just seem to accumulate. I have a deep, inner need to stack.

Please tell my husband in the comment section that I need the carpeting in the whole house replaced with tile similar to the picture below.


Thank you very much. I'll do the some for you same day.

Terlet Talkin'

I cleaned the master bathroom today before work. A good cleaning, not one of those declutter and spit ones, you know, where after you pick up all the old newspapers, empty shampoo bottles, and old beer cans, you spit on a toothpaste splatter on the mirror and rub it off with your elbow.

Anyway, it’s my bathroom and if that’s how I want to clean it, it’s OK with me. Who else is gonna use it besides me and ol’ point and shoot himself? (And I’m talking about your new gun here, dear.) ;)

Anyway, I was scrubbing the terlet and wondering how many different terlets I had scrubbed in my lifetime, in how many different houses, in how many different towns and states, and how many times I had scrubbed each terlet, added together for a total number of…what? I don’t know but as the old saying goes, “If I had a nickel…!” Personally, I think I’d be a zillionaire!

Anyway, my sink drain was looking a little peaked, so I took the wire terlet scrubber to it and that made me wonder how long germs stay alive on such things. Would last scrubbing’s germs have died out by now? Dried out from lack of moisture? Come back to life after rehydration? That kind of bothered me so I took one of the toothbrushes my dentist gives me and starting using that on the drain. I don’t use those toothbrushes on my teeth but I make sure I get one each and every time I visit my dentist. They are so good for things like this.

Anyway, I use an electric toothbrush on my pearly yellows. The dentist doesn’t read my blog so I’m not cutting off my supply here. He's up on dentistry but not so much on computers. But as I was scrubbing away at the built-up minerals on the drain (minerals, I said. Not dirt!), I noticed engraving I’d never seen before. Of course, that made me scrub harder with the toothbrush but not much happened so I went back to the wire terlet scrubber which I’m sure was by then germ free after the air had sanitized it and I scrubbed again until all the words were clear, although rather dull looking.

It stated, “Do not use harsh chemicals or wire terlet scrubbers on this drain.”

Anyway, what I want to know is should I scrub IT Guy’s sink drain with the wire terlet scrubber too so both sinks look alike? Please hurry with your answer. IT Guy gets home at 5:20.

My Favorite Thing Party! Come join us! Ninety-third post and counting!

A picture of some of my favorite things:

I just had to join Thrifty Decor Chick's Favorite Thing Party,
courtesy of Jen at Sanctuary Arts at Home.
I have many favorite things
but this picture
shows
so
many
of them...
my love of home,
my love of garage sales,
my love of cowboy decorating.
The only thing it doesn't show is my love...

so here he is!