Even though the holidays are fast approaching, I couldn’t resist working on some of my current pet projects. Earlier in the month I had attempted to finish making the booths for my diner. Kath Dalmeny’s book says to affix the booth fabric to the backside of the seats and backs with double-sided tape. I’ve never used this type of tape, so I bought some and tried it out. At first, everything seemed to work out great with it. It held the fabric nicely to the foam core board, but then gravity or physics came into play and the tape wouldn’t hold the fabric in place for an indefinite period of time. I wasn’t sure if the double-sided tape was only supposed to hold the fabric in place until the backs and seat pieces were glued to the booths. Perhaps in the U.K. double-sided tape works better keeping things in place than on this side of the pond? This setback frustrated me, but instead of completely getting bummed out, I decided to think up another way to affix the fabric to back side of the foam core pieces.
I talked to my husband about my problems with the double-sided tape and he suggested using staples to hold it in place. This idea seemed like a possible solution, but I wanted to think about it thoroughly before going forward. I decided to work on other parts of the diner while I considered the staples solution.
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| Tile flooring paper |
Based on the directions it appeared that I would need to glue the booths and other furniture to the floor. This meant that I would need a floor to glue these items to. Years ago I had bought some great tile flooring paper at my favorite and now defunct miniatures store Once Upon A Time.
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| Floor pattern on top of mat board |
I had made a pattern for the floor awhile ago out of my usual contact paper and brown wrapping paper. I found a piece of mat board that I used as the base and cut this to the size of my floor pattern. The flooring paper I had was this wonderful design of red and light yellow squares and triangles with a border around it. I wanted to implement the border onto the diner’s floor.
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| Tile flooring paper glued to mat board base |
I decided to cut part of the flooring sheet to match up with the right-angled section of the floor’s pattern. I then cut away the border from the remainder of the sheet to glue down on top of the borderless sections of the part I had cut. The tricky part was the angled portion of the floor that would be in front of the door. The gluing went better than I had anticipated. Next was to cover with varnish. I didn’t have much glossy varnish left and wasn’t sure if a glossy floor would work for this project, so I used a matte varnish instead. The flooring paper had been glued to the mat board base and had dried thoroughly, but I had some minor bubbling of the paper. The areas where I had glued the border to the paper bubbled some too, but this I expected. After the first varnish coat dried, the bubbles had strangely disappeared just as they had surprisingly appeared in the first place. I painted on another varnish coat and some bubbles appeared again but this time they mainly stayed on the glued border pieces. Once the varnish dried, the bubbles disappeared again. Unfortunately my floor was also horribly warped by this time too. There was no way that I could glue it to the MDF base of my diner, so I weighted it down with books to try and flatten it out.
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| Tile floor with borders glued in place |
I waited a couple of days before lifting the weights off my floor and found that it wasn’t as curled, thankfully. I squeezed a bead of glue all over the unpainted part of the MDF where the floor would go and spread the glue into a thin layer with a plastic card. I placed the floor onto the glue, covered with waxed paper and then weighted it down with books.
While waiting for the glue to dry, I took another look at my diner to see what else I needed to deal with before gluing everything down. Since I would be gluing the furniture to the floor, I’d obviously need to have the walls glued to the base as well so that if necessary I could glue furniture pieces to the diner’s walls. I hadn’t painted the inside of the diner’s door yet. The mirror pieces were still attached to the wall with Scotch tape and the other door that I plan to install behind the counter needs to be made and glued in place.
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| Painting interior side of door |
I painted the inside of the door a nice brown color. While painting it I noticed a small area of the outside of the door that needed to be touched up. I went through my paints, but discovered that I had created a unique maroon color for the door’s exterior. This I mixed up and applied. I had tried to minimize paint on other parts of the interior by putting strips of masking tape around the front door, but this didn’t completely eliminate paint from getting in unwanted places. Clean up was quick and fairly easy by using a Q-tip and water on the affected areas. Once the paint was dry, I glued on doorknobs on the exterior and interior sides of the door.
Next on my list was to apply the silver cardboard to the edges of the counter and tables. However, I learned that the silver cardboard I had wasn’t long enough for me to cut into strips to be glued around the tables and counter. I found a larger size piece of cardboard from a cereal box that I used instead. I already had metallic silver model paint to use. Based on the warnings on the instructions, I opened windows and turned on my exhaust fan to try to lessen the fumes. The paint looked great, but I didn’t enjoy working with it because of the smell. The fumes weren’t so bad if you weren’t up next to the items painting them. The effect was definitely worth the fumes and having open windows in December. Perhaps if fumes are something that really bother you, work with this type of paint in the summer when it’s not so uncomfortable having windows open.
The next step was to glue decorative paper to the front side of the counter. Again, I spread a Tacky glue into a thin layer and then placed the piece of decorative paper that I’d cut to the approximate size onto the glue. Using a plastic card, I smoothed the paper down onto the glue-covered cardboard.
I removed the mirrors that I had taped to the walls of the diner. I plan to glue them to the walls later and hopefully can come up with a way to have the mirrors stretch across the entire length of the wall. The mirrors had been up so long that the tape left behind a sticky residue that I tried to remove with Q-tips dipped in water. This did remove some of the sticky residue, but also removed some of the paint as well. When the areas dried out, I painted over the affected areas and the wall looks pretty much back to normal.
I kept thinking about another remedy to the attaching the fabric to the backside of the booth backs and seats and never came up with any better idea than to use staples. My husband happened to have some small staples that he agreed to use for the project. I had measured the depth of the staple’s arms and knew that I would need to trim some length from the arms. I gathered everything I thought I would need and decided to work with just one of the booth seats to see how it worked out. I put on safety goggles, since you never know, and I’m not interested in getting small bits of metal stuck in my eye. I used the cutting part of a pair of needle nose pliers to trim a bit off the staple’s arms and then pressed it into the fabric and then into the foam core board. Surprisingly, I discovered that this was the solution to my problem.
After stapling all of the fabric to the back side of the booth seats and backs, I set up the booths with the counter in the diner and took photos to test out what the overall effect would be.
I worked on my project more over the Christmas holiday and will post about those happenings soon.
