#Furniture staining

[perspectivesusa]

[vintagehomecollection]

Lois E. Lugonjac, ASID, Lois Lugonja Interior Design

100 Designers' Favorite Rooms, 1994

[evan-collins90]

'Soft-Countriana' style bathroom designed by Anne Cooper (year unknown)

"A luxurious Victorian theme and mood are established with the romantic lavender hue in this delicate bathroom suite. The complex authentic trim and openwork are featured with gleaming white that contrasts against the soft lavender wall pattern. Brass fixtures shine like jewelry and every color detail has been carefully planned to increase the effect of this regenerating space."

Scanned from the book, 'The Kitchen & Bath Color Book' by Melanie & John Aves (1999)

[bleaksqueak]

Holy shit, this pack ended up bigger than I thought it would, and I still had so many assets I'd made for this set that I have extras that I can include later as a part 3 bonus pack. This month's big reward pack is my art nouveau room/class assets that I made for Soli. All of these are drawn by me and includes a lineart variant for the assets that I did lineart for (so, when available.) I did some color alts on the stain glass and pattern tiles special for patrons, and there's also two huge new full sized illustration files available for this month as well! Head over to the patreon and grab some goodies. All previous month's packs are still available, including tons of brushes and other transparent illustration assets! Solivaga Patreon - April Rewards

[gender-trash]

the post about fast fashion/sewing one’s own clothes blew up again… honestly the more i think about it the angrier i am about it. with both clothing and furniture we sort of live in a world where the market is being overtaken by disposable items made with cheap materials at the lowest possible labor cost. and like, not to diss ikea or anything — god knows they’ve supplied me with enough cheap bookshelves — but this is exactly why i ended up building my own desk.

my dad tells stories about his mom, who was very talented at sewing — it wasn’t her “day job” but in that part of rural iowa in the 60s she was the person you called if, say, you needed a wedding dress on next to no notice. (i’m also told she was excellent at baking pies, but that’s beside the point.) at that time and place, it was legitimately *cheaper* to make your own clothes than to buy them from the store. they would be made of much the same materials, except that you would substitute your own labor for that of whoever assembled the storebought garment.

today, the fabric to make a shirt will almost certainly cost you more than an equivalent department store shirt would. to say nothing of the cost of your time and labor. part of this is that people who sew their own clothes generally don’t want to waste their time on shit fabric, so fabric stores don’t sell quite the same grade of shreddable polyester. part of this is that our modern globalized supply chain has minimized both labor and materials costs as hard as it can, and this optimization has intertwined labor and materials sourcing a lot more than they apparently were in the 60s.

let’s turn back to the subject of furniture. the equivalent of the cheap polyester department-store shirt is the ikea desk. the desk surface is made of laminated particle-board, which is lighter and cheaper than actual wood; the desk is sold to you flat-pak, and you assemble it yourself, thus saving on labor costs. the laminate surface will probably delaminate after a few years’ use. also as with the cheap shirt, any damage is near-impossible to fix — you could sand and refinish a scuffed plywood surface, but there’s no sanding laminated particle-board. it’s also harder to modify to suit one’s needs — i can drill a neat hole for a monitor arm in my plywood desk much more easily than in a particle-board surface.

in both cases, what do you do if you want a slightly higher grade of item? well, obviously you’ll have to pay more money — but it’s difficult to be sure you’re really getting your money’s worth. you have to spend ages and ages comparison-shopping and reading reviews about how quality has really gone downhill since production moved to [new country]. often — especially with clothes — the thing that your money is actually paying for is Style, as separate from Substance. or good advertising. i’ve been halfheartedly in the market for a decent couch for some time, and i’ve noticed that nearly every apartment makeover video on youtube is sponsored by the same furniture website, which of course has provided a free couch — that the youtuber assures us is Really Good, For The Price. as soon as a manufacturer acquires a reputation for Quality, it is in their economic interest to sell out as hard and fast as they can and pocket the increased margin from selling crap at the price of quality until people notice. and in a world where most shopping has moved online, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re still in the actual-quality period. i’m not sure if there even *are* furniture stores around here at quality levels in between ikea and danish concepts (suggesting a market for a mid-tier scandinavian furniture purveyor, perhaps hailing from norway or finland).

because of the sort of person that i am, i tire rapidly of the endless comparison shopping. i don’t want to become a damn couch supply chain expert, i just want to retire the folding chair from my living room. it can’t be *that* hard to build a couch, can it? well, not if one is privileged enough to have the tools and time and space to do it in. i think most of the comments and tags on the fast fashion post are from people wishing they had one or more of the above to make their own clothes with. speaking from direct personal experience, a sewing machine is at least both cheaper and easier to find space for than a minimally equipped woodshop.

the other common piece of advice is to buy used, buy from a thrift store or an estate sale. unfortunately hunting down all your shit used also takes a lot of time and effort, and particularly in the case of furniture hauling the stuff home is a nontrivial logistical problem. again, money or more nebulous forms of privilege (the friend with the truck) are needed to smooth these roadblocks. and it’s really amazing that the solution to “i want an item that is not garbage” is “buy an item manufactured at a time when they were not yet garbage”. yes, of course, the less-durable instances won’t have survived the passage of time, but that’s only part of the effect. things genuinely used to be manufactured to a higher standard of quality. my sewing machine is from ebay; it’s the same model my *other* grandma had, a baseline singer consumer-grade machine. all its gears are metal, and it has a heavy-ass cast metal housing, too. the other household sewing machine is a modern singer consumer-grade machine and for all its fancy stitches it looks sort of like a doll’s toy — the plastic gears are going to break at some point, or the motor will burn out, and if it turns out that the motor on the modern edition is designed to be user-replaceable i will personally eat a hat. i suppose we also used to ask a lot more of our consumer-grade sewing machines, back when sewing one’s own clothes was a baseline household skill for everyone but Rich People, instead of a hobby that consumes more money than it saves you.

i don’t know if my post really has a conclusion. i’m just angry that we live in a fallen world full of miraculous technology and yet we have not solved the seemingly simple economic problem of exchanging a reasonable amount of money for a newly produced durable good that isn’t a complete piece of shit. i am a *robotics engineer*, for the love of fuck; i have a complicated, rare, well-compensated skillset. it cannot *possibly* be a comparative advantage for me to spend my time building a couch or sewing a shirt instead of paying someone to do it for me (ideally also, if i may ask for a miracle, someone who gets things like fair pay and healthcare and vacation time). why is this transaction so damn hard??

[jay-wasreblogging]

Everyone saying after the Reichenbach falls that Watson will go on a break, but what if he starts to document his grief and mourning?

[maximalismdaybyday]

Source

[sroiretni]

[ohhigh-imhi]

🩷🎀🌸⭐️💞 Barbie’s DreamHouse 💞🌸🦄🩷🎀🪄

//Source: Maximalist Design and Decor Group (Facebook)

Artist: Jonny Carmack

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Claysville, PA c.1880 pt.3

[perspectivesusa]

Complete Guide to Understanding Interior Wood Stains: Everything You Need to Know

Interior wood stain Lexington offers a comprehensive selection of high-quality wood stains to enhance the beauty and longevity of your wood projects. Whether you are looking to stain furniture, cabinetry, trim, or other interior wood surfaces, you can find a range of options in various colors and finishes that will bring out the natural grain and character of the wood. With expert advice and a variety of products available, interior wood stain Lexington helps you achieve a professional, polished look for all your wood projects.

[vintagehomecollection]

The Los Angeles House, 1995

[almostarts]

Juniper Shelf by Kenneth Cobonpue,

Natural or Dark Stain Oak

Sm: 50.5"W x 13"D x 84"H

Lg: 61.5"W x 13"D x 84"H

[laceratedlamiaceae]

Izzy is the kind of guy who would demand that you put a coaster down for everything and Ed is the kind of guy who wouldn't even notice the carefully stacked coasters on the side table until someone nagged him to use one and that's why their relationship is Like That

[binch-i-might-be]

I'm very tired so I'm gonna close my eyes for thirty minutes. I have to do stuff later tho don't let me fall asleep!!!!

[otherpeoplescreativity]

Photo descriptions in Alt text.

I decided to enrich my ttrpg enclosure by upgrading some organizational stuff.

I have owned these wooden boxes for years. They are great for tidying away minis or handout props, but within two weeks I stop seeing the boxes. That means I forget about their contents.

Maybe I can make the boxes stand out from the bookshelf a bit? Adorn with metaphors for the plot devices they should contain?

My first step on the little crate is to sand it down, at least around the edges. It's going back inside for tonight, because I cannot deal with the noise and smell of sawdust. Anyway, I want to install hinges on the lid so I can get rid of the nails.

Everything else needs at least a couple coats of this sparkly metallic blue stain. Except the coffee and lid -- those are for keeping me going.

I'm painting exclusively inside the cardboard box. Also they will stay in the box while they dry. I know that I will have spray, drips, and spills; I want to clean up easily, without damaging my home or the front garden.

.

Later:

I thought a single coat to most surfaces would take me about fifteen minutes. I stopped here for the evening because I had been standing for over an hour.

The little cube takes the stain well! I continue to roll low on my minimal Mechanical Skills stat. Cube looks surprisingly even. I can see my haphazard brush stroke technique on the rectangular box. That one may require three coats to get a pleasing result.

I used the old smartphone box to wipe excess paint off of the paintbrush because I have no idea if it could look nice. What the hey, I don't have that phone anyhow.