Projects on the Side

The railing before any cleaning.

Before I take and post the pictures of our new bathroom, I thought that I would show you a couple of side projects that I did.  One is the railing for the stairs and one is the extra storage for the pantry.

I knew what I wanted to do to clean the super gross railing that attaches to the wall leading upstairs; lemon oil.  I am in love with lemon oil. It cleans and shines and moisturizes wood. And it smells good!

Gross railing.

After I found the lemon oil, I had to find the umph to attack a really, really gross, dirty railing. I finally managed it today.

I intended to just squirt the lemon oil on my rag and wipe away.  That would work.  However, it was going to take the entire bottle of lemon oil and a big hunk of time to do it that way.

A quick trip into the house and a  Google search brought up some great ideas for cleaning a wood railing. I chose the one that involved baby wipes.

Why do I have baby wipes when the only child who lives at home is Swim Girl and she is 28? That's easy:  art.  I use a lot of baby wipes in the Bat Cave for art projects.  I mean, I didn't even have to make a run to the store.

The oily hunks of grime.

My wipes hadn't been used in a couple of months, so they were dried out.  A quick soaking in a bit of water revitalized them.  Ok.  Now you can start.

Wipe the dirty, gross railing with baby wipes. You should start to see the gunk kind of come up in oily hunks. Be sure and go over and over until you get up all of the grime.  It should loosen up fairly easily with just a touch of pressure.  You don't need to wreck your arm. Throw the wipes on the garage floor as you use them.  You can throw them away later. Yuck.

After the railing is cleaned up you can use the lemon oil.  Just squirt some into a clean cloth and wipe away.  Then with another clean cloth, wipe and buff.  You can repeat this step if you want.  If you have done a good job with the baby wipes, very little dirt will come off onto the oiled cloth.

The directions I checked also suggested using equal parts vinegar and water if the baby wipes didn't work completely.  I did not have to do that.

In progress

Finished

We have quite a bit of room in our pantry for some storage under the last shelf.  I looked all over for some sort of rolling storage that wasn't plastic.  No luck.  I finally decided to take matters into my own hands and make some rolling crates.

Yup.  Snack crate.

I purchased two wooden crates at JoAnn's for about $10 each. I have seen them at Michael's also. We have plenty of leftover paint from the remodel so I primed the crates and gave them two coats of paint.  I chose to use the same color that we put on the kitchen walls.

Let me tell you, this was a bit of a pain to do.  Each one of those slats has edges that need to be painted. Alaska Girl suggested that I use spray paint and I almost ran to the store to get some.  Then I remembered how much paint we have left and just sucked it up.

The wood was also pretty rough.  It really needed sanding, but I am lazy and didn't do it.  I tore up more than a few foam brushes painting the crates.  I suggest that if you use this type of crate that you set up in an area where you can just leave them and the paint.  You will be more likely to keep at it. It does take a while since you can only do so much at a time. I think the whole process took me a week to complete.  This includes a couple of non-painting days.

The casters

I then turned the project over to my husband.  I had purchased two packages of 4 casters to put on the bottoms.  I also bought the screws. I did not buy washers.  He had to make a washer run. Apparently, I also bought two different sizes of screws accidentally and I failed to take into account the fact that each caster needed four screws.  My turn for a hardware run.

There is plenty of room on the ends of the crates for identification.  I almost painted those with dry erase paint, but decided against it.  That stuff is expensive and once you open it you have to do all of your layers and then throw the rest out!  You cannot save it for later. Have fun!