- All right, today is, today
we do something about this. This ironing board has
served me faithfully for many years and she's very lovely but the space underneath
really has become a catchall for anything and everything, particularly things that I don't have a
dedicated home for elsewhere. So I think it's time
that we make this more of a usable space under here and give some of these things a home. You might be telling me, well why don't you just get rid of some things? No, we're not gonna do that. We are going to add more things and organize the things we have. That is what I wanna do. So fortunately, we had a neighbor who was getting rid of
things, she's moving away and I scored a lovely little dresser thing that is almost exactly the same dimensions as the top of the ironing board here. So we are gonna take that, some old boards from back when we were
traveling across the country and had a temporary like
platform thing in the van. We have some pieces of that and then I've got some
bedding that used to be in like a friend's attic like uncle's garage attic or something. It was covered in spiders,
but like on the outside of the bag I got rid of
the bag, kept the bedding which seems to be spider free. I think we're good. So I'm gonna take these and combine them all into a
very fancy ironing station. First off, we're going to
start with the dresser. It has clearly been very very well loved by the
family that had it before but this isn't quite my taste. So we are going to go ahead and sand it back down to
remove most of the paint. I'm not gonna worry about getting it all the
way down to bare wood. This is thin enough that I don't know that it would withstand that process, but we can at least get
most of the paint gone and that'll gimme a chance
to fix up any of the corners and things that need a
little bit of attention and love and then we can
go about repainting it. I'll give you one guess as to what color. Fortunately, we have an orbital sander so that should make this a fairly quick and painless process. Fingers crossed. Before I do that I should probably remove all
of these lovely little handles. Unfortunately, we are missing four of them so I think I'm also gonna
have to replace them with something else. Or at the very least I'll have
to replace these bottom ones. And if I'm doing some,
I might as well do all unless I can happen to
find an exact match. So I've been sanding away and I'm sanding more than
I necessarily meant to because the black paint
is such a weird sort of gummy sticky paint as I'm sanding it. It just, it's creating such
an incredibly uneven surface. It's definitely more
even than when I started but I keep finding myself
really wanting to get rid of the black paint just because it keeps making such little hills like sticking to itself and making bumps. So I might end up removing more of the black than I originally attended. Now while the sander
wasn't quite working out for me very well with this,
a top layer of black paint I did wanna try another trick I saw online of using a heat gun to kind
of soften the way the paint and then scrape it down. I already tested out
this bottom section here and it's not perfect but I do think it is
better than the sander. So I'm going to continue
playing with that. I really wanna avoid using the
like chemical stripper stuff. We're gonna try to stick
with the mechanical methods if we can. The paint removal process
is coming along swimmingly. I feel like as I do more and more of it, the better I get at
figuring out the techniques to make it go faster which is excellent. That's actually why I started
with the top by the way. Eventually, there's gonna be
an ironing board on there. So even though I'm going
to clear off the old paint and repaint it with a new paint, I still wanted to do that first, because that's a good test zone, you know what I mean? Now. (machine whirling)' What was I saying? Unfortunately we have a hit upon our first repair need
situation, which is this, this guy under here. This is the very bottom. And what I think I'm gonna
do is toss down some glue and do some clamping maybe some nails shot in
to help reinforce that. But I think that I'm kind
of done sanding for the day. Let's do some repair stuff and then come back to sanding tomorrow. I think I am just about done getting paint off of the body of the dresser here. It's definitely not 100% gone, but I'm hitting about my
level of like, you know what? It's good enough, we're fine. So that's what we've got. At the very least, I
think that any new paint I get on there should
stick pretty dang well. Although I'm gonna need to give this a really mighty de dusting. It's going pretty well. It's been kind of fun
switching back and forth between the round sander
and using the heat gun and using the different
pokey, scrappy tools kind of depending on what area I'm on and it's been an adventure but I think I'm just about
done with that on this. And all I've got left is saying hello to all the spiders that keep visiting me and finishing off the dresser
fronts, the drawer parts. So I only did one layer of primer. I saw some stuff saying
I should maybe do two but I don't feel like it. So we're not doing that. We're doing gonna do
one and it'll be fine. We are now primed and it's
been drawing for 24 hours. I gave it a really quick
sand just to help rough up the surface a smidgen. And then we are going to paint on our vaguely this color red paint. All right, let's see what
this actually looks like. And we have kind of a burgundy
ish, not quite brick red but in that general
vicinity sort of color. I think this will do let's see what it looks
like on the actual drawer. Okay, it's kind of like
a deep burgundy ish red. There's definitely some kind of bluish tones in there
that's making it read as kind of a cool pink sort of color. Yeah, burgundy makes sense. I did end up needing to do
several layers of paint. It was way too sheer to just do one. Part of the reason is because I was trying to apply really thin, thin coats so that it wouldn't end up getting bulky in any
one particular spot. But that meant that I
needed to do several layers to build up to the right
opaque level of color I was hoping for. Once I had that all done and gave it a full 24 hour
to dry and set completely, I added the different
handles both to the top ones that have these single point drawer pulls as well as the bottoms
that have the pair poles. And now we are ready for the topper. This is the portion
that I'm going to cover in several layers of bedding and some fabric and it'll be
the actual ironing surface. So I've placed it down. I added a couple of clamps
to help really keep it in place while I get
some drill holes started. 'Cause I have these kind of
bolt and nut connector bits that I'm hoping will do a
pretty good job of making sure that it can hold onto the
board and grab it down on but also make it removable
later because I've read that the bedding after a couple
years can get a little eh, and you need to either replace it or add on additional layers. So I'm hoping that this will work as a good, sturdy, but removable solution. Now one thing is that
unfortunately the board is just a smidgen short of the edge. But I'm hoping that with enough layers of
bedding on top of this it won't read as shorter
than the end here. But eh, I didn't wanna go ahead and buy a whole new board
when this one is so close to being the right size,
it'll just have to do, it's the same size on this end and on that end over there. To cover the topper layer, I laid out several layers of bedding one after another
smoothing each as I went. And then I secured the first edge just by kind of gently pulling it over and using my air powered staple gun here to staple a bunch of that edge in place. Not worrying too much
about pulling it tight yet since there's nothing to pull against yet. But once we've done this first edge and we go to the opposite end now we can try and pull this nice and taut before stapling
that whole edge down. Once that's secure, I
cut off all the excess and then got to work on the
sides, which I needed to try and make sure I didn't
pull too hard either here just kind of gently back and forth making sure
that it's relatively taut without pulling things
completely outta whack. We have a manual staple gun too but I will say the air powered
one is so much nicer to use. Once I had the whole edge secured down at least one staple
every inch, if not more I was ready to do a solid
trim all the way around including kind of fussing with the corners to get them
to lie as smooth as possible since there's kind of double
the material at those points. Then for the actual cover fabric, I went for this kind of sagey
green wool fabric I had. It's got a nice strong dense weave and I feel like we'll make a good cover that should last a few years. The table's gonna go down right where I had all those
holes drilled earlier and then I push the bolts
up through the bottom into the board and I'm just
ratcheting them into place. This is so neat how it kind of
sucks the board down into it. I would say that the bolt
idea worked perfectly. It is nice and held on
there nice and stable and I don't think I have
any worries about it, shifting around and it's very, very easy to take it right back off and put a new cover if
this one gets really gross or old or if the padding underneath which I put, I think nine layers total of very, very thin cotton bedding on here I used up not quite but almost all of that
roll that I showed before. So this should I think
last me a good long time but it's even though it's a lot of layers they're so thin that it doesn't
have a huge amount of loft which I think is good. Like it's just enough
squish, but little enough that I still think
it'll be easy to iron on which I suppose is our
next step here is to see whether or not it does in fact
iron well, I hope it does. It would be a very big
bummer if it didn't. I have just the thing to
give it that very first test. Courtesy of the sponsor of
today's video, Thred Up. I specifically ordered
a whole bunch of linen because as you may know, is wrinkly AF, Thred Up is an online thrift store where you can give secondhand
clothing a second chance and I love it particularly
because you can search for the specific fiber
that you're interested in. In the winter, I love to get wool items and then in the summer
linen is just fantastic. It's been so hot lately so this is gonna be
really really nice to wear and look at that embroidery. Gosh, I think our iron
is prepped and ready so let's get to ironing. I feel like linen, one of the things that is kind of notorious
about it that a lot of people don't love is the
fact that it's a wrinkly fabric. That's what it does. It loves to wrinkle. I feel like most of
the time I don't bother with ironing it 'cause
I don't feel like it and I like the wrinkling look
is kind of nice sometimes but sometimes you do wanna get it nice and smooth and my old ironing
board wasn't very stable. It didn't wanna stay up very nicely. So I am so excited that this one is going
to not move on me at all. I am more excited for ironing
than I think I should be. I'm sure that once I've
ironed a bunch of things the novelty will wear off. I think this might be my
favorite of the new bunch. This is a Hope and Harlow
original estimated price of 127 but I got it for about 37 and it's so cute although I think a close
second would be that kind of orangeish shirt from Uniqlo. I think it was originally estimated at 51 and I got it for about 28, 29. I don't wear a lot of pants but I've been seeing a lot of these kind of looser sort of capri summer
styles that look very comfy and I know that I'm gonna
be doing a lot of squatting and kneeling in the dirt
this summer for my gardening. So I figured some pants
might be a good move both by themselves and under dresses. I love layering, I love
layering shirts under dresses. I love laying dresses under dresses. I think it's all a very good look and also pants under dresses. Why not? Although I do feel a little
bit like a hobbit about to go on an adventure when I wear the pants and kinda looser shirts. But it's a good vibe. It's a good summer vibe. I think it's so cool how
different linen can feel like the white embroidered
shirt is very crisp and smooth in that fresh, linen way versus the orange pants
that have clearly been worn and washed a bunch and are
super like buttery soft. It's really neat seeing the kind of differences in linen. This video isn't about linen the sponsorship isn't even about linen. If you want to dress up as a little hobbit going
about your gardening business or perhaps a District 12 person, then you should check out
my Thred Up link down below. They've put together a page so that you can see what I got
and shop for similar items. They have a better than
usual discount code right now of 40% off your first
purchase rather than just 30. Go check that out. I hope you guys find just
what you're looking for and also enjoy the lovely
cool properties of linen. Speaking of the linen, it did iron so beautifully
on the new ironing board. I am kind of in love with this thing. I've been wanting to do
something like this for years but I just kind of kept waiting for honestly the right
furniture to come along. And also just the, all right I should finally do it,
kind of energy to come up. So I'm glad we are here, it is lovely. It was kind of fun trying to decide what topping fabric to use,
because I thought about red but it's too much red. I thought about black but the only black fabric I
have right now is very staticky. I swear like bits of fluffs
just immediately stick to it every time I look at it. So I was like, I don't wanna iron on that. And then this nice kind of sagey green one I
think is a really good mix of it should hide my messy
bit of fluff tendencies and I think it really
nicely goes with the red and green that's all over
the rest of this room. So I'm very pleased. I think that this is the very lovely fancy new ironing unit that
I was hoping it would be. I did consider doing a bunch of fun, cute designs on the front but I have another project going right now that is a lot of detailed
paint work, so I decided that this should be just nice and simple. The other thing I could do is
like maybe a nicer iron setup like a gravity fed, fancy
industrial type iron. But I think that as long as
this guy continues to work, eh, I'll probably just keep using this. Maybe if it dies someday, I'll upgrade. But otherwise the ironing board portion,
very upgraded, very lovely. I'm a big fan. And the nice thing about this is that I feel like it's
something pretty easy to do like to DIY yourself at home. Like I wanted a very specific
kind of size profile. But if you're less picky about that you don't mind it being a
little bit more narrow or wide or long or tall or
short, whatever you want. Then find a piece of furniture
that you think will work from any thrift store or your parents' basement
maybe, and toss a board and wrap it in a bunch of fluff. And I like it. I'm a big fan. If you do end up making a
lovely ironing table station of your own, let me know
because I wanna check it out. I wanna see what kind of
cool stuff you guys make. You should tag me in whatever
your social media platform of choice is so that I can
see your cool, cool tables. And you should also order from Thred Up using my link down below to get
some lovely cool linen items such as the style I got and get 40% off that first order. All right, I hope you guys
have a wonderful, lovely day and have a very lovely summer.
