Getting Creative - Lath Board Side Table

I was given this plain-looking faux wood side table one day at work and, not sure what I would do with it, brought it home. A few days later I had the idea to use some old Lath Boards I had laying around to give the table a new top.

So, one night while my wife Katie was away from home, my kids and I mixed a few paint colors with some water and spent about 30 minutes painting lath boards. We used green, blue and pink. When the boards dried, the blue and green were apparent, but the pink wound up looking white. It made for a great combination of colors!

My son David and I teamed up to glue and nail the boards to the top of the table. We then trimmed around all four edges and then I covered it with 4-5 coats of gloss polyurethane.

The next step was to wrap the edges of the tabletop with some hemp rope I had leftover from another project. This was Katie's idea. I had no good ideas for the edges, but on Katie's suggestion I glued and stapled the rope to the whole edge, so you could no longer see the faux wood veneer.

Finally, I painted, stained and sanded the legs to make them look a little weathered.

It was a fun and very easy project. It was also nice to find a use for the lath boards, which normally are sent directly to the trash can!

Getting Creative - Kitchen Coat Hooks

One of the things my wife Katie and I love to do is work on things in our house. In fact, we've spent almost the past two years remodeling the entire thing. Now that the remodeling projects are winding down, we've started focusing more on the smaller things - decorations, accessories, etc.

Since we spent so much time, and money, on the renovations, we're trying to find creative ways to put the finishing touches on our home. That means we have to get creative.

One creative thing we recently did was to re-purpose some old hooks we found in our basement to provide a good place for our kids (and us) to hang coats and sweatshirts. We mostly use the back door, which opens into the kitchen, so there were always piles of coats and shoes on the kitchen floor.

We took the old hooks off the basement wall, pulled apart the assembly they were mounted to and started cleaning them up. Once the paint was sanded off, we realized the hooks were really beautiful, old brass. We built a new frame to mount the frames in and finished it off with a decorative pattern that gives it a little character.

So now we have a set of 6 hooks (which each have multiple hooks on them) and the top of the frame is deep enough to rest some picture frames.

It was fun teaming up with Katie to creatively solve a problem and add a really unique finishing touch to our kitchen!