Back in January I came across a very neat looking old door in the basement of the Hundley House — the house where we are renting an apartment.  The neat looking door was just leaning against the wall in one of the many cold and lurky basement rooms of the house.  It was narrower than most normal doors — giving it a cool factor, it was solid oak and very heavy, it had a skeleton keyhole, and it is almost about 100 years old!!!  Some of you may already know this, but the Hundley House is one of the oldest homes in Carbondale, thus making it a historic site.  The home is an old brick mansion built in 1915 by Mayor J. C. Hundley and his wife Luella.  The inside of the house is split into three apartments.  If you are interested in the history of the house, look it up, because it is QUITE interesting (murder, suspense, etc.).

I decided that I wanted the door, but I knew it wasn’t mine to take.  I told Greg about my secret desire.  Greg said that I should prayerfully ask the landlord for it.  So, I prayed and asked God that if I should have this door, let the landlord say “yes”.  But if there was to be any reason that I should not have the door, let the landlord say “no”.

The next time I saw my landlord outside the house I asked him if I could have the door in his basement.  He looked at me with a quizzical expression and asked me why I would want a door.  I tell him my reason, he gives me more of that same quizzical look and says, “ok, well whatever floats your boat.”  So I got the door!

Greg did a thorough cleaning of the door.  And now, it hangs from our living room wall.  : )

Since temporarily migrating to Carbondale, Illinois, we’ve worked on several restoration projects.  To put it plainly, we love old things.  We love making old and random things usable while being creative in the process.  One of our first projects here was a small kitchenette table that would seat 2-4.

Now to give you a little history, before Greg quit his job last summer, he would bring boxes home from work for our big move from Baltimore.  One day he brought home a very large packaging tube made of very sturdy cardboard.  As soon as I saw it, my mind went racing with all the different things we could do with it.  In the end, we decided we would bring it with us to Carbondale and it would become our kitchen table there since we were SURE we wouldn’t be bringing our large farm house table for the short 10 month internship.  In order to make the table work, Greg would need to find a circular table top to place on top of the cardboard tube, and I needed to find random, but cool-looking eclectic chairs for the table.  All were accomplished within weeks of moving to Carbondale.

We found the table top at Lowe’s for pretty cheap ($24 at 50% off).  We also purchased 2 wobbly chairs from a local thrift store (4.99/piece), and 2 wobbly chairs from a local antique shop ($12/piece).  Our makeshift kitchen table and chairs were slowly coming together, but we still had lots to do to make them presentable and sustainable!  So we went to work.  We sanded the table top and stained it to the color we preferred.

Once the table top was completed, we worked on the chairs.  Greg, being the great restorer that he is (I think he gets it from his Father above), took apart the chairs piece by piece and put them back together with stronger nails.  Once they were pieced back together, he bound them with strong twine so that they could solidify before we used them as our dining chairs.

Reupholstered 2 of the chairs with neat fabrics because they were falling apart.  We also put fabric on the cardboard tubing.  The overall finished product looks like this.