If you know my husband, and yes, I know I have wrote that statement before, but if you do, you know he has some awesome ideas. The problem is, he usually thinks he is the inventor of the idea, like it is something that has never been done before or seen before; a true original. Now, some of the time it is something that he has come up with on his own, and others have as well. Sometimes though, he see's something, thinks oh, I really like that, take that idea, run with it and build on it, and then forget he saw it somewhere before. Well, I think that is the case in my barrel. Remember, I told you I was an avid pinner from Pinterest, and that when we started into this process, I made up a board for all my ideas and thoughts. Well one day I saw this and pinned it.
I adored this idea, and I pinned other variations of this on my board. I can remember Dan seeing this and he said "Oh wow that is really cool."
Until we got into the build process that was about the last of it. But then we started building and planning, and we both loved the thought of it in our powder room. A room that would not get a lot of humid steam from showers and tubs. So it was decided that is what we would do. So all for months while we were in the planning and beginning building process, we would be looking at Craigslist and their were literally tons of them around here. Then it became time for us to look to actually buy one, and Nothing. The ones we did find were several hundreds of dollars, not exactly what we wanted, AND sometimes several states away, and shipping costs were going to be tough.
So, I put several people on the prayer warpath. I was really starting to think about what we might need to do if we could not find what we wanted, and Dan was as well. We did not want to give up on our idea for this room, but....... One day, in my Craigslist and internet search I felt compelled to search under "Used Barrels" I had searched under everything under the sun, and nothing. So to Craigslist I went, put in used barrels, and I found the beauty above in the Amana Colony area, and they only wanted a little over $100.00 for it. Jean and Steve went to pick one of them up, the guy had a few to choose from. Dan wanted the darkest one, with the most rusts on the bands. They picked it out and it still had quite a bit of liquor in it, so they dumped it and brought it home.
Now this thing was a whiskey barrel, used for whiskey, Jack Daniels to be exact. But the people we got it from had used it to hold a brewed beer or something in it. Can I tell you, this was the smelliest thing we had ever smelled. So when we got it we washed it out, and then let it dry out, and it still was rank. We did a number of things with it, and then Jen had a thought to maybe just spray it with polyurethane on the inside. So Dan tried this one night. This worked. He sealed the outside and then started working on making it into a sink. I also had done some research on ways people had accomplished this. Dan made use of several ideas. Now, for the sink. We had found a hammered copper sink at Menards that we liked, but it had to fit the barrel. So after we got our barrel, we went back and checked out the dimensions. Our sink would JUST fit. Here is our barrel, with sink and faucet in the "dry fit" stage in the garage.
And here it is in the powder room.
We absolutely love it.
There were so many items that we were needing to use during the process of this build, that when we went to need them, and look for them, they were GONE. God has brought so many things to us through prayer. It has truly shown Dan and I that God is taking care of us, and that he is listening to us, and more importantly that he supplies things in his time, and not Dan's. Oh did I write that out loud, ah yah. Mr. Dan is one of those who want things to go on his schedule, and there have just been many times through this that God showed him, he was in control and not Dan.
With this sample of a picture, I am going to start a continuation of this blog, called Making it home. In this other blog, this will be more about how I decorate it, how I pull it together, and make it more than a house, but home. I am excited at this thought, because I am finally starting to get to the things I really love to do, CREATE!
You are so clever.
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