Author: Quandie

First things first, I drew five names at random from the comments left on Friday’s post and Susan, Cynthia, Wendy, Alison and Kim all won some samples of Miss Mustard Seed milk paint.  I sent emails to all five winners, I know I have multiple readers with those first names, so if you didn’t get an email, I’m sorry to say you didn’t win.

But, keep in mind that you can still order 3 samples from Carver Junk Co for $18 with free shipping (use the code MILKPAINT), so I hope some of you will order some samples and give it a try even if you didn’t win.

Now, on with today’s post!

A while back (when the grass was still green and there were leaves on the trees) I picked up another small washstand.

I’ve painted quite a few of these over the years.  They make awesome bedside tables.  Initially that was my plan for this one, so I didn’t even include the towel rack that came with it in my ‘before’ photo.

That turned out to be unfortunate because a picture is worth a thousand words, and it will be so much easier to explain this with a photo so I borrowed a picture of a similar piece from the world wide web.

Freakishly tiny photo, but it shows a towel bar at the back that is very similar to the one on my piece.

Usually I just discard these towel bars.  Much like mirrors on dressers, I feel like they hamper the versatility of the piece.  You wouldn’t really want that towel bar on your nightstand for example.

But then I had an idea for this piece.  I decided to make it into a coffee bar, and to turn the towel bar into a frame for a chalkboard.  I asked Ken to remove the round dowel that went across the top and replace it with a piece of bead board instead.

Then he cut a piece of hardboard for the chalkboard and I painted it with Rustoleum’s black chalkboard paint.

Initially I was just going to paint the entire piece, after all, here is what the top looked like when I brought it home.

It was in pretty rough shape.  But I love to pair a wood top with black paint, so I decided to try stripping it.  After all, if it didn’t work out I could always paint it later.

I stripped it, sanded it down and then waxed it with Miss Mustard Seed antiquing wax, and I’m so glad I did.  It’s not perfect, but I still love the way it turned out.

I painted the rest of the piece in two coats of Miss Mustard Seed’s Typewriter.  If you haven’t tried milk paint yet, I always recommend starting with the black.  It’s so, so easy to use.  It often covers in just one coat, and I probably could have gotten away with one here but I like my paint really opaque so I went with two.  I never have any trouble with the pigments dissolving with the black either.  Also, as you can see, it distresses beautifully leaving a gorgeous authentic looking aged finish.

And speaking of finish, I used Miss Mustard Seed hemp oil as my top coat over the black milk paint.  If you are new to milk paint, keep in mind that it’s the hemp oil that gives the black this rich, deep color.

I cleaned up the original hardware by just scrubbing it with some dish washing soap and then I put it back on.

To give it a little bit of an industrial vibe I added some chunky black wheels.  Somehow I thought it would be more functional to have a coffee bar that is easy to move around.  In hindsight, I’m not sure why I thought that.  For use at parties?  In case you want coffee in bed?  Well, they look cool and they do add a bit of height to the piece even if there isn’t really a need for them.

And in case you are wondering, yes, that is snow.  Just enough to be pretty in the morning, but mostly melted by the afternoon.

I drew the chalkboard using the method I shared in my tutorial last week.

This coffee bar is the perfect size for your Keurig and all of your coffee making supplies.

After all, coffee is always a good idea!

Please check my ‘available for local sale’ page for details if you are local and in need of a coffee bar!

I’ve mentioned once or twice before that Mr. Q and I like to go on Friday date nights.  Only our Friday date nights involve driving across town to pick up a piece of furniture.  We both really enjoy spending that time together.  But one evening last June I decided to invite my sister along for the ride.

We were driving all the way up to Cambridge, Minnesota to pick up a hutch that I had found on Craigslist.  Cambridge is about an hour north of me.  Normally I wouldn’t go that far for something, but it was a great deal on a lovely china cupboard.  Plus, it was a beautiful summer Saturday evening that was perfect for a drive.  The sellers told me they lived on Spectacle Lake and it was a beautiful area, so I immediately knew that my sister would enjoy coming along to see the scenery.

When we arrived at the appointed address we discovered that it was an old 40’s lakeside resort that is no longer functioning as a resort.  The sellers told us that they’ve been living in one of the old cabins as caretakers of the property, but now the property is being sold, the old cabins will be torn down and replaced with McMansion lake homes.  I’m always a bit bummed out by stories like these.  Those old cabins with their knotty pine walls and screen doors that make a slapping sound when they close have so much charm.

 I really wish I’d brought my camera so I could share some photos!  But I didn’t, so I’ll just borrow one from pinterest to set the atmosphere.

After taking a little tour of the vintage cabin, we loaded up the hutch and before we drove away we asked for a dinner recommendation.  The sellers recommended a local place that had fresh fish and a decent patio, so we stopped off and had a delicious dinner before heading home with this in the back of our truck.

That was way back in July.  So what happened between July and November?

Well, I started out planning to paint this piece grey.  I have a customer who had mentioned that she wishes she’d bought the French hutch that I had at my sale last year, and said if I ever found another like it she’d love to have it.  So my plan was to do a similar treatment on this one.

But that plan required being able to remove the fretwork behind the glass.  And well … you know what they say about the best laid plans.

First of all, I didn’t notice until I took a closer look at this piece that the two narrow sides don’t open.  Not the top glass ‘doors’, nor the bottom ‘doors’.  I guess you wouldn’t really call them ‘doors’ at all, they are just stationary panels.  So I couldn’t get to that fretwork from the front.  OK, so next I removed the back of the cupboard.  I figured I could then remove the shelves and easily get to the fretwork from the back.  Um, nope.  The shelves are firmly glued in place.

Then I asked Ken to come over to consult.  He strongly recommended that I find a way to live with leaving the fretwork in place.

I still didn’t want to let my initial vision for the piece go, so I went ahead and painted one coat of grey.  Then two months went by.  I kept procrastinating and feeling guilty for not finishing the hutch, but I couldn’t bring myself to work on it.  Finally I realized what the underlying cause of my procrastination was.  The grey just wasn’t working with the brown wood of the fretwork, and that was keeping me from finishing the job.

So I pulled out my Annie Sloan chalk paint in Coco, a much better color choice with the wood fretwork.  I added a coat of Coco over the gray and realized it was just what I needed.  Once the paint was dry I started to sand the piece to distress the edges and quickly realized that the undercoat of grey was showing wherever I sanded in a way I also didn’t like.

Ugh.  I’d have to add another coat of Coco.  Frustration kicked in yet again and another couple of weeks went by.

With winter weather looming, and a trip to Disney World coming up, I knew I needed to get my act together and get this piece finished.  It’s really too big to work on in the house.  Plus I wanted to use up some Annie Sloan wax that I had on hand and I won’t use that product indoors.

So a few weeks ago when the forecast called for sunny and a high of 75 I took a day off at the day job to just get this hutch finished!

I have to tell you guys, the entire time I was waxing this piece I was cursing my decision to use the chalk paint.  It would have been so much easier to just use Fusion’s Algonquin.  It’s very similar to the Coco and I wouldn’t have had to wax it.

What was I thinking?  I’ll tell you what I was thinking, I wanted to just use up the Annie Sloan products that I had on hand rather than go buy some Algonquin.  Such a foolish choice.  It would have been worth every penny to just buy a pint of Algonquin.

Well, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.  But now the labor is behind me and this hutch really turned out lovely.

I made a lot of decisions while working on this one.  The first was to stencil the inside back with a French poem.  Since I had the back off anyway, I figured I might as well go for it.  It was a simple detail to add before putting the back on again.

I painted the panel with two coats of the Coco, then stenciled it with an acrylic craft paint.  Once dry, I waxed it with Annie Sloan wax and then put it back on.  I think it adds a great little subtle detail even though it will be mostly hidden behind the contents of the cabinet.

I also added some ‘grain sack’ liners behind the glass on either side of the hutch.  These are just some strips of fabric that I stenciled with “1918”.  They are just tacked into place, so the future owner of the hutch can opt to remove them if they prefer.

I swapped out all of the knobs on this one for vintage brass knobs that I thought suited it better.

So, a mere 4 months later, this piece is finally done!

 It’s such a pretty china cupboard, perfect for displaying a non-collection of ironstone or possibly your grandmother’s china.  Or for a little less traditional look, it could be filled up with books.

This hutch is available for sale locally while it lasts.  If interested, be sure to check my ‘available for local sale’ page for more details.

Mr. Q and I picked up this petite secretary hutch a few weeks ago.  The gal we purchased it from said she got it from a friend who said that his grandfather made it.

It had a couple of flaws, but nothing major.  However, as you can see in the ‘before’ photo, one of the drawers fell apart as we were unloading it.  That was an easy fix that just needed some glue.

In addition, there were no stops in place to keep the drop down desk surface from falling back inside the piece when it was up.  The only way to keep that piece in place was to use the lock mechanism, which was rather tricky.  Ken solved that problem by just adding a small peg on either side.

When I first brought this piece home I had envisioned a fabulously chippy milk paint finish on it.  That didn’t quite work out.  I did start out painting it with a couple of coats of Homestead House milk paint in one of my favorite pale greys, Bedford.

However, when I came back out to the workshop the next day I saw that most of the paint had chipped off the fronts of the drawers and the front of the drop down desk.  The paint on the sides of the piece didn’t chip, but it looked really blotchy.  I had a feeling before I painted this one that I might end up with this problem.  You see there were spots on the sides where the previous finish was entirely worn away.  Those spots absorbed the milk paint quite differently than the spots that still had some finish on them.

I thought that maybe I could still work with the milk paint and just go really chippy and distressed, but in the end I knew I wouldn’t be happy with it.  So I wrote off the milk paint and switched to Fusion acrylic paint in the same color, Bedford.

First I vigorously sanded down the super chippy drawer fronts and drop down desk front.  If I hadn’t, the chippy texture of the milk paint would have shown.  Once I had those mostly smooth, I wiped them down and then added a coat of Fusion’s Bedford.  I didn’t sand the sides of the piece that hadn’t chipped, I just painted right over the milk paint.

It only took one coat of paint to get good coverage and to solve the blotchy problem on the sides.

I added another Iron Orchid Designs transfer to this piece.  I thought this design suited it perfectly.

I painted the inside of the hutch in Fusion’s Midnight Blue.  I thought this would be a great color if one has some ironstone that they want to display and they want to make it pop.

I also painted the inside of the desk in the same dark blue.

I had a heck of a time trying to get photos of this piece on a brilliantly sunny fall day.  The glass in the doors reflected everything.

I even resorted to moving the hutch inside, but I didn’t think those photos were any better.

Maybe outside was better after all.

Either way, I think the hutch itself definitely looks better painted.

Would you agree?