q is for quandie

A couple of weeks ago when I purchased the pair of vintage school desks, they also came with this sweet little teeny tiny chair.

I know that rusty patina isn’t everyone’s favorite, but I like a little well placed rust.  In the case of this chair, I decided that I didn’t want to paint it at all.  I just wanted to add a little extra pop of something.

So I added some Tim Holtz rub-on numbers to the back rest, as well as just below the seat.

Then I tried to use it in the school desk photos, but it just looked a little odd tucked under the desk.

On top of the desk was not much better.  So I didn’t use these photos for my post about the desks.

Then yesterday I decided to add some stripes to the seat.  I sanded it lightly, taped off the stripes and painted them using black acrylic craft paint.  I followed up with a coat of Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax to just liven up the finish a little.

And voila, the finished chair.

By the way, this chair is a bit smaller than the typical little kid’s chair that I’ve painted.  This one is only about 21″ tall.  Here’s a photo I took to give you a better idea of the scale.

See what I mean?  Tiny.

But it sure packs a ton of cuteness into a tiny package.

My craigslist spotter, nnK, spotted this dresser for me a week or so ago and I sent Mr. Q off to pick it up.

It had a little bit of damage on the right side of the 3rd drawer down, some veneer is chipped off and the trim is missing.  But otherwise it was in great shape, aside from the finish being pretty dinged up.  It also looks like there was some water damage to the feet at some point.

For some reason, as soon as I saw this in person I thought ‘yellow’.  And luckily I already had some of Fusion’s Buttermilk Cream, which is the perfect shade of creamy yellow.  Not in-your-face lemon yellow, but a subtle dignified yellow.  This is a fairly dignified dresser, so it deserved a dignified color.

Once I had it painted in yellow, I decided to give it a little more personality with the addition of white inside the trim.  I used Fusion’s Limestone for that.

Looking at the craigslist ad, I had no idea that the top half of this dresser had a curved front.  In fact, if you look at my own ‘before’ photo you can’t really tell either.  But in person it’s quite obvious.

I thought about changing out the original hardware for some clear glass knobs, but there are 12 drawer pulls on this thing!  Even at only a few dollars each, that adds up when you need 12 new knobs.  So instead I spruced them up with a little gold rub ‘n buff.

This dresser has a formal, traditional feel so I opted not to go chippy with milk paint.  The Fusion is just so darn easy to work with in comparison with no need for a top coat, no mixing, no worries about color variations.  I did end up need three coats to get really good coverage though.  I distressed the edges just a little.

The yellow and white on this dresser reminded me of some daffodils that I used to have in my garden that were yellow and white.  I really wanted to find some daffodils to use in my photos, but wouldn’t you know it, the flower shop near me was all out.  I had to settle for yellow tulips, which paired nicely with some ironstone.

By the way, this dresser is quite large.  I think it’s often hard to tell in photos, especially in this case where I haven’t added a chair or anything to provide scale.  This baby is 52.5″ tall and 36″ wide.

So let’s take a moment to talk about lining drawers, shall we?  Are you pro or con?  I am against lining a perfectly good drawer.  In my experience, a lined drawer ends up looking shabby much more quickly than an unlined drawer.  Loose paper liners don’t last very long, while sticky contact paper can be a nightmare to remove and it really doesn’t clean very well.  So for the most part, I don’t line the drawers of my pieces.

I make an exception to that when the drawer is really grossly stained.  Or in this case, I made an exception because two of the drawers in this piece had previously been lined with contact paper and it left behind an awful sticky residue that I couldn’t get rid of.  But, like I said, only two of the drawers had this problem.  So I only lined them.

Two of the drawers have dividers in them …

And are in quite good shape.  The final two drawers aren’t divided, but also are in very good condition.  So I chose not to line them.

Is that weird?  If I were keeping this dresser, this is what I would do.  But will a prospective customer wish I had lined them all?  What do you think?  In general, are your pro-liner, or con?

Linking up with Friday’s Furniture Fix at Lost & Found Decor

and Making Broken Beautiful at the Curator’s Collection.

I suspect that unless you are homeschooling your kids, most of you would not have looked twice at the craigslist ad for these vintage desks.

But the fact that they were a pair made me immediately think ‘nightstands’.  Plus I was kind of digging their mid-century vibe.  If you look at the base, you can see that the height is adjustable, so I knew I could raise them up a bit to be the right height for next to the bed.  So one recent Friday evening date night, Mr. Q and I drove out to one of my fave Minneapolis neighborhoods, Linden Hills, to pick these up.

I debated between two different concepts for them.  I thought about going ‘industrial steampunk’ by painting them black, ‘dipping’ the legs in copper paint and stenciling some numbers somewhere.  But in the end I decided to play up their mid-century look by painting the metal aqua and leaving the blonde tops as is.  They were in really good condition, so that seemed like a no-brainer.

I started by adjusting those legs.  That ended up being the most difficult part of this project.  Those bolts had obviously not been loosened in a very long time.  Luckily Mr. Q was able to use his brute strength to get the job done.  Then I painted the base of each table in Fusion’s Laurentien.  I absolutely love this color and am just finishing off my 3rd can of it.  I’m going to have to stock up on more!

Once the paint was dry I sanded the edges a little to add some character, but I still felt like the paint job looked a little too new.  So although you don’t have to use a top coat with Fusion paint, I opted to wax these.  I started with a coat of Miss Mustard Seed’s furniture wax (clear).  The purpose of an initial coat of clear wax is to make the application of the next coat of dark wax easier to manipulate.  If you’ve ever tried using dark wax directly on a lighter paint color and it looked really streaky and you weren’t able to blend it as much as you’d like, that’s because you needed a base coat of clear wax first.

I added some rub-on numbers to the pencil tray just to add a little whimsy.

I staged some of my photos with a typewriter and of course you could use these as desks.

But really, they are just too cool for school.  I would use them as nightstands.  I just don’t have a good spot for taking photos of them next to a bed.  So if you are opposed to cookie cutter furniture and prefer unique one of a kind pieces, these are perfect for you.

This Tokyo map paper had the perfect colors to match the desks.  There is something about that combination of aqua and french vanilla that I just love.

How would you use these desks?

I mentioned a little bit ago that it has been nice enough to be back out in the photo cottage already this year.  When I said that, what I meant specifically was that I could be out there taking photos without freezing my face off.  But it wasn’t quite warm enough that I wanted to be out there scrubbing away the winter grime.  Until last week (before we had another cold snap) when I came home from work one evening and it was 62 degrees outside.  So I decided there was no time like the present to head out there with my bucket of water and my scrub brush.  And now I have a fresh clean floor.  I was so happy with it, that I tried to include a bunch of floor space in today’s photos.

All this talk of a clean floor is meant to distract you from noticing that I don’t have a ‘before’ photo of this dresser.

Drat!

I thought I had taken one, but if I did it is lost in the sea of 100’s of photos that I take every week (thus the urge to organize my photos that I mentioned yesterday).  This dresser has been patiently awaiting its turn to be made over, so it is possible that I took one some time ago and I just can’t find it!

Oh well, moving on …

I went with MMS milk paint on this one because I had a feeling it would get chippy, and indeed it did.

I mixed some French Enamel and some Lucketts Green together to make this color.  I’ll be honest, I was expecting a much lighter color based on seeing what was said to be this same combination on a piece on pinterest.  This is a good reminder to everyone that colors in photos often don’t translate to how they look in real life.

This photos of this dresser are a really good example of that.  I think the dresser looks a bit more blue in the photos than it really is.  If you are proficient in MMS milk paint colors, this color is a bit lighter and a tad warmer than Kitchen Scale.

This dresser has the prettiest drawer pulls on the lower three drawers.

By the way, I did strip the top and then wax it with Cece Caldwell’s Aging Cream.

My vintage gardening books were the perfect color to use for staging.

And I threw in one of those sweet hand sewn baby dresses that I keep just for staging furniture.

This lovely dresser is for sale.  If interested, please feel free to leave a comment requesting the details or email me at qisforquandie@gmail.com.