Category: furniture.

It has been a busy, busy week here!  Two home tours on two different blogs and now to cap it off, a furniture makeover.  All to be followed by some serious napping time this weekend I think.

I’d forgotten just how long ago I picked up this pretty little dresser until I dug out the ‘before’ photos.

Hmmmm.  No leaves on the trees, brown grass and last year’s hydrangea blossoms still on the bush.  This had to have been April, if not earlier.

I’m not sure my ‘before’ photo captured it, but this dresser had a really ugly finish on it.  It looked like one of those ‘antiquing’ finishes.  You remember ‘antiquing’ from the 70’s, right?  It was weird.  All I know is that it had to go.

I followed my usual m.o.  I stripped the top and then waxed it.  I used Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax instead of a tinted wax.  I love the pale wood top, and I’m happy with leaving all of its imperfections as is.  My sister took a look at it and declared that she prefers when I stain and poly the tops.  That’s OK.  There are lots of different opinions out there, I’m just hoping that there are potential customers out there who like the rustic patina of this top as much as I do.

Next I painted the body in the Real Milk Paint Co. milk paint that Reclaiming Beautiful is now carrying.  This time I chose a color called Dragonfly.  Just for fun I snapped a ‘behind the scenes’ photo for you guys while the paint was still drying.

This is my preferred method of painting lower pieces like this one.  I find it difficult to sit on the floor for too long, or to bend over for too long, so I hoist the furniture up onto the horses and this way I can reach everything with ease.  It also makes it so much easier to paint the feet.  Sometimes I stand while painting and sometimes I use my painting stool.  It is far easier to sand and wax things at this height also.  And yes, I did finish this one with a coat of Miss Mustard Seed’s furniture wax.

Here is the finished dresser.

I am officially in love with this color and with the perfectly distressed finish I got using the Real Milk Paint Co. paint.

The Dragonfly is a gorgeous rich blue green.

By the way, those are my Endless Summer hydrangeas and that is the sum total of blossoms that were on it this year.  So sad.  And yes, the pink and the blue came from just the one bush.  I know that supposedly the acidity in the soil determines the color, but it seems odd to me that one bush has differing levels of acidity in different branches.  What do you think?

Anyway, I got plenty of chipping on this piece, which I think works perfectly with the age and style of it.

I discarded the knobs that came on the dresser.  I’m quite sure they weren’t original to the piece, they had a sort of tacky 70’s vibe.  These gorgeous glass knobs from D Lawless are much better suited.

I’ll be sharing a more in-depth tutorial on using the Real Milk Paint Co. paint on the Reclaiming Beautiful blog in a week or two.  It’s going to include a giveaway of some of the products I used.  However, the giveaway will only be open to those who can pick up the prize in person at their shop in Stillwater, so you locals might want to keep an eye out for that.  I apologize non-local readers, first you had to suffer through not being able to go to the barn sale, and now you miss out on a giveaway.  I’ll try to make it up to you down the road somehow.  But for you locals, if you don’t already follow me on the Reclaiming Beautiful blog, you should pop over there and do so (by clicking here).  If you follow by email you’ll get an email every time I post something new.  I promise you won’t be inundated with numerous emails since I only post over there 2 or 3 times a month and that way you’ll be sure not to miss the post.

Meanwhile, this lovely dresser is available to the first person that wants to snap it up.  For more details, check out my ‘available for local sale’ page (click on it just below my logo at the top of this page).

This dresser came to me from my friend Cecelia.

When Mr. Q picked it up, the top was separated from the bottom.  That was probably one of the easier fixes that Ken has had to deal with for me.  One of these days I have to write a blog post about the cool little tool that he uses for reattaching tops like this.  Next time he does that I’ll have to try and get some photos of the tool and the process.

The strange thing about this dresser is how discolored that middle drawer is, it really kind of jumps out at you.  I really don’t know what would cause this phenomenon.  If any of you have any ideas, I’m all ears.  IMHO, this ‘flaw’ made it a good candidate for a paint job and I love using milk paint on these old pieces. The shop in Stillwater where I occasionally sell my pieces, Reclaiming Beautiful, just started carrying a line of milk paint from The Real Milk Paint Co.

I picked out Peacock based on the sample sticks they have in the shop.  For me the hardest part of using a new brand of paint is getting to know the colors.  You can look at photos of the colors online all day long, and somehow the color always looks different in person.  The plus for me with Miss Mustard Seed milk paint is that I know exactly what all of her colors look like in real life.

But I also have to admit that I’m getting a little bored with the MMS colors.  It’s time for a change.

So after stripping and waxing the top of this dresser (with Cece Caldwell’s Aging Cream), I mixed up some Peacock.  It mixed up pretty much exactly like the MMS milk paint that I’m used to.  The only slight difference I’ll note is that it foamed up a little more than I’m used to.  The Real Milk Paint Co has a product called Anti-Foaming Agent that I’m going to try next time.  But I didn’t run into any trouble with the foaminess, I just let the paint settle a bit before I started working with it.

This color is deep, rich blue green that almost looks black in low light.  It leans a little more towards green on my piece than on others I’ve seen it used on.  I wonder if that is because there was a lot of red to the wood underneath.  Milk paint can be a little more transparent than other paints, so the color you are painting over can make a difference.

I also used hemp oil as my topcoat and that really changed up the color.  It brought out a lot more green, and darkened it up quite a bit as is typical of hemp oil.  By the way, the Real Milk Paint Co has a hemp oil in their line, but I used MMS hemp oil because I already had it on hand.

The hardware on this dresser is just stunning, isn’t it?

You can also see the green of the color a little better in that last photo.

I was hoping for more chippiness, but it eluded me once again.  Next time I’m going to try another product from this line called Chippy Paste.  Have any of you heard or it, or used it?  I’ll be sure to let you all know what I think of it when I try it.

I used an old copy of Moby Dick in staging this piece.

The colors on it worked perfectly with the Peacock.

Funny though, it wasn’t until I was editing the photos for this post that I noticed the sea horse motif on the cover.  See it? Isn’t that cool?

Have any of you tried the Real Milk Paint Co milk paint?  If so, let me know what you thought of it.  I’ll be trying out a few more of their colors soon.

As usual, please check my ‘available for local sale’ page for more details if you’re interested in purchasing this dresser.

Happy 4th of July!

And to all of my readers from other countries, happy Monday!

I’m probably sitting on a beach at the Jersey shore right now, but I scheduled this post in advance so you all wouldn’t miss me too much 😉

Earlier this summer I picked up a few kid-sized chairs at various garage sales.  I love painting these little chairs.  You can see others I’ve painted {here}, {here}, {here} and {here}.

Yep, I’ve painted lots of them and since I didn’t want to repeat myself I had to really give some thought to what I wanted to do with them.  I definitely wanted to go with milk paint for a chippy, aged look.  On the first chair, I started with Miss Mustard Seed’s Flow Blue.  I added an off-centered grain sack stripe in white using a stencil and some white acrylic craft paint.

For the second chair I pulled out Miss Mustard Seed’s Tricycle.  I didn’t want these chairs to match, but I wanted them to coordinate.  Red seemed like a good choice.  Once I had the chair painted, I gave some thought to what sort of embellishment to add.  I didn’t want to do the same stripe as the first chair.  So, I went with a Swiss flag look.

I used frog tape and just taped off the cross and painted it with Fusion’s Limestone.

Then, since I seemed to be on a roll with the blue and red, and since the 4th of July was coming up, I decided to paint the third chair in Miss Mustard’s Farmhouse White.  I also added a simple little stencil to the seat.

Which gave me a trio of chairs in red, white and blue!

Perfect for a 4th of July blog post.

I love the idea of hanging the chairs in a row on the wall to act as shelves.

You could keep your vintage American Government book on them.

Wouldn’t this book be fun to use as a 4th of July table decoration?

I took the chairs, the books, and even the little sailboat off to Reclaiming Beautiful a week or so ago.  Hopefully they will find new homes from there!

Recently I’ve been telling friends and family that I have placed a moratorium on bringing home any more furniture.  I don’t have a lot of space for storing pieces, so I have to be sending just as many out the door as I’m bringing in the door.  And somewhere along the line the balance got thrown off.  So for the last month or so I have been trying not to bring in any new pieces to work on until I get some of the ones that I already have finished.

But then I found an awesome desk at a garage sale for just $15.  How do you pass that up?

And then there was a bedroom set that my friend Meggan’s husband’s co-worker (or something like that) was selling.  Meggan had texted me about it a while back and I made an offer at the time.  Then I basically forgot about it.  So when they accepted my offer a few weeks later I felt like I should ignore the moratorium and bring the set home.  I figured I could squeeze them in somewhere.  So last week Mr. Q and I drove out to pick them up. The set includes a tall dresser, a dressing table and a full size bed.

I decided to start with the tall dresser.

There was nothing terribly wrong with this dresser, it just needed to be lightened up.

So I got out my Little Billy Goat paint in Momma’s Fridge, which is a lovely pale aqua blue.

I took just two coats to get good coverage.  I like to water the paint down a little for the second coat because it goes on a little more smoothly.

Once the paint was dry, I added a stencil to the top of the dresser to give it a little extra personality using white acrylic craft paint.

I finished with a coat of Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax.  Just so you know, you must seal Little Billy Goat’s paint with a top coat of some kind.  Otherwise water will take the paint off.  This is handy for distressing with a wet paper towel, but not so handy for daily use, so always seal pieces painted with Little Billy Goat.

The hardware that came with this dresser is so pretty.  I just added a little more gold to them using a Little Billy Goat Goat Stick in Gold Leaf.

If you haven’t tried one of these, they are really so easy to use.  Keep in mind that they are self-sealing, so you have to peel off the waxy coating, or rub the stick on paper until it comes off, each time you use it.  It’s really pretty slick and so much more user friendly than the rub ‘n buff (which I find dries out in the tube, and then you have to toss half of it away).  Here was my process for these drawer pulls; first I rubbed off the waxy coating on the stick, then I ran the stick lightly around the pull itself.  I didn’t press hard or cover the whole thing, I just wanted to get some of it on there.  Then I went back in with a q-tip and blended it.  Think of it like blending your eye shadow.

I added the hardware back onto the dresser, and it was done.

A super easy makeover.

Please check my ‘available for local sale’ tab to see if this piece is still available.

Please note that Little Billy Goat has supplied me with paint and goat sticks, but all opinions are my own and I am not compensated for this post.  If you would like to try Little Billy Goat paint and you are local, you can find it at Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater.  You can also find Little Billy Goat products online at piperclassics.com.

A while back when my friend Donna dropped off a load of free furniture for me she included this sweet little table.

Aren’t those square feet fab?  I love the subtle detail on this piece.  It was in good shape too.  I just thought it would be even better painted.

So I painted it in my favorite shade of green milk paint, In a Pickle from Sweet Pickins.

I got lots of awesome chipping.

Just for fun, I tried a number of different locations for a photo shoot.

First the driveway …

Although that bright back-lighting might work for certain shots, like this one …

I don’t think it showed off the table to its best advantage.

Next I tried the garden …

The lighting seems good.  No harsh shadows.  But does the green table get a little lost with all of the green behind it?

The white walls of the photo cottage seem to show this table off well.

Which background do you like best?

And if anyone local needs a sweet green table, check out my ‘available for local sale’ page for details because this table is for sale.

In case you were wondering, the dining set that I posted on Friday did go home with the customer who had dibs on it.  I know the darker top caused her a little hesitation, but in the end she decided she couldn’t pass on it and she bought it.  I hope it looks good in her dining room and that she is happy with the purchase!

Now that I’ve sent a table, 3 leaves and 8 chairs home with her, I have space in my workshop to work on some other pieces.  I started with this beautiful spoon carved dresser.

Sadly, I neglected to take a ‘before’ shot, but you wouldn’t have seen much except a typical antique spoon carved dresser.  In fact, it looked quite good on the outside.  That was part of the problem with this one.  You see, nnK’s parents purchased this dresser at auction for me.  They were at the auction for other items, but when they saw this piece come up and realized how low the price was, they decided to bid on it because it looked to be in quite good shape from the outside.

 However, what they didn’t realize was that it was in very rough shape on the inside.  The bottoms were falling out of the drawers.  The joints were all coming unglued.  The drawer glides were all worn down.  And so on, and so on.  This dresser was very close to becoming Humpty Dumpty no. 2 (to read the story of H.D. no. 1 click here, here and here).

So I sent this one off to Ken’s workshop without even taking the time to get a ‘before’ photo.

Ken performed his usual miracles and patched it up beautifully.  The drawers now have all new bottoms, they open and close easily and the dresser is very stable.  I can’t say how lucky I am to have Ken to make these repairs for me often enough.  I truly couldn’t do this work without his help.

Once Ken was done with the hard part, I just had to tackle the fun stuff.  I stripped the top which took 4 passes with the stripper and it’s still not perfect.  Luckily I was not aiming for perfection.  I don’t know what kind of poly was all over this thing, but it was thick.

I sanded it down and just added a couple coats of Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax.

I then decided I wanted to paint this one in MMS milk paint in Marzipan.  Let me first explain that I often joke about having a lifetime supply of milk paint.  When my friend Lori closed down her Round Barn Potting Co shop last year, I bought out a huge chunk of her milk paint inventory.  I figured I’d have about enough milk paint to last two years.  Here it is a year or so later and I have gone through about half of the paint, so I wasn’t far off the mark.  But I don’t have multiple bags of every color, and I haven’t done a great job of paying attention to what I do have on hand.  So when I pulled out that bag of Marzipan I wasn’t really thinking about whether or not there was enough left to do the entire dresser.  I assumed I could just open another bag if I ran out.

Turns out I didn’t have another bag of Marzipan, and I didn’t have enough paint in my cup to do a 2nd coat, let alone a 3rd.  Drat!

So I decided to stretch what I had left by adding some Linen.  Here’s a great photo showing the differences between the MMS whites …

Marzipan is an almond color.  Linen is the creamiest/warmest of the MMS whites.  And I have lots of Linen on hand.  But duh, I didn’t actually grab the bag of Linen, I grabbed Ironstone, the brightest white of the bunch.  I added a spoonful into my paint cup without even noticing.  Double drat!

That lightened up the Marzipan quite a bit!  So, then I decided to go ahead and add a little Linen too.  Why not?!

But all was not lost, I ended up with a lovely shade of white.  I couldn’t recreate it if I tried though.

By the way, for those of you who also paint with milk paint, here’s a tip.  If you’ve already painted one coat of a color and you don’t have enough left for another full coat, be sure to mix more paint before even starting the 2nd coat.  Your second batch may be a slightly different color, even if it came from the same bag as your first.  So always make sure you have enough paint left to cover the entire piece.  Obviously in my case my 2nd coat of paint was definitely a different color than the first.  I ended up doing a total of 3 coats on this dresser for good coverage.

Next I used a small brush to paint the spoon carved flowers with straight-up Ironstone.

I wanted it to be a subtle difference, just enough to make them pop.

I gotta say, I love the result.

I did not use a top coat.  Miss Mustard herself has been forgoing a top coat lately, so I followed her lead.  I love the look of the paint without a top coat.  I don’t know that I would leave the top of a dresser unprotected in this way, but for the sides I think it’s OK.  Although this probably won’t work well in a home with small children who leave hand-prints on things.

So, not only is Ken an amazing neighbor who fixes furniture for me, but his wife is pretty fabulous too.  She saw me outside taking photos of this piece and she came over to ask if I’d like any roses from her garden to use in my photo shoot.  Who would say no to that?

Arlene grows roses in just about every color under the sun, but I specifically wanted just the pale flowers with barely a hint of color.

Aren’t they lovely?

Be sure to check back later in the week when I share some of the stuff my sister and I brought home from the Nokomis sales.  And in the meantime, if you’re in the market for a gorgeous spoon carved dresser check out my ‘available for local sale’ tab for details.

I absolutely love to dine outdoors, how about you?

Some of my favorite travel memories revolve around restaurants with gorgeous patios such at the Indian Jewel in Prague which is situated in a courtyard that has been around since medieval times.  I also fondly remember dining at a sidewalk cafe in Copenhagen alongside the canal in Nyhavn.  All of the chairs had little wool throws on them so that you could wrap up as it got chilly when the sun went down.  Our server easily switched between English at our table, German at the table next to us and French at another which impressed me to no end.

Mr. Q and I try to dine on our own deck whenever we can.  Of course, this being Minnesota, there are only about five months out of the year when this is possible.  I did take a cue from the Danes and I have a wool throw for each chair, so that helps extend the season.

I’m always drawn to those photos on pinterest or in magazines that show a dining room table set up outdoors.  They always look so romantic.  Check out my ‘dining al fresco’ pinboard {here}.

But the reality for me is that whenever I try to plan something like that the weather doesn’t cooperate.  Last Friday I had some people over for dinner.  I had pictured a gorgeous evening on the deck, but instead we ended up inside.  Not only was it in the 90’s and awfully humid, but that weather led to the possibility for severe thunderstorms.  Somehow high winds and lightening kill the romance of outside dining.

It’s far easier to set up a dining table outside strictly for a photo shoot.  You can just wait for a lovely sunny day and get everything set up just right.

It helps if you just happen to have a freshly refinished dining room set that you want to share.

This is the completed dining set that I mentioned earlier in the week.  I’ve only pictured it with 4 chairs, but there are 8.  You saw most of them on Monday.

There are also 3 leaves.  So it can be expanded when necessary.  Mr. Q and I tried adding the leaves last night just to be sure everything worked well.  That table gets to be quite long with those leaves added!  The 8 chairs will be just right.

The client who purchased the Inglenook sideboard from me has dibs on this set.  She’s coming to see it tonight.  She’s worried that the darker wood top on this table won’t work with the lighter wood top on the sideboard.  The table top looks darker in these photos than it does in person though, so I’m hoping she likes it.

If it turns out that she doesn’t think it will work, this set will be looking for a new home.  I’ll be sure to add it to my ‘available for local sale’ page if it becomes available.  Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, my sister and I are headed out to our favorite Minneapolis neighborhood tomorrow for their annual garage sales.  The Nokomis neighborhood is where both of our parents were born and raised.  Hope I find some fun stuff to share with you next week!

Linking up with Friday’s Furniture Fix.

It’s finally summer, which means it’s time for iced tea!

And the tables that I painted recently provide the perfect resting spot for a glass of tea.

This pair of tables has been patiently awaiting a makeover since last summer.  They were thrown in as an afterthought with a pair of primitive cupboards that I purchased via craigslist.  They aren’t really something I would normally choose, but somehow I found myself loading them into my truck.

Yep, what was I thinking?  Just some basic redwood patio tables.  Oddly, the previous owner added a redwood stain over the existing chippy white paint.  This was really not a good look.

Not too long after bringing them home I decided to try a chippy milk paint finish.  I painted one green and one blue.  Huh?  What?  Why?

Yeah, neither one looked good.  So I shoved them in a dark corner of my workshop and there they sat all winter.

I finally pulled them out again and decided I needed to just do something with them.  I envisioned a sort of drift wood, beachy look.  So I pulled out some paint that Allie at Little Billy Goat sent to me to try out.  It’s a light grey and the color is called Farmhouse.

I used the paint straight out of the jar, which is a little thick, but gave great coverage.  As a result, I only need one coat!  You gotta love that.

I added a french poem stencil to the top, but I kept it very subtle in a just slightly darker grey.

I distressed them vigorously.  I like how the texture from the previous chippy paint came through.  You can also see that this was the green one.

I finished them off with some Annie Sloan wax.

These tables are perfect for taking out into the garden on a pleasant day to enjoy some iced tea and a good book.

I sent the tables off to Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater.  Hopefully they will go to a good home!

 

First things first, I drew a random name from the many people who commented on my post about vintage cameras and Jaci N. wins the free camera!  Thanks again for all of the comments.  I hope to host another giveaway soon.

Now, on with today’s post.  You know how groups of animals have specific names, like a ‘murder of crows’, a ‘troop of monkeys’ or a ‘school of fish’?  Well, with chairs a grouping is called a ‘jumble of chairs.’  OK, yes, I just made that up.  But it’s good, right?  Let’s make it a thing.

I recently acquired a jumble of chairs from my friend Sue.

I happened to have a dining room table with no chairs, and Sue happened to be getting rid of her chairs but not her table.  So it was a no-brainer to pair her chairs with my table.

Although Sue’s chairs were already white, I was using Fusion’s Limestone on the base of my table and the white of Sue’s chairs was too bright in comparison.  So I sanded the chairs a bit to give the new paint every opportunity to stick to the old paint and then I added just one coat of the Limestone to update the shade of white on each chair.

I also reupholstered the chairs with some fabric that I painted with a grain sack stripe.

There are 8 chairs altogether, but one was still being re-glued when I took these photos.

It may seem like I have six chairs that match, and two that are mismatched, but actually I have 4 pairs of 2 each.  The shield back chairs don’t all exactly match.  If you look really closely you can see that each pair is slightly different.

And of course the two with the square backs are entirely different.

But the paint color and fabric unifies them all and I think they will be perfect with the table.

I’m not gonna lie, it was quite the job to paint and recover 8 chairs.  I didn’t think I was ever going to finish!  I’ll be glad when this one is behind me.  Check back later in the week when I share the completed project including the table.

Have you heard?  Pink is the new neutral.

I’ll be honest, I had not heard this.  But when my friend Meggan was over last week, she mentioned that she’d read it somewhere.  So later that evening I did some googling.  Sure enough, I found lots of articles about the subject including {this one} from houzz and {this one} from Apartment Therapy.

Well, you all saw how much I loved the new pink from Fusion, Little Piggy, and this is a pink that I can easily see being used as a neutral.  It’s a very subtle blush pink.  After painting a small chair in it, I knew I had to go bigger.  I decided it would be perfect on this dresser that Mr. Q brought home from the thrift store for me.

This dresser was just kind of ugly.  I’m not sure, but I think that is a cut-out section of floral wallpaper that is stuck to the middle of that one drawer.  A few passes with some coarse grit sandpaper took care of that.

Next came a couple of coats of Little Piggy.

I wasn’t entirely happy with any of the photos I took in the photo cottage, so I pulled the dresser outside and tried again.

The knobs that came with the dresser seemed just a little too small, so I replaced them with some pretty faux mercury glass knobs that I had on hand.

Still not super excited about the photos of the dresser.  None of them do justice to the color, but the peonies look great.

The dresser really is very sweet, and I got such a great deal on it that I am passing the savings on to whomever purchases it.  If interested in more details, check out my ‘available for local sale tab’!