Spinning up some Craftiness

This week's Spin Assignment is Arts and Crafts.  Oh, boy, do I love Arts and Crafts.  The hard part was trying to figure out what to post about.  First I thought maybe I should post about the Custom Dolls I used to do regularly (and will do again when time and space permit) which were so much fun to do, especially when creating something unique like Martinique the Martini Fairy (yes, that is a giant-sized martini glass):

Or I could write about the various Halloween costumes I made so I could have a unique costume for partying with my friends...like the Little Red Riding Hood one, or the Judy Jetson one.  I made them without any patterns, just created them based on cartoon images.

  

Or I could write about the winemaking ventures, but I'm already doing that.

I like creating things.  I like looking at something and thinking to myself "I can do that..." and then do it.  One of my favorite accomplishments, however, is when we decided to tackle the remodel project we felt was necessary a few years ago because Princess Nagger was in potty-training mode and my father-in-law is elderly.  We needed some sort of bathroom on the first floor to eliminate the need for racing up a stairway to eliminate...particularly when in a hurry.

We had a brilliant idea to add a powder room to the first floor, but the quotes we got from local contractors were astronomical.  We decided to do it ourselves.  There was a closet just inside the back door that housed the washer and dryer, but it was too small to add a toilet and sink so we decided to take a sledgehammer to it and start from scratch.  The one end of the long living room went from this:

To this:

The 'crafty' part started with the bar - our friend Rob took some 200 year old barn timbers and with hubby's help, planed them down to a nice flat surface, then glued the 3 sections together into a nice bar top:

He and hubby built the sturdy frame for the bar top (even bolting one side down through the floor to one of the house beams in the basement for extra security), then bolted the top to the frame, finishing it off with more of the 200 year old beams and the wainscoting we found in the Summer House:

The corner shelving was created in stages - we started with an old corner cupboard frame we found in the Summer House, decided to use that as the 'source' of the shelving - mounted that to the wall first, then added wainscoting to finish out the back.  I cut triangular glass sections from an old storm window stored in the barn, and hubby added a great light fixture at the top.  We also had some vintage mirror trays that were given to us by friends that I mounted on the back of each shelf to give it more depth:

The sink for the corner shelves was created by using a great bowl that my sister Kimn helped pick out.  We cut a hole in the bottom of the bowl for a drain (we did buy 2 just in case we broke one with this experiment - amazingly we had no breakage!)  We found a great faucet at Lowe's that fit perfect in the corner, giving us hot and cold running water:

The wine glass rack was yet another collective creative brainstorm - we found an old wooden ladder in the barn that we cut into 2 sections for the main frame, bolted to the studs in the powder room wall, and used the chain from my pot rack to mount the suspended end from a beam in the ceiling.  We also found an old wooden loom in the Summer House that worked perfect for the glass 'slides' so we cut it into sections and mounted them to the ladder in a custom size for the glasses displayed:

We found some great hanging light fixtures to bring more light to the bar top, and I mounted the speakers to my stereo on the top ladder section.  I ran the wires into the wall before hanging the sheet rock and doing all the spackling and painting of the space.

It was one of the biggest projects I've done yet, so the next big one will be replacing the horrid yellow counter tops in the kitchen with tile and taking a sledgehammer to the stone facade above the cupboards and to the drop-ceiling in the kitchen to create more open storage space. 

Are you a crafty person or a do-it-yourselfer?  Join Jen's gang of crafters by heading over to Sprite's Keeper and spinning up some craftiness of your own - or live vicariously through the other crafty people's craftiness.