q is for quandie

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.

The other day I was running some errands over my lunch hour when I spied an ‘estate sale’ sign on the side of the road.  Fortunately, there was no one behind me, because I slammed on the brakes to make the turn.  I quickly purchased a sweet little nightstand (you’ll see that later) and some German redwork …

I also noticed a charming maple dresser that was marked $90.  In general, I find that estate sale prices on furniture are a little too high for me.  It was a cute dresser, but not worth $90 to me.  However, there were signs posted throughout explaining the ‘bid’ policy for this sale.  Basically, I could leave a bid, and if the dresser didn’t sell for full price, the sellers would give me a call if they wanted to accept my bid.  I placed a bid for $65 and dashed back to work.  There was some strategy involved in coming up with this amount.  On Day 2 of the sale, the dresser would be reduced to $60 if it was still there.  However, they would hold it for me at the $65 until I could get back to pick it up.  Nice.

On Saturday morning, I got the call.  My bid was accepted and the dresser was mine.  I just had to go back and pick it up.

A little sidebar story for you.  Why, oh why do I ever leave the house in paint splattered sweatpants and without makeup?  I usually make a rule to never, ever do such a thing.  However, on this particular Saturday I had painted all morning, and was going to do yardwork all afternoon.  It seemed silly to change clothes and add makeup just to quickly pick up this dresser.  After all, who could I possibly run into at an estate sale?  Sure enough, the moment I walked in the door I heard “hey, need some help loading that dresser?”  Oh boy.  One of our local fire fighters, whom I happen to work with at the day job.  So embarrassing!  From now on, it’s makeup and real clothes, even for an estate sale!

Back to the dresser.  Once I got it home and scrutinized it more closely, I found that it had a … hmmm, what should I call it?  Sort of a crack in the wood that left a pointed jagged edge sticking out.  I wish I had thought to take a picture of it before we fixed it, but once again, I forgot.  I thought I could just use some glue and a clamp to hold the jagged edge in place, but I wasn’t able to even budge it.  So, I called in my handyman neighbor Ken.  He always has some little trick up his sleeve for stuff like this.

Basically, he used a chisel to add some ‘give’ to the jagged piece of wood.  The chiseled line will ultimately be hidden behind that pretty braided trim.

We glued and clamped, and voila, the pointy bit is back in place.  I’ll fill in the crack with some wood filler, sand it down, nail the braided trim back down and paint will hide this repair quite nicely.

I had originally consider both red and yellow for this dresser.  I have found that when I paint things in those colors they take about 3 times as long to sell.  They do sell eventually, but they don’t fly out the door like the aqua/blue/mint green tones do.  Still, sometimes I ignore that and go with my gut, and this one said red.

But then Fusion offered to send me some paint from their new Michael Penney collection.  I saw Lily Pond and decided to go for it.

I sanded the entire dresser, wiped it down with a damp cloth, and then painted one coat of paint.  I added a second coat to the top of the dresser, but believe it or not, the rest was just fine with one coat.  Talk about easy. I waited about an hour or so, until the paint was dry to the touch, and then I used 220 grit sandpaper to lightly distress.

I found that it distressed quite easily at this point.  In the past, I have waited longer to distress and with the Fusion that isn’t a good idea.  As this stuff cures, it gets harder and harder to sand off.  So distress promptly.  Unless of course you don’t want any distressing.  But aside from that little tip, using Fusion really couldn’t get any easier.  There is no need to wax, unless you just prefer that look.  Waxing has never been my favorite thing, so it’s nice to do without it now and then.

Isn’t this a sweet shade of green?  While pulling out stuff to stage the dresser, I realized it’s just a tad more subtle than the green on the vintage clock I picked up while shopping in Las Vegas last year.

It also works beautifully with some of my vintage wallpaper.

It’s that sort of 50’s vintage green that I love so much.  I have a bread box in this color in my pantry.

What do you think of Lily Pond?  I think it would be utterly charming in a nursery.  It’s got a little bit of a beach cottage vibe too.  Ahhhh, if only I had a beach cottage!  And don’t you just love those fat cinnamon bun knobs?

I’ll probably post this one on craigslist soon, although with my sale coming up in June pretty soon I’ll have to start hanging onto pieces for the sale.  But for now, this one is available.  Ooops, sorry, this one is sold.