Guest Blogger! Time for a Husband's Point of View

Hello there everyone, this is Jenine's husband Brandon and I'm taking over the blog for today. As much as I'm ashamed to admit it, I look at quite a few furniture blogs too (I know I know, please don't tell my guy friends). The bloggers are always women and a lot of them are married, but their husbands are always a faceless, mythical creature that pops up every now and then as brief mention in a post, or maybe as a pair of hairy knuckles holding a circular saw in a tutorial picture. Not anymore. Now it's time for our voice to be heard.

You've probably heard the saying "behind every great man, there's a great woman", and now I'm going to go on-record as saying behind every great woman (blogger), there's a great man. Ok, so I guess that's not necessarily true, it would be totally possible to be a single woman and have a great furniture/craft/cooking blog, but I like to at least think I make it a little bit easier. I spend a lot of time on Craigslist looking for those slightly flawed $20 dressers that have amazing potential, or sitting at the computer at 6:59 PM on Thursday night so that Jenine's latest project can get a good linky party "spot" at Miss Mustard Seed, or proofreading blog posts and customer emails, not to mention the slightly manlier things like gluing and clamping furniture, filling old hardware holes and drilling new ones, and just generally using my huge muscles to move giant wooden things around the garage.

I can't speak for everyone, but I'm sure a good number of these beautiful furniture redos and revivals owe a good chunk of success to the poor neglected husband/boyfriend/dad. Well men, I know the hard work you're putting in behind the scenes and I'm here to recognize and applaud you for it. We know the women are the true talented, creative geniuses, but dangit, we do awesome helpful stuff every once in a while too.

Alright, so now let's get down to some projects. A couple of months ago, I was driving around the neighborhood the night before garbage day, and saw this cool table sitting on someone curb. I don't think any of us can pass up any free furniture that has even a glimmer of hope, so I scooped it up and brought it home.

It was missing the glass on top, and the legs were barely attached, but free is free. Well Jenine worked her magic and decided to make it a crazy flashy piece and spray painted it silver, then put me in charge of cutting some thin plywood to fit in the two places on top. Then she was going to cover them with textured wallpaper and paint that silver also, so that it would look like aluminum tiles. Well... it didn't quite work out that way. I spent some time gluing and screwing the legs onto the table to get it sturdy again, but then things went south. My jigsaw and I had trouble getting 2 pieces cut PERFECTLY to fit, then when the wallpaper was added, it was up too high above the rest of the tabletop, then we discovered that the wallpaper wasn't the most durable thing to use for a table top. So that wasn't going to work out, and everything else we thought of for the top either was too expensive or wasn't very plausible. Well... look at these awesome silver legs- we just couldn't let it all go to waste. (Yep, that's a dirty garage and a jerky gun)

So now it's on to plan B. We have a piano sitting in our living room that doesn't have a bench, so Jenine came up with the idea to use the cool legs from this and make a piano bench out of them... and I'm in charge of it. I have no idea what I'm doing, but stay tuned for a piano bench tutorial coming up soon!

This post seems to be getting a bit long now, so let's wrap it up. Our brother-in-law made this awesome faux-brick backsplash in our kitchen a little while ago...

And Jenine has been prodding me for a while to put the same brick around our fireplace, which right now has this hideous tile around it.

So sometime in the nearish future, I'll be ripping that tile out, making a template for the brick panel, then cutting and attaching it, and I'll be back to post that up as a tutorial for you also. Anyway, I'll be back soon, representing for the supportive men out there. Thanks for reading!

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