Author: Quandie

I recently saw the ad for this twin bed on Facebook Marketplace and I just knew I had to have it.  Just check out those curves …

My sister and I headed out on a gorgeously frosty day to pick it up.  The seller shared a bit about its history with us when we got there.  Apparently her grandmother purchased this bed when a hotel in St. Paul was selling off their old furniture.  Unfortunately, she didn’t know which hotel.  Later, the seller herself used it as her bed as a child.  Eventually it ended up in storage because no one had a use for it.  The seller was hoping that when her own kids grew up one of them would want to restore the bed, but no such luck.  None of them were interested.  So she decided there was no point in continuing to store it.  It should go to someone who would put it to use.

And that’s where I come in.  I’m not actually going to put it to use myself, but I am going to refurbish it so that someone else can put it to use.

I started out by giving it a light sanding, vacuuming away the dust and then giving it a good cleaning with some TSP substitute.  As I was wiping away the cleaner, the water was slightly tinted orange.  That’s always a clue that the stain is going to be one that bleeds through your paint.  So once again, out came the Dixie Belle BOSS.  Over the years I’ve learned that it’s just easier to be safe rather than sorry and go ahead and use BOSS when I even slightly suspect the stain will bleed.

So, everything got a coat of BOSS and I let that dry overnight.  The next day I added two coats of Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth.  Once that was dry, I sanded the edges lightly to distress, once again vacuumed away any dust, and then went over it with a clean microfiber cloth.  I followed that up with a top coat of Dixie Belle’s flat clear coat (and if you’re wondering, yes, I did add the clear coat before applying the transfer).

Have I mentioned yet how much I love that foot board?  The curve!  The scrolly legs!  The perfectly framed space for a transfer!

IOD’s Le Petit Rosier transfer was practically made for this bed.  It was just a tad long, so I cut about 4″ off the bottom that I’ll save for another day, but the width was perfect.

And the top section of the transfer looks gorgeous on the headboard.

I have to tell you guys, applying this particular transfer is not for the faint of heart.  Because each little letter is a separate piece you have to be sure that you’ve got each one rubbed on individually.  I really thought my arm was going to fall off after finishing that foot board.

But it was absolutely worth the effort.

The bed does have side rails and slats.  I really don’t have enough space in my house to get good photos of complete beds, but I gave it a shot so you could see the full effect of the bed put together.

This bed feels super sturdy to me once assembled.  I think having four feet on the foot board adds a lot of stability.

I think I’ve given this bed a totally fresh new look.

What do you think?

As always, thank you to Dixie Belle Paint for providing the BOSS, paint and clear coat used on this bed.  If any of you locals need a fabulous twin bed, check out my ‘available for local sale’ page for more details.

I promised you all a makeover of this armoire this week, and here it is!

I found this antique armoire at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and I fell in love with its potential.  It was in fairly rough shape.  The veneer was chipping off all over the place, one of the back legs was broken, the bottom was warped and coming apart, and the top was lifting off as well.

And here’s the inside.

It felt like this forlorn old armoire had been kicked to the curb.  It had been marked down at the Restore so I suspect that it had been there awhile because no one wanted to tackle a piece in such rough shape.  I just had to save it and give it a new life.

I started by getting Ken to come over for a consultation.  We came up with a two-step plan. First up was fixing the back leg and shoring up the bottom.  Ken added some new support pieces underneath the bottom.  He also repaired the back leg.  Meanwhile, I glued up a bunch of loose veneer and added some Dixie Belle Mud filler where needed.

The second part of our plan was to add shelves to the right side of the cupboard to make it more functional for storage.  I don’t think too many people really need an armoire with space for hanging clothes, shelves seem much more practical.

Now this piece is perfect for clothing.  You can keep your undies, socks, etc in the drawers and then stack your jeans, sweaters and t-shirts on the shelves.  I keep my clothing in a cupboard with shelves and I think it’s much easier to find things on the shelves rather than in a drawer.

As you can see, I painted the inside of the cupboard in Dixie Belle’s Apricot.  I thought it would be fun to have a pop of color on the inside.  At first I was a bit worried that this would make it too ‘girly’, but then I realized that the lines of this armoire were a bit girly anyway so why not go with it?

And if you’re going to go girly, you might as well go all the way and add a gorgeous floral transfer right?

This is just about 1/3 of the Wondrous Floral II transfer from re.design with prima.

By the way, I added two coats of Dixie Belle’s flat clear coat to the interior of the armoire.  I wanted those shelves to have some extra durability.

Since my plan included painting the exterior in a shade of white, I decided to hedge my bets and add a coat of Dixie Belle’s BOSS to the outside first.  BOSS will block stains, and that original exterior stain looked to me like it could be a bleeder.  I did not use BOSS on the inside because it did not have the same dark reddish color as the exterior.

It only took two coats of Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth to cover over the BOSS (and I used the clear version, not the white version).  It might be my imagination, but I always feel like the BOSS helps light colors cover better.

The Drop Cloth created a perfect neutral background for one of my old favorites, the Seeds transfer.

The front of this armoire definitely needed something to add a little interest.  Without the transfer it was just a large, flat, white space.  I finished the exterior with Dixie Belle’s Big Mama’s Butta.

If any of my newer followers are wondering about the dress form, I’ve shared it a few times here on the blog but here is the original post about how I decorated it.  I have to say, it remains one of my all time favorite projects.

I’ve suggested this armoire would be perfect for storing clothing, but really it would provide excellent storage in any number of settings.  It could hold spare bed linens, or you could use it in a large bathroom to hold extra towels and toiletries.  Of if you’re super fancy, you could use it to store your painting supplies in your workshop.

What would you store in this cupboard?

This is normally the part where I mention that this piece is for sale and that you can check out my ‘available for local sale’ page for more details, but this one is already spoken for.  One of my regular customers stopped by to pick up some other items and got a sneak peek at the armoire.  It will be perfect for her granddaughter’s room.  So yes indeed, I have given this formerly forlorn armoire a new life!

As always, thanks to Dixie Belle Paint Co for providing the products used in this makeover!

Way back in March I shared this bed …

I’d gotten it at a neighborhood garage sale, and it did not come with its side rails.  But the former owners assured me it was a twin sized bed and that they used it with a twin mattress, they had just misplaced the side rails.

So after giving it a makeover with some Dixie Belle paint in Sawmill Gravy and the Cosmic Roses transfer from re.design with prima, I sold it as a ‘twin bed’.  One of my regular customers purchased it, and then purchased some metal side rails to use with it.  But after monkeying around with it to get a twin mattress to fit, she determined that this was not a twin sized bed but rather a 3/4 bed.

Lesson learned:  always measure myself.

If you aren’t familiar, 3/4 beds are somewhere in between the size of a twin bed and the size of a full (or double) bed.  It’s a little bit difficult to find a 3/4 mattress, although they can be found online.  I imagine it would be equally difficult to find bedding, especially if you want a fitted sheet that actually fits.  Jumping through those hoops might be worth it for a really spectacular antique bed, but certainly not for this one.

You can buy side rail extender thingies to turn a 3/4 bed into a full sized bed, and that probably would have worked out OK here.  You end up with a few inches of mattress sticking out past the headboard on either side.  I’ve done something similar with the bed in our own principle bedroom, I’ve converted an antique full bed to fit a queen mattress.

You could also modify some side rails to fit a twin bed, thus leaving a few inches of head board sticking out from either side of your mattress.

In this case however, my customer wanted a twin bed.  And she also wanted to place it in a corner so both the headboard and the side of the bed would be up against a wall.  That meant that having a couple of extra inches of width to the headboard would have left a gap between the mattress and the wall.  Not a good plan for a small child’s room.  Can you just imagine how many things would get stuck between the bed and the wall (including the child)?

So, long story short, I took the bed back.

Then I considered my options.  Re-market it as a 3/4 bed modified to fit a full?  Or turn it into a bench.

I’d chosen not to turn it into a bench initially because the footboard was far too low to work for creating sides to the bench like in all of the previous benches that my handyman/neighbor Ken has made.  Usually he cuts the foot board in half and creates arm rest type sides, like in this example …

But then I thought perhaps we (and by ‘we’, I mean Ken) could make an ‘armless’ bench using just the headboard.  That would have been OK.  But I really wanted to incorporate the foot board somehow.  Then a lightbulb went off in my head.  Why not flip the foot board the other way around, so that the flat part was at the top and the curved part at the bottom.  And then use it as the front of the bench.

My first job was to convince Ken that this was do-able.  He always doubts his ability, while I always believe he can work miracles.

So I sent the foot board home with him to see what he could come up with.  Sure enough, he was able to remove the center section from the legs, flip it around and re-attach it to the legs at just the right height for a seat.

Ta da!  See?  I knew Ken could do it.

After flipping the foot board, Ken added his usual planked seat.

  Don’t ask me how he does that, he just works his magic and I get to see the completed piece when he’s done.

I was able to retain the Cosmic Roses transfer on the headboard.  I just had to touch up the existing paint in a few spots and also paint the new portions of the bench.  I decided to paint the back of the headboard this time around too.  You never know when someone is going to want to place a bench in a spot where the back is visible.

I decided to play up the floral motif of the transfer when staging the photos for this bench.  Plus, Christmas is over, it’s time to start thinking spring, right?!

I added an old wooden berry tote with some pots and some lavender.  Then I painted up a cupboard door sign in a very similar shade of green.  The paint on the tote is original, but the sign is painted in Dixie Belle’s Kudzu.  I sanded it well to distress the finish, then added a coat of clear wax followed by a coat of antiquing wax.  It’s not exactly the same color, but it’s close.

So, the 3/4 bed is now a bench.  And it’s available for sale if any of you local readers are interested.

If you ever come across a 3/4 bed and you just don’t want to deal with trying to fit a mattress to it, you could consider turning it into a bench.  And if you have a piece that isn’t working ‘as is’, considering flipping it!

As always, thanks to Dixie Belle Paint Co for providing the paint used on this bench, and to re.design with prima for providing the transfer.

This summer I picked up another kid-sized chair at the Lowry Hill & East Isles sales.

There it is on the right hand side of this photo …

My original plan was to paint it and put a Christmas stencil on it like the ones I did last year.  But as it turned out, the seat was a bit smaller on this one and I didn’t like the way any of the Christmas stencils fit on it.

Then I ordered some new stencils from an Etsy vendor called Wallcutz, including this one …

I purchased it for another project (which I’ll be sharing soon), but I realized that in addition to being quite adorable, it was also the perfect fit for the chair.

So this past weekend I pulled the chair out of the carriage house.

And one thing that struck me about it was that the finish was in pretty darn good shape.

Normally I would automatically paint a piece like this.  After all, painting furniture is what I do, right?  Also, my experience tells me that painted pieces almost always sell better than unpainted pieces.  At least historically.  That being said, I’m noticing that more and more people are returning to wood finishes instead of paint (which frankly is kind of a bummer for me).

So I thought I’d try a little experiment with this chair.  Rather than painting it, I decided to just add the stencil to the seat leaving the wood finish ‘as is’.  Well, sort of ‘as is’, I did sand the seat lightly to make sure the stencil paint would adhere well.

I used my method for adding a little bit of a shadow to the word ‘honey’.  Basically I stenciled just that word first using Dixie Belle’s Putty, then once dry, I moved the stencil just a hair up and to the right and then stenciled the entire design using DB’s Drop Cloth.

It’s such a simple thing, yet it adds so much depth to the stencil, don’t you think?

Once the paint was dry, I sanded lightly over the seat with 220 grit sand paper to smooth out the surface.  Then I added a coat of clear wax to the entire chair.

I staged my photos with a couple of tiny pieces of ironstone.

As someone who loves both miniature versions of things and ironstone, these are a couple of my favorite things.  Especially that little tureen, it’s only about 4″ tall.

So, now it remains to be seen.  Will this chair sell?  I’ll keep you posted on that.

Or maybe one of you local readers wants to snatch it up?  If so, be sure to check out my ‘available for local sale‘ page.

In the meantime, what do you think?  Do you prefer items that are painted?  Or do you think this chair works ‘as is’?