q is for quandie

Remember the gorgeous set of furniture I picked up last year?  The dresser and bed were intended for a custom client who had been looking for just the right pieces for a while.

The pieces came as part of a set that also included a vanity and the seller didn’t want to break them up so I purchased all three.  The vanity has been waiting patiently out in the carriage house for a makeover ever since and I finally got to it last weekend.

Here is the winter-y ‘before’.

The vanity was in worse shape than the other two pieces.  If you look closely, you can see that the lowest round part of the leg on the far right of the photo was broken off.  There were actually 4 of these round sections broken off of the various feet.  Ken helped me glue them back on.  In addition, the veneer inside the knee hole was badly damaged on one side.  The drawer fronts also had quite a bit of veneer damage.  In other words, this piece was an excellent candidate for a paint job.

I took my inspiration for the color scheme from this beautiful nightstand that was painted by Dana at circadee.

Isn’t it gorgeous?  It’s painted in MMS milk paint in two of the new European colors, Layla’s Mint and Marzipan.  Fortunately, I had just stocked up on those two colors up at the Round Barn.

Here is my finished result.

My Layla’s Mint looks a little more green than the inspiration piece, but I still love how it turned out.  I highlighted the details on the piece in Marzipan, which is sort of an almond color.

I got a lot of great chipping too.

The hardware that came with this piece is lovely.  I debated adding some rub n’ buff in gold like Dana did on her nightstand, but in the end I just cleaned mine up and waxed them with the MMS furniture wax.  I took a side by side pic so you could see the difference a little clear wax makes.

I always love keeping original hardware whenever possible.  It just works so much better than the new stuff.  Let me take a moment to tell you about escutcheon pins.  Are you familiar?  They are the little bitty nails that hold a drawer pull like this one in place and keep it from spinning around.  You can see the little hole for the escutcheon pin on this one at that little point just below that center detail.  See it?  Often times these pins are missing on old furniture.  You can then usually see damage around the drawer pull made by the pull spinning around.  You can see that on this dresser I brought home last winter.

See those circle shaped groves around the hardware?  People will try to tighten the screw to keep the pull from spinning, but really you need to just replace the pin.

But, back to our vanity.

I love the shape of the mirror on this one.  Very unique and lovely.

Wouldn’t this piece be absolutely lovely in your dressing room?  Not lucky enough to have a dressing room?  Then perhaps in your guest room, or maybe your daughter’s room?  This one is for sale.  Ooops, sorry  you missed it, this one is sold.

I’ll leave you with one last ‘before and after’.

This dresser was another craigslist find spotted by nnK.  I really didn’t need to add to my stash of furniture to paint, but the look of this one really appealed to me.

Unfortunately, I once again forgot to get a ‘before’ picture of my own, so I am borrowing the picture the seller used in his craigslist ad (I hope he doesn’t mind).  This one wasn’t in terribly bad shape except for those drips of stain under the key holes.

I knew I wanted to strip the top, and I also wanted to keep the original drawer pulls.  That meant I needed to find a color that would work well with the wood tone, and with the brass pulls.  I also definitely wanted to go with milk paint on this one, it was calling out for a chippy finish to play up its age.  I also thought two layers of color would add to the whole effect.  So I dug out my stash of MMS milk paint to see what I had.

I started with a base coat of Shutter Gray.  If you’ve never used this color, I think its name can be a bit misleading.  If you are expecting a grey (especially after seeing the little color dot on the package), you might be surprised how blue it is.  I sanded the entire dresser by hand before I started painting (I also stripped the top first, always do this first, it’s a drippy process).  The finish was very dry, and since I wanted to get some chipping I didn’t do too much sanding.  I wiped the dresser down and then painted on a coat of the Shutter Gray.  Then I went and started some laundry.  When I came back to the dresser, I knew right away I was in trouble.  There was A LOT of chipping.  I went over it lightly with sanding block to knock off the loose paint, and this is what I ended up with.

Kind of a cool look, but not what I wanted.  Don’t panic if this happens to you, this can be easy to fix.  I just sanded it down much more thoroughly and added another coat of the Shutter Gray.  The second coat had much less chipping.  Here is how the same side of the dresser looks in the end after a 3rd coat of paint using my final color, French Enamel.

I did not use the bonding agent.  Just the extra sanding I did helped the paint adhere better.  I prefer doing this to using the bonding agent because you still get some chipping, just not an excessive amount.

Once the second coat of my base color, Shutter Gray, was dry, I used canning wax on the edges and around the key holes.  The idea was to get a resist there with my next color so the Shutter Gray would show through.  I followed up with just one coat of French Enamel.  The results were a little more subtle than I was hoping for.  Next time I’ll know to be more generous with the wax, or perhaps I’ll try Vaseline.

I’d never used French Enamel before, although I’ve had this bag in my stash for ages.  Up until now I’d always passed it over in favor of some other color.  That was a mistake.  Now that I’ve actually used it, I know what I have been missing.  It’s gorgeous, a much more saturated blue than I was expecting.  I have to say, I had a really hard time capturing the true color in my photos.  I tried three different times of day to get the lighting just right.  I even tried setting a custom white balance on my camera, but I still got a million different variations of the color in my photos.  I really think this is a color that you just have to try for yourself and see in person.

I’m glad I kept the original hardware.  It has some great patina.

I staged it with flowers that were white and chartreuse.  Yes, those roses really are a pale green rather than white

Does anyone need a vintage farmhouse dresser?  This one is for sale for $225.  Ooops, sorry you missed it, this one is sold.

A week or two ago one of my neighboring towns, White Bear Lake, hosted a Trash to Treasure Saturday.  They encouraged home owners to put anything they wanted to give away at the curb with a ‘free’ sign on it.  Then people were invited to drive around and load it up!

Well, you didn’t have to ask me and my friend Sue twice!  We were on it.  And we brought home a nice little haul of free stuff.

This is what I got; two faux bamboo folding chairs with cane back seats, a gutted sewing machine table, a gutted radio cabinet with no legs, a tacky metal french flower bucket and a pair of vintage yellow Samsonites.  Total cash outlay = $0.

I’ve already given makeovers to the chairs.  But first, here is where we picked them up.

Not terribly promising from a distance.  We almost drove right on by.  But the chairs caught my eye.  I grabbed two of them and was leaving the other two.  One was totally trashed and the other had some damage to the cane.  In the end Sue grabbed that one though, planning to do something about the cane.  I think it goes without saying that we passed on the old TV, plastic high chair and bad patio cushion.

Once I got the chairs home, the biggest task was removing the seriously tacky yellow vinyl from the seats.

I’ve never seen so many staples!  I still have the blister I got pulling all of those out.  Next came a paint job.  I’ll admit I began with a brush and some Fusion paint, but in the end I threw in the towel and brought out the spray paint.  It was just too putzy to paint all of those spindles with a brush.

As for the seats, I cut some drop cloth fabric to fit and then painted on a faux grain sack stripe.

This was made much easier by my newest find, super skinny tape!  I’d been looking for such a thing for a while and I finally found it at Menards (a local DIY store).

It’s made by Painter’s Mate and is .23″ wide.  Perfect for a faux grain sack stripe!

Aren’t these chairs a great combo of faux bamboo and cane?

And yes, you read that right earlier, these are folding chairs.  Stakmore, “the folding furniture with the permanent look.”

I think they turned out smashing.  You could use them at a small dining table for two, at a desk, or even just keep them on hand as extra seating at parties.

They really aren’t trashy anymore!

I am selling these for $30 each if anyone is interested.

I mentioned that I bought a little matching table at the same estate sale as the Lily Pond dresser.  I’m not a fan of using ‘matching’ furniture pieces, so often when I buy pieces that came from a ‘set’, I split them up.

I’m still going green, but this time with Miss Mustard Seed instead of Fusion.

There are lots of shades of green out there.  Avocado, mint, grass, pea, pear, forest, moss, the lily pond I used on the dresser …

I have to say, some times with the MMS milk paint greens, I feel like there are a lot of shades in the same bag of paint!  One of the quirks of milk paint is that you can never be entirely sure precisely what shade you will get.  You really need to be OK with that if you’re going to use it.  I knew that going in when I decided to paint my little estate sale table in Boxwood.

I’ve used Boxwood before, and loved it.  But this time it just wasn’t working for me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s bad.  It’s just not quite what I was going for.  I got some great chipping, which I loved, but the color just felt a little flat to me.  A little too 80’s country maybe?  Maybe the problem was the orange finish showing through the chips.  I don’t know, but something about it wasn’t speaking my language.

So I came home from work one night and decided to add a layer of Luckett’s green over the Boxwood.

Ahhhh, so much better.  I love the little peeks of Boxwood showing through.

I tucked some toile scrapbook paper inside the drawer.

Is it possible to not love this color? or the chippyness of milk paint?

Or maybe it’s just simply the layering of colors that appeals to me so much.

It works great next to a chippy chair.  Wouldn’t this be a great combo in your potting shed?  Or maybe on a covered porch?

And on a more personal note, today is my sister’s birthday.  Happy Birthday Deb!

Are you digging that mid-century bookcase?  Debbie was this size when mid-century was just called ‘new’.

Last night my mom flew from Las Vegas to New Jersey to help her celebrate, and then to keep her company on the drive to Minnesota.  They will be hitting the road bright and early tomorrow morning, and my sister will be an official Minnesotan by Sunday!  Woo hoo!  How lucky am I?

As part of my ongoing attempt to clear out a back log of furniture in my carriage house, last weekend I painted this guy.

I don’t even have a ‘before’ shot of this one, I was so anxious to just get it done.  I sent Mr. Q out to pick it up last fall.  From the picture on craigslist, I thought it had more of a mid-century vibe.  I was going to paint the body white, and then do an ombre effect on the drawers.  However, when I saw it in person it wasn’t at all what I expected.  It is big, and sort of ‘heavy’ looking.

Honestly, I was so uninspired by this piece in person that I was just going to turn around and re-post it on craigslist as is.  However, the finish was in such bad shape I simply couldn’t do it.  I decided it would be better to just give it a quick chalk paint makeover with some Annie Sloan in Aubusson.  I then realized that I needed to go with a wood top to balance out all of that blue, so I stripped the top.  Unfortunately, that only made it more obvious that someone had used the top of the dresser as an ashtray.  Jeesh.  Have you ever seen that?  Burns about the length of half a cigarette all the way around the perimeter of the top.  Clearly someone had rested their lit cigarettes on the edge of the dresser and left them to burn there.  Why do people treat furniture with such disrespect?

I tried bleaching the burn spots, then sanding them down, then bleaching again, then sanding again.  They lightened up a little, but were still pretty apparent.  So in the end I decided to try and cover them with General Finishes Java gel stain.  I think it did a decent job of covering the marks.

If you look closely you can see that the Java gel went on darker in the areas around the edges where I sanded heavily.  But this is such a great improvement over how it looked before that I am happy to call it good.

By the way, in case you are wondering, I topped the Aubusson with some of my custom mixed dark wax.  I’ve mentioned this before, but for those of you who missed that, I mix 1 part dark brown Briwax with 4 to 5 parts cheap Johnson’s Paste Wax to create my own dark wax.  The Briwax on its own is very dark, but mixed with the Johnson’s it is just the right color.  I would never use it indoors, because it’s quite smelly.  It’s also probably bad for the environment and one’s health.  But when it’s nice enough to work outside, I sometimes pull it out because I really like the end result I get with it, and let’s face it, it’s cheap.  I bought the Briwax for $1 at a garage sale, and the Johnsons is about $6 per can.

I’ll be the first to admit that this piece isn’t my usual style, but I like to think that I saved this dresser from an uncertain future.

And now it is done, and hopefully will go to a good home and I can move on to some of the pieces I have waiting that are more ‘me’.

I was continuing my British theme from last week’s Union Jack desk while staging the photos of this dresser.  I used some London map paper on the wall and my Perfect English Farmhouse book.

And on the other side, look kids, Big Ben!

So, do any of you need a big blue dresser?  Ooops, sorry you missed it, this one is sold.