Piano Bar pt 8 - Antiquing and placement!

Hey Reader

The time has finally come to move the piano into it's home in my living room. It isn't quite done, there is still some fabricating to do, but that can all be done and applied to the piano later, and I am interested in parking my car in my garage again. Let's get in to what I did!

This is where we last left the piano. The casters are in place, the piano is painted and it was time to move on to the next steps. Then a truck arrived with my childhood bedroom on it. My folks decided that I could store my own crap, and so I got 44 boxes of toys, clothes, textbooks, and other fun memories that distracted me from piano construction for a while.

The next step was antiquing. I never really thought of antiquing as being challenging, but I was having a bit of a hard time. Essentially, you water down brown (or any color you want, I suppose) paint. Then you rub it into the furniture, and immediately wipe it off. In theory, it will stick to the deepest crevices and give an antique patina to the piece. I definitely watered it down too much at first, and was wiping away too thoroughly. It takes a special hand, but once you get it it goes pretty fast.

I also measured the space inside and asked a very kind gentleman at Home Depot to cut me a sheet of wainscoting. I learned a valuable lesson here. One that everyone should know long before cutting things, and that I knew. Now I have learned it again. That lesson: Measure twice, cut once. My sheet of wainscoting was a full 5 inches too long to fit because I had transposed some numbers. I managed to fake it with a hand saw, confident that the edges will be hidden away so they can be a little rough. You would never know to look at it now. I am sort of glad it happened, because it meant that the bigger sheet of wainscoting would go in the middle, and the shorter parts would go on either side. It just feels more balances, even if no one will ever be able to tell.

I settled on a contrasting cream color for the decorative front board and the wainscoting. It took a fair number of coats to get good coverage. I wanted to antique this as well, but was running out of brown paint. I figured out how to stretch it just a little bit further, by adding water to the far of paint and getting any paint that was stuck to the sides. If that seems like a desperate way to save paint, you are right. I did this at 11pm and there was no place I could go to get more at that hour.

I kept spilling it and found myself treating that paint like it was Texas Tea, black gold... I am talking about oil. Well, actually I am not, I am talking about paint.

How did that even happen just now. Anyway, after taking a dip in my cement pond, I was able to assemble the piano and push it into the living room.

Much like the caster experience. I learned nothing and decided to push it into the house by myself. I got it up over the step from my garage to the main house and realized I could not pull it in anymore. I also couldn't get into my garage anymore. After climbing over the piano a few times, and cleverly using side doors, I was able to get it in place.

As you can see, I staged it with some stuff I had already, but there will definitely be more construction and tweaking to this project in the future. In the meantime, I can't stop looking at it. It is absolutely my favorite thing about my living room right now.

I can't wait for people to come over and see how cool it looks!

 I could stare at it all day, but I need to think about my next projects.

Keep making cool stuff,
Until next time,
JoshPrime