Category: furniture.

Sorry to say, I neglected to get a before picture of the dresser I painted last weekend.  But there wasn’t much to see.  It wasn’t hideous and it also wasn’t a piece where it was hard to see the potential.  This one went in with lots of potential and it lived up to it beautifully.

After patching a couple of spots of chipped veneer on the drawer fronts, I stripped the top.  I wasn’t sure if the wood was going to be very pretty with just the CeCe Caldwell Aging Cream, but decided to give it a go.  I’m so glad I did.  My sister was sharing my workshop while working on her china cupboard (soon to be revealed), and she was amazed by the transformation with just a little wax.  A while back one of my readers, Teri, asked me to show pictures of just such a transformation in progress, so here they are!

Here is the top after stripping (using a citrus based stripper), sanding with 220 grit sandpaper and wiping clean with a little TSP substitute (phosphate free, I use the spray and get it at Mendards).

It looks very dry and not terribly pretty.

Then here I am applying the Aging Cream with a piece of old flannel sheet (action shot taken by my sister, note my paint splattered fingers!) …

So, just to be clear.  I am simply rubbing the Aging Cream (a.k.a. dark wax) into the wood, and it brings out that much gorgeousness!  Please note, the use of ‘lint free cloth’ is recommended for waxing, but I am a rule breaker!  Since I had sanded this wood smooth, I thought the flannel was a safe bet and it worked for me.

After rubbing the wax on, I usually wait about 10 minutes or so and then wipe away the excess with a fresh, clean cloth.  Here it is after that step.

If you want more shine, you can go back after 24 hours and buff to a shine.  I usually skip that step, I’m just not a ‘shine’ girl.

I can remember back to before I tried this myself.  I had no idea that you could simply use wax to achieve these results.  No stain, no poly.  Of course, the results depend a bit on the natural beauty of the wood you are working with, so keep that in mind.  Also, a waxed top will not be as durable as a poly’ed top.  I think that is perfectly acceptable for a dresser, but maybe not as good for a desk or table top depending on how much wear they will get.

So … here’s what I did with the rest of the dresser.

I painted the body of the dresser in Miss Mustard Seed’s Marzipan (which is an almond color).  I really love this color, which is kind of strange since it’s a glorified beige and I’m not really a beige girl.  But, this is a warm, rich, almond-y color, not a pinky, peachy, beige-y color.  So much better.  It took three coats to get this coverage.

Next I added some Miss Mustard Seed Ironstone on the two medallions on the top drawer.

I finished with Miss Mustard Seed clear furniture wax.  I wasn’t sure I would put the original hardware back on at first, but in the end it was perfect with the new color of the dresser, so I kept it.

Although I didn’t get any chipping on this one, it did distress beautifully along the edges.

My Perfect English Farmhouse book and some crazed and stained ironstone were perfect for staging this dresser.

And the chair that makes its way into so many of my photos looks great next to this dresser too.

And here is one last look at that waxed top.

This beautiful dresser is for sale, if you are local and interested in the details, leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you!

Linking up with Finding Silver Pennies.

Sometimes I think it may seem as though I decide to makeover a room and then I just whip it up in no time.  That’s not really how it goes.  I usually think about it for a long time, and then I try to work up the gumption to get ‘er done.  That can take awhile.  I’ve been wanting to perk up my dining room since last winter.  I knew I wanted new chairs, and as I mentioned last week, I specifically wanted french cane back chairs.  I’ve been watching craigslist for them since last spring.  I finally saw a set that I liked, but not only were they expensive ($75 each), they were also all the way out in Mound, MN.  Still, I decided they were too good to pass up.

I recruited my sister to drive out there with me.  It should have been about a 50 minute drive, but since we missed our turn off, it ended up taking more like an hour and 15 minutes to get there.  But, it was worth the drive.  These chairs are perfect.

First of all, they are really well made and very sturdy.  The cane is in perfect condition.

They have really nice proportions and they are very comfortable.

And best of all, they have seats that can be recovered with just some stapling skills.  No fancy reupholstery required.

The piping around the edge tricked me at first.  I thought maybe these were non-removable seats.  So I was thrilled when I turned them over and saw the screws for removing them.

The only thing wrong with these chairs was their shiny orange finish and unappealing fabric and those are easy to fix!

After removing the seats, I used my favorite cheating method to paint the cane.  Spray paint!

Painting cane with a brush can take forever.  So instead, I spray paint it first.  In this case I used Rust-Oleum in Heirloom White with a satin finish.  Once I had the cane fully covered in the spray paint, I let it dry.  Then I went back over it with the paint I was using on the rest of the chair.  In this case, Annie Sloan’s Old White.  Now the white matches, and I only needed one lightly brushed coat on the cane.

The rest of the chair took two coats.  Once the paint was dry, I sanded by hand to distress.  Since these chairs were for me, I could distress to my heart’s content.  I like my pieces to look a little beat up.  Once sanded, I vacuumed off the dust and waxed with Miss Mustard Seed’s furniture wax.  Let me take a minute here to talk about using a brush to wax.

I think I’ve already established that I am kind of a cheap skate.  I don’t like to spend much on tools and supplies (well, on almost anything really except trips to Europe and good hair products) and this Miss Mustard Seed large wax brush was priced over $30.  I will tell you that I probably never would have ended up with it except for the Round Barn’s going out of business sale.  It was half price, so I decided to splurge on it.  Yes, I purchased this brush myself, this is not a sponsored post in any way.

And I’ll tell you what, this brush was worth every penny (and would have been worth paying full price for actually) when it came time to wax these chairs.  It got in all the nooks and crannies easily, it maneuvered around all of the curves and bends, it even worked beautifully on the caning.  If you do a lot of waxing and you don’t already have one of these, get one, stat!  So much easier than trying to use a rag to wax these chairs.

I debated a couple of different options for seat upholstery.  I thought about using drop cloth fabric and stenciling it with a grain sack like I did on these folding chairs.

I also thought about using one of my many European stencils instead of the grain sack stripe.  But since I already have a European style stencil on some other pieces that are in going in the room, I felt like that would be overkill.  In the end, I just went with authentic grain sacks.  And I LOVE them!

I purchased 4 of these grain sacks from 3:17 Vintage in Afton.  Each one is a little different and they are exactly what I wanted on the chairs.  Well … wait a minute … to be honest, exactly what I wanted was a fabulous European grain sack with an awesome blue grain sack stripe down the middle.  But have you priced those?  For the price of just one of those, I was able to get 4 plain old mid-western grain sacks and still have some change left over.  And if I had splurged on the European version, I probably would have never let anyone sit in the chairs.  This way I’m perfectly fine with using them, and if they get spilled on, no problem!  They are pre-stained!

I have to admit, Ken the handyman totally rolled his eyes when he saw these.  He simply can not fathom why I would want stained old grain sacks on my dining room chairs!

But in case you missed it the first time I said it, I LOVE how these turned out, stained grain sacks and all!

I had set myself some lofty goals for this past weekend.  I wanted to finish the chairs, plus paint two dressers.  I didn’t quite get there.  The chairs are all painted, sanded and waxed, but I still need to upholster the seats on the other three.  It won’t take long, but they weren’t quite ready for this post.  As for the rest, one dresser is completely finished and needs a photo shoot, the 2nd dresser is painted, but needs to be sanded and waxed.  So, I have my work cut out for me this coming week.

I’m also going to keep moving on the dining room makeover.  Things are starting to come together, more ideas are percolating, and I hope to share more on that with you soon.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, my sister and I blew off our visit to Oronoco Gold Rush.  There was a heat advisory here on Saturday.  Gold Rush can be overwhelmingly hot even on a cooler day.  The combination of no shade, lots of pavement and lots of people results in heat overload.  And let’s not even think about the condition of those porta-potties in that heat!

Last Sunday one of my fellow vendors at Reclaiming Beautiful posted a quick heads up about a garage sale in Stillwater on Facebook.  Mr. Q just happened to be free, so as an experiment I sent him by himself with strict instructions to text me photos and prices before buying anything.  One of the pieces he sent a picture of was this mid-century modern desk.

Lately the mid-mod stuff has just really appealed to me, and when he told me it was $10 I said “yes!”

Unfortunately, what I couldn’t see in Mr. Q’s quick phone photo was the water damage.  See it on the legs?  Yep, that’s water damage.  There is also some fairly significant veneer damage around the edges of the top.  Basically both of these factors rule out refinishing this piece with some Dark Walnut stain, which was originally what I wanted to do.  The drawer fronts were in pretty good shape though, so I stripped and stained those, and painted the rest.

I also painted the handles on the drawers.

I’m still not sure about that choice.  Maybe I should have left them wood.  And maybe I should have painted the desk in a more subdued palette.  Dark grey?  Black?  Oh, but what’s the fun in that?  This is painted in Fusion’s Laurentien, one of my favorite aquas.

Obviously the chair I’ve used for staging my photos is all wrong.  This desk needs a mod chair, like an Eames style chair …

Or this pretty aqua chair …

Use this picture of the desk without the chair to imagine it paired with one of these more modern chairs.

Yep, better, right?

This desk is priced to sell at $125.  Anyone need a sweet little mid-century modern desk?

A while back my sister-in-law Tracy texted and asked if I wanted a dresser that was ‘free to a good home.’  She included a picture.  I’ll admit, I didn’t immediately love it.  It seemed uninspiring and maybe a bit too traditional for me, and it was hard to see the details on my phone.  But hey, it was free!  So I said yes.

And before you think I am insulting my sister-in-law, I have to point out that she works in a senior care facility and this was a piece from her work, not from her own home.

When we got there to pick it up, she told me that I could also have the matching nightstand if I wanted it.  Sure, why not?  In for a penny, in for a pound.

I decided to start with the nightstand since it was small.  I pulled out my Fusion paint in a color called Inglenook that I hadn’t tried yet.  I lightly sanded the whole piece, and then I painted two coats of Inglenook on the outside.  I painted the interior in Fusion’s Limestone for some contrast.  That took three coats to get good solid coverage.

Once I got a closer look at the hardware on these pieces, I decided I had to keep it.  It has great detail.  I added some gold Rub ‘n Buff to spruce it up.

I put the hardware back on, and I was bedazzled.  Truly.  This was one of those amazing transformations.  I’ll admit, I did not see it coming.  The piece went from really traditional (like something that my mother would have in her house) to really pretty and very French.  I hadn’t even noticed the French-ness, but it definitely came out with the paint job.

Before I continue on to the dresser, I have to tell you about that suitcase.  I came home from work one night and there it was on my porch.  I don’t know how it got there.  I must have had a visit from the vintage suitcase fairy!  So I threw it into the photo shoot.  In hindsight, maybe it was a weird addition to the photo.  If you are my vintage suitcase fairy let me know so I can thank you properly!

I had originally been planning to paint the dresser in a pale grey, but having seen how gorgeous the Inglenook was, I had to go with that again.

Have I mentioned, by the way, that this thing is ginormous?  It is nearly 6′ wide!

There are four different types of hardware on this guy.  The drawer pull on the top middle drawer matches the nightstand and is the most detailed.

My reader Victoria calls these “mock key knobs”, which makes sense since it’s supposed to look like a key that has been inserted into a lock.  These are some pretty gorgeous mock key knobs, right?

The two smaller side drawers have a very simplified version of the mock key knob.

The lower drawers have regular drawer pulls rather than mock key knobs.

But they also have a faux keyhole in the middle of each drawer.  When I pulled these off I found that the original manufacturers (I assume) had put a little piece of black electrical tape behind the opening on these escutcheons to make it look like there was really a keyhole behind them.  I decided black electrical tape just did not cut it for me, so I added old book pages behind them instead.

I love adding these kinds of details to my pieces.  I don’t know if anyone even notices them, but I hope they do.

If you’ve ever used Rub ‘n Buff, you probably know that you just put a little on your finger, rub it on, and once dry, buff to shine (hence the name).  After doing all of these pieces of hardware, I had one seriously gold finger … which was ironic because there was a Bond film festival on TV while I was working on these and I watched Goldfinger not just once, but twice in one day (well, OK, I did nap through some of it the 2nd time around).  Ahhh, Connery at his finest.  But seriously, how did they get a character named Pussy Galore past the censors in 1965?

Anyway, I staged both of these piece simply with some Vanilla Strawberry hydrangeas, some Rachel Ashwell books and one of my favorite vintage clocks.

Both of these pieces are available if anyone out there wants to add a little je ne se quoi to their home.  Local sales (Twin Cities area) only I’m afraid.  It could never be cost effective to ship these!  The larger dresser is $295 and the nightstand is $95.  Sorry, these pieces are already sold!  As I suspected, they went really quick at these prices.

You’ve all seen them.  Old sewing machine tables.  They once had a sewing machine tucked inside and you could flip open the top and pop up the machine.  I bet these things were considered the height of innovation and so very convenient when they first came out.  No more having to drag the heavy sewing machine out of the closet and set it up on the kitchen table.

 And now of course they are obsolete, and the carcasses are a dime a dozen.  Somehow I managed to accumulate two of them and both were free.  And missing their machines.

Unfortunately I neglected to take ‘before’ photos of this piece, and I also didn’t get ‘fail’ photos of this one.  What do I mean?  Well, the first time I painted this I did an undercoat of  MMS Flow Blue with a top coat of Linen.  Problem was, it was a bleeder.  And you couldn’t see it with the Flow Blue.  It wasn’t until I added the Linen (which is a warm white) that I saw the pink stain coming through.  Since I didn’t really love this piece in the Linen anyway, I decided to just go back to the drawing board and paint it a darker color.

First I slapped on a quick coat of MMS Tough Coat Sealer, just to be sure that bleeding stain wouldn’t continue to plague me.  Then I painted it with Urban Rooster’s Smokey Ash.  Of course, the distressing brought out the Linen color underneath.

I’m not usually a fan of seeing a white base coat under something, but I was kind of stuck with it on this table so I made the best of it by adding a white stencil to the top.

I painted the little flip down compartment (where you kept your bobbins and needles) in Urban Rooster’s Cotton Candy.

I tried six ways from Sunday to get good photos of this table, but it just wasn’t cooperating.  First I staged it in the photo cottage …

I didn’t love these photos though.  I couldn’t get the angle quite right.

I tried adding the suggestion of some French flair with this book on the chair.

But it wasn’t helping.  This is a great book, by the way. Lots of fantastic pictures of French interiors.

I then moved the table to the front porch and placed my French cane back chair next to it.  I’m really not any happier with these photos, but I had to call it good because I took this table over to Eye Candy REfind for the grand opening last weekend.

I don’t think a chair has enough bulk to balance the table, but next to a bed or sofa it would be perfect.  Since the inside is basically hollow with just that little hinged bobbin drawer, it doesn’t provide much storage.  But you can add your own with some vintage suitcases stacked underneath.

I had Ken permanently attach the hinged top on this table, but I am thinking about creating a drinks station with the second one.  You’ve probably seen them on pinterest, where you flip open the top and there is space for an ice bucket where the sewing machine once was.  But that project is for another day!

 

I’ll admit it, I am cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs … or Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops.  We don’t have them on hand very often, but gosh I could go for a bowl right now.  But this morning, I am cuckoo for Annie Sloan’s Coco chalk paint instead.

Remember the set I just purchased last week?  Well, after seeing how amazing the bed looked painted in chalk paint, I decided to go the same route on the mirrored dresser.

As a reminder, it started out looking like this …

I’ve got a secret for you.  Mr. Q is back there holding up that mirror!  I photo-shopped his feet out of the picture.  I got him to tilt it a little bit backwards too, so I don’t have to duck out of sight in the mirror.

After some paint and new stain, the dresser now looks like this …

Gadzooks!  Even I am amazed by this transformation, much like I was with the bed.  Since I don’t have Mr. Q back there holding up the mirror in this shot, I did have to duck down low to get myself out of the picture.  You can thank me for doing so, as it was hot and humid and my hair was a fright.

This dresser is quite gorgeous without the distraction of that weird stain job, isn’t it?

The veneered top was in very good shape except for the old finish, so I stripped it, stained it with Varathane Dark Walnut gel stain, and then waxed it.  The wood is quite lovely now.

You can see that I left those odd flowers on the top drawers.  I debated removing them like I did on the bed, but in the end I felt like the paint disguised them fairly well.  I also left the original hardware.  It was all there and it had a lovely patina, so it stayed.

I always having trouble deciding whether or not to keep the mirrors on these sorts of dressers.  I did a little research and I couldn’t find a single instance where Miss Mustard kept a mirror like this, although she has done many dressers that are similar to this and must have once had mirrors.  I feel like these pieces are more versatile without their mirror.  Without a mirror this could be used in a dining room, a family room (with a TV on top) or it could be turned into a bathroom vanity.

Plus, it looks great without it too.

But it seemed like such a shame to discard the mirror on this one.  It’s very pretty.  Here’s a better shot showing the detail on the mirror.

Of course, whoever buys it will have the option of removing the mirror.  But I often find that people can’t see past something that is there in front of them.  Or, maybe they will feel like I do, that you can’t just discard the mirror.  Hopefully this piece will find a buyer either way.

This piece went out to Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater this week.  And for those of you who are local, do you know about the St. Croix River Valley Vintage Crawl taking place this weekend?

Eight vintage shops in the area (My Sister’s Cottage, Mama’s Happy, Reclaiming Beautiful, Le Garage Girls, Farmhouse Inspired, Hello the House, 3:17 Vintage Furniture & Home Decor and Eye Candy REfind) are participating in the crawl.  Check out the details here!

 

 

 

One drizzly evening last week Mr. Q and I picked up a lovely bedroom set.  This is one of my craigslist secret tips.  I hesitate to even share it here, because the competition for craigslist pieces has gotten seriously fierce in my neck of the woods.  Maybe I should start keeping my secrets tips to myself!  But no, here it is.  I often search for bedroom sets instead of individual pieces.  They might seem expensive at first glance, but if you break down the cost per piece they can sometimes be a great deal.  Plus there is the added bonus of getting multiple pieces in one trip.  Time and gas saving!

This set included a full sized bed,

a tall gentlemen’s dresser,

and a lady’s dresser with mirror.

Personally, I think the coloration on these pieces is quite hideous.  OK, maybe hideous is a strong word … but …  well, yep, hideous.  The dark shadowing around the edges is a total turn off for me.  And then there is this odd looking flower detail.

You can’t see it as well on the dressers, but they both have it too.  Gack!  The green center just boggles the mind.  Isn’t it kind of creepy?

But I had a sneaking suspicion that these pieces could be quite beautiful with a paint job.  The prettier details that were barely noticeable before really pop now.

See?

The difference is night and day, don’t you think?

I chiseled the weird flower from that raised circle on the foot board and replaced it with a 1902 stencil.

But first I had to use some Tough Coat Sealer just on this raised circle because the black kept bleeding through my paint.

Speaking of paint, this is a custom mixed Annie Sloan chalk paint color.  I used about 1/3 Louis Blue, 1/3 Pure White and 1/3 Old White.  Then I topped it off with a smidge of French Linen (grey) to tone town the ‘sweetness’ of the Louis Blue.

While we are on the subject of tweaking colors, let’s talk about white balance and how it messed up the color in my photos of this bed.  Do you use the white balance setting on your camera?  I know that the professionals calibrate their white balance for the exact conditions of their photo shoot.  I’ve done that with my camera, but I seldom get it right that way.  I’m a total amateur!  However, I do frequently change between the ‘canned’ white balance settings on my camera; sunny, shady, cloudy, tungsten light, and fluorescent light instead of using the ‘auto’ white balance setting.  Sometimes you have to play around with them to get the right setting for your conditions.  I find that in many cases I need the “sunny” setting even when I’m in the shade.  The two photos above were taken using the sunny setting, and as you can see, they were taken in the shade (but with a sunny background behind the subject).  The color in them is fairly accurate to the piece itself, except I think the color is a bit lighter in person.  A pale blue with not a lot of green in it.

Then just to experiment, I decided to switch my white balance to the “shade” setting.  And this is what I got.

A pretty picture, but not an accurate representation of the color.  This looks a lot like Duck Egg blue, which the bed definitely is not.  Sometimes you can fix this using a photo editing software, but I was unable to get the true blue of this bed using Picmonkey, Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery.  I kept getting a lot of extra pink thrown in.

I’m not an expert on white balance, but I have been working on getting it right in my photos since that translates to showing more accurate pictures of colors on my blog.  I feel like it’s important since a lot of you (like me) will see a color you like on a piece of furniture, and then be so disappointed when the color looks entirely different in person.  I still don’t get it right all the time, as was the case with these bed photos, but I try!

Did you know that even a lot of camera phones have a white balance setting?  Mine does.  It doesn’t have as many as my Canon Rebel camera but it has cloudy, daylight, fluorescent and incandescent.  So, if you aren’t already working with your white balance settings, give it a try.

And if you want to see the real color on this bed, drop in at Reclaiming Beautiful in Stillwater where it is sporting one of my new tags!

That title sounds like some sort of rural floozy from Provence, although apparently the spelling should then be “chippie” (and if you don’t understand what I mean, look it up).  But in this case it’s this fabulous dresser.

I started with this dresser that I purchased via craigslist.

As usual, it looks great in the photo, but it had some flaws.  For one thing, the top was falling off.  Ken waved his magic wand and fixed her right up.  The finish was not in terrible condition, but there were some water rings on the top.  The main flaw, in my opinion, was that someone had put a rather shiny poly on it.  I am not a fan of shiny.

But shiny can work in your favor sometimes with milk paint.  In this case, I was able to get the absolutely perfect amount of crackling and chipping thanks to that previous finish.

So, what do you think of the green?  I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure at first.  This is the same Sweet Pickins’ In a Pickle that I used on the farmhouse table.  At first I thought it might be just a bit too bold for a dresser and that it might have an adverse effect on my ability to sell it.  I seriously considered putting white over it and letting just some of the green peek through.  But then I thought to hell with it!  I love it.  If no one else loves it, too bad.  If it doesn’t sell, I’ll just keep it myself!

This time I used my custom mixed dark wax (a mix of Johnson’s paste wax and dark brown Briwax) instead of the Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax.  That deepened the green a bit and helped bring out those fabulous crackles.

I used a new trick to get more chipping; tape.  After my paint had dried for about 24 hours, I pressed some blue painters tape along the edges of each drawer and then ripped it away pulling some of the paint with it.  It worked beautifully.  Maybe this piece would have chipped anyway once I vacuumed it, but it’s hard to say.  I recommend trying the tape thing yourself.

You can see that I switched out the knobs for glass.  I just felt like they brought out the vintage farmhouse look I was going for.

Why am I calling this a french farmhouse dresser?  Well, not because I know what kind of furniture they have in french farmhouses, but because I added a french stencil from Maison de Stencils to what I feel is a very farmhouse style piece.

Plus, I looked it up and the Pas-de-Calais region of France has 2,000,000 acres of farmland (Wikipedia said so).  So really, this stencil is very apropos for a french farmhouse dresser.

I’m a little disappointed that my stencil looks fuzzy in all of these photos.  It really isn’t fuzzy in person, but I continue to have problems with my photos looking fuzzy on WordPress.  You’ll just have to trust me when I say it isn’t this fuzzy.  Or, better yet, come and see it yourself at the grand opening event for Eye Candy ReFind in Hastings.

My vintage “Young Folks History of France” book was the perfect shade of green for staging this piece, along with my grandmother’s green depression glass canister.

So what do you think?  Are you in or are you out when it comes to green?

I spent a little time on Rachel Ashwell’s blog the other day.  She doesn’t really blog a whole lot, but every once in a while I check out what’s new.  Her latest post was about vintage furniture and here is what she had to say:

“When hunting for wooden pieces,  I am usually  looking for authentic paint in the Shabby palette (white, ivory, pale pink & blue, grey teal or bleached raw wood) or pieces that can create a rustic vintage decor and on a rare occasion I will repaint.  I get great joy when I see pieces come through our “restoration for reloving”  process.  Each piece is cleaned, shored up if wonky, drawers and shelves lined with vintage wallpaper, new glass, marble or hardware applied…and when ready we proudly tack on our branded brass plaque.”

Well, I am rarely lucky enough to find a piece that has an authentic vintage paint job in a color that I like so when I find one, much like Rachel, I like to preserve it.  Such was the case with the Nokomis dresser.

It was really pink, but not a terrible pink.  It also had some great layering under the pink.  Some blue and some cream.  I like to believe that Rachel would have snatched this one up had she come across it somewhere too.

Even though I wanted to save the original paint, I felt like I needed to tone down the pink-ness just a tad.  Adding some vintage wallpaper to the drawer fronts was just the ticket.  I chose a paper that had pink roses, but also has the blue and cream (ordered from Hannah’s Treasures via Etsy).

To me this is the quintessential farmhouse floral wallpaper.

Now, I’m going to give some details on wallpapering furniture here.  If you are never in a million years going to wallpaper anything, feel free to just skip right over this next part.

But, if you have been thinking about using vintage wallpaper on something yourself, here are a few tips.  First of all, I use Zinsser Sure Grip all purpose adhesive (I got mine at Home Depot).  I use the powder, because I can just mix up as much as I need, which isn’t much.  I usually cut my pieces just a bit bigger than they need to be.  For example, these drawer fronts were about 7.5″ high, so I cut 8.5″ strips.  I apply the adhesive to the back of the paper using an inexpensive chip brush.  Then I “book” the paper.  This is basically just gently folding half of the paper over to the other half, glued sides together.  Gently!  Don’t make a crease in the middle.  I was taught to do this back when I was wallpapering entire walls.  I don’t really know why.  Google says two things.  One, if your paper is going to stretch, this allows it to do so before you apply it.  Two, this allows the adhesive to “activate”.  I don’t know if either of these things are really true or not, I just do it anyway.  Next, since this pattern had a stripe, I tried to pick an obvious position on the paper to start at the left hand side of each drawer.  I could go into a bunch of detail here about ‘repeats’ and stuff like that, but that would really get boring.  For the most part, I didn’t pay too much attention to the repeat on this paper.  If you know what I’m talking about, go back and take a look a the pictures.  Yep, didn’t get the repeat perfectly, did I?  Did you care the first time you looked?  Probably not.  However, I did have to get the stripes lined up.  That would have been easier had I started with the bottom two drawers, and then lined up the upper right hand drawer last.  But, never let it be said I do things the easy way.  I had to rip the paper off that upper right drawer and re-do it when the stripes didn’t line up with the bottom.  I didn’t take that piece separating the upper drawers into account.  Ooops.  Luckily I had enough paper.

I actually had more than one person ask me if it was going to be difficult to trim the wallpaper around the keyhole escutcheons.  Sometimes it catches me off guard when I realize that not everyone knows how some of these things work.  Although they were fairly painted over, the escutcheons were just held in place by two small nails.  I used a razor blade to loosen the paint around them, then just carefully pried them off.  After I wallpapered the drawers, I put the escutcheons back on using the nails.  Easy peasy, no trimming around them required.

So far I have had very good luck with the Zinsser adhesive.  I find that the wallpaper goes on and stays on.  I wait 24 hours or so after applying it, and then I go back and sand the edges.  Yep, you read that right, I sand them.  It gives them a nice smooth edge, and leaves nothing loose to catch on stuff.

My little Artissimo blue chair makes a great companion to this dresser.  It cuts a little of the pink sweetness, and it brings out the blue in the wallpaper.

I like to think that Rachel would approve of this one, what do you think?