q is for quandie

My neighbor, nnK, has been busy dumpster diving for me again.  This time she came home with a old school desk and an industrial stainless steel cart.  You’ll have to wait to see the cart, but I finished up the desk this week.  Here is what it looked like when she brought it over.

I had to laugh when I saw that it was literally labeled as “trash.”

The desk has a metal base with a formica top and is the perfect job for Fusion paint.  I knew it would stick to both of these surfaces.  Initially I was going to paint all of it, the base and the top.  But as I started working on it, I decided I liked the patina on the base, and if I could find the right color scheme for the top, it could work as is.  I hate to cover up a good genuine aged patina.

The inside of the base was another story though.  It was kind of disgusting, so I opted to paint that with one of Fusion’s new colors from their Michael Penney collection, Seaside.  These colors will be available for a limited time, so if you love it, you’d better get it now.  The Seaside is very similar to Annie Sloan’s Aubusson.  As a matter of fact, I was painting a dresser in Aubusson at the same time I was working on this piece and they were practically indistinguishable (you’ll see that dresser next week).

Now that the inside is painted, you can feel comfortable tucking your favorite books inside without them getting grungy.

As for the top, I knew right away that I wanted to do another Union Jack.  I could have done it in the traditional red, white and blue (and Fusion does have an awesome navy and red), but I wanted to change it up a bit.  I started with a base of Seaside.  Then I taped off the lines for my Union Jack and painted the next layer in Fusion’s Champlain, which is a shade of white with a tiny hint of grey in it.

You may be noticing at this point that I forgot the diagonal lines.  Ooops.  Drat.  I had to wait for this to dry and then go back and add them.  I’ll note here that I let each layer of color dry for about 24 hours before moving on to taping the next one.  As a result, my tape came off very cleanly and didn’t remove any paint with it.

The final layer of my Union Jack was painted in Fusion’s Bedford, which is a nice warm greige.  And voila!

Once the top was dry I sanded it with a fine sanding block.  That removed some ridges of paint that had developed around the tape lines and left a nice smooth finish.

One could use this desk as a desk, although it is rather small if you like to spread out. I think it would be more fun to re-purpose it as a bedside table.  Or use it next to your sofa, or in your foyer as a place to drop your keys and mail as you walk in the door.

I am rather in love with this desk now.  After all, who doesn’t love Jack?

 Please note that I have not been compensated by Fusion for this post, but they did send me some free samples of their paint to try out with no obligation which was awfully nice of them.

Eureka!  I finished the chairs!

Took me long enough.

But in my defense there were two.

I am relieved to have them done.  Turns out that upholstery might not be my favorite thing.

I managed to replace the arm patches, but don’t look too closely at my work.

It will not hold up to intense scrutiny.

I’d give you all of the details on how I did them, but you probably don’t really want to copy my work.  Look to Miss Mustard Seed for legit tutorials on upholstery.

The nice thing about these chairs is that they are totally neutral and could be dressed up with throw pillows in any color.  I’ve shown you three different options in my photos.

Despite my whining and complaining about how much work these were, I went out and purchased a claw foot antique settee on Wednesday and I’ll be jumping right back in for more upholstery work.

I know, you’re now thinking to yourself ‘what is wrong with her?’  Or perhaps it’s just me wondering about that.  Am I a glutton for punishment or what?

Well, here’s the thing.  Every year I set myself the goal of trying something new.  Last year it was stripping and waxing wood.  I had been afraid of this process for a long time, so I decided I needed to tackle it.  And as it turned out, it’s pretty easy.  Now I often strip and wax the tops of my pieces.

This year’s goal is to get a handle on upholstery.  I don’t sew, so I’ll never do any serious upholstery work, but I want to be able to tackle the basics.  I think that like anything, more practice will help me get more comfortable with it.

The beauty of this particular settee is that it won’t require any sewing.

Also, I should note that this is all the fault of my friend and Carriage House Sale co-conspirator Sue.  She just finished a fab settee herself and it inspired me to tackle one too.  I’m going to share her’s with you next week, so stay tuned!

This poor dresser has been wasting away out in the carriage house all winter.

 Somehow its plain straight lines just weren’t inspiring me.

But I have made a commitment to get to all of the pieces that are waiting for me out there, and this one was next up on the list.  It is a great example of how my plans change as I begin working on a piece.  My original plan was to paint it grey with white horizontal stripes on the drawers, much like this inspiration photo from pinterest.

I was going to use Fusion paint, because I knew that would handle the taping of the lines quite well.

I even ran to Hobby Lobby and bought some really pretty crystal knobs that I thought would work well with this rather more formal look.  However, while picking up those knobs, I also grabbed some glass pulls just to see how I liked them on this piece.  Since it already had two holes for each pull, I thought maybe, just maybe, the glass pulls would work.

Sure enough, they were exactly the right size.  To me, glass drawer pulls give a very ‘vintage farmhouse’ feel to a piece, which meant I had to change gears and go with milk paint.  Also, after taking a closer look at the dresser, I decided it would be the perfect piece for stripping the top and refinishing it with my favorite wax for that, the Cece Caldwell Aging Cream.

All that remained was to pick a color.  I debated several Miss Mustard Seed colors, but in the end I realized I was kind of bored with the “out of the bag” colors.  I needed something custom mixed.  I went to my favorite place for inspiration, pinterest.  I keep a pin board for MMS colors and I try to pin custom color examples whenever I see them.  I considered using a color that Dear Emmeline created called Eucalyptus.  It is a mix of Boxwood and Ironstone.  But I wanted more blue in my color.  Then I saw a dresser painted by Abbe Doll and decided it was perfect!  A mix of 3 parts Luckett’s Green to 2 parts French Enamel, and I just happened to have plenty of both colors.  I don’t think that she named her color, so I’m calling it Tropical Island.  It’s a beautiful shade of blue green, like the waters surrounding a tropical island.

And since I was on a roll with the whole ‘island’ thing, I decided to turn the dresser into a kitchen island!

Ken and I worked together to add new casters.  Why new?  I wanted them to be functional.  The vintage casters tend to look pretty, but you wouldn’t really want to roll your pieces around on them too much.  These larger casters also added the perfect amount of height to bring the top up to counter top height.

I staged the piece in my own kitchen first to see how it would look.  I thought it would be perfect to take photos in the early morning when the light is flooding in.  I forgot to factor in that the light would be flooding in behind the island.

Hmmm.  Not the best plan.  Although I like that you can now easily picture this piece as an island.  And since it is intended to ‘float’ in the room like this, I did paint the back.

You can see that I added a little hook to the side for hanging a towel.

In the end I hauled the tropical kitchen island out to the photo cottage to take advantage of better lighting.  I staged it with a lovely French ironstone bowl and some other pretty vintage kitchen items.

As is typical with MMS milk paint, there is some slight color variation in the paint.  You can really see it more clearly in this close up.  The drawers are a little more green than the body of the dresser.  But in this case, the drawers are all the same, and I think this look works on this piece.

After having the island in place in our own kitchen, Mr. Q and I have decided we really don’t have room for a kitchen island.  So, this one is for sale?  How about you, do you have space to fill in your kitchen?

Remember the cane back chairs I picked up a while back?

Well, they are promised to one of my favorite customers, Nikkii.  We once added up all of the pieces she has purchased from me, and it was in the double digits.

I think the very first piece she purchased from me was this bed, back in my pre-blog days.

 She also has the Duncan Phyfe sideboard …

and this sweet white dresser …

Not to mention the footboard chalkboard.

Plus a bunch more!

So I am happy to be working on these chairs for her.  I know they will be right at home along with the other pieces she has!

However, they are turning into one of those projects.  The ones where you just keep running into snag after snag.  And they still aren’t done, but I thought I would give you an update (mainly because I don’t have anything else to share today!).

My original plan was to start with removing those arm rest patches so that I could just paint the arms.

Easier said than done.  The Velcro slipcover thingie came right off, but the upholstered arm cover had about 400 million staples holding it in place.  I spent over an hour on the first one, and still had about 20 firmly embedded staples left in the arm that I simply could not get out.  It was time to consider a plan B.  I am going to attempt to re-upholster them.  Miss Mustard makes it look so easy, I hope it is.

Once I made this decision, I decided to go ahead with the painting.  I painted one coat of chalk paint on the first chair, and quickly realized that it was going to be a challenge to cover all of that cane with a brush.  Time for another plan B.

I decided to spray paint the cane first, then cover it with a final coat of chalk paint.  I generally avoid spray painting indoors though, so I had to wait until the weather cooperated so I could haul them outside for this step.  I am not a big fan of spray painted furniture, but when it comes to both cane and wicker, it can often be the best option.

While manhandling the chairs for spray painting, I realized that one of the arms was really wobbly.  I thought I could shore it up by just tightening the screw that holds it in place.  No dice.  I called my handy man/neighbor/furniture miracle worker, Ken, for a consultation.  He decided he could work some magic with glue and by adding an additional screw where the arm meets the chair back.  Since I’m going to paint these, he knew I could patch and paint over the screw head.  Thank goodness for Ken, but of course this was another delay in getting the chairs painted.

Meanwhile, I was working out a plan for the cushions.  Luckily my friend and Carriage House Sale partner, Sue, is a fabulous seamstress who doesn’t mind tackling the occasional sewing job for me.  I sent the cushions home with her along with some drop cloth fabric.  She whipped up some slip-covers for me in no time!

She made them with an unstructured pillow sham-like design, so they could be slipped off and washed.  Since Nikkii has some little ones at home, I know she will appreciate this feature.  Here is the underside, with two ends that overlap so the cushion can be slipped out.

And here is how one looks on a partially finished chair.

Nice, right?

So … progress is being made … but I’m not quite done.

I still need to add another coat of white, distress and wax, then re-cover the arm patches.  I’m hoping to get all of that done this coming weekend.  Wish me luck!

On a related note, for you Fixer Upper fans, remember when I first posted about these chairs and I mentioned that Joanna had used similar chairs in one of her fixer uppers?  Well, she did it again.  In the most recent episode, Asian Ranch, she used them again …

Does she re-use furniture for staging the homes for the show, and then take them back and use them again?

Or does she have a supplier of these chairs that she just goes back to for more?

Does anyone else wonder about this?

And while we’re on the subject of Fixer Upper, did anyone else notice the piano in the Asian Ranch episode?  It came with the house and looked like this …

And they kept it in the house …

See it tucked away back there behind the table?  It’s a little difficult to see in this photo, you can see it a little bit better in the episode, but I think they painted it black.

And I love it.

So now I’m tempted …

What do you think?  Black piano?  I could use MMS Typewriter milk paint.  Do I dare?

I purchased this chippy blue chair many years ago at a garage sale.  I no longer remember what the seat looked like at the time, but I’m sure it was gross.  I’m also sure that the seller thought this thing was ready for the dumpster.  But you know me, I love that chippy factor.  And this one is authentically chippy.

 I recovered the seat with some pretty vintage pink and white fabric and for many years the chair lived in the ‘potting shed’, which became the ‘summer house’, which became the ‘photo cottage’ last year.  At that point, the chippy blue chair became homeless.  I’ve shuffled it around, but it hasn’t really found a spot.  I used it in the photo shoot for this dresser I painted a few months ago.

But it ultimately ended up stashed on the front porch, so during last weekend’s clean up I pulled it out of there.  Taking a close look at it, I realized it was really dirty from all of those years in the cottage out back.  It deserved some attention.  I pulled off the seat, removed the fabric covering and sent it to the washing machine.  Then, I vacuumed off the surface dirt.  Finally I pulled out the magic eraser, and that made all the difference.

Look how much dirt came off, ewwwww …

That was a brand new magic eraser when I started!  Are you now wondering how it is possible that 90% of the time I neglect to take photos of my process, but somehow I managed to get a photo of dirty water for you?  Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with me either.

After cleaning the chair, I re-glued some of the cross pieces at the bottom that had come loose.  Finally, I wanted to add a little protection to the finish so I pulled out the sample of Fusion Beeswax Finish that Homestead House was kind enough to send to me.

I used some torn up flannel sheeting and rubbed the beeswax over the whole chair.  It added a little more sheen to the painted areas, and some much needed moisture to the chipped areas giving the chair a fresher look. I don’t know if you’ve used a magic eraser before, but it does tend to remove the shine from things.  So the beeswax added a really nice lustre back to the chair. This stuff is made with pure natural beeswax and hemp oil.  You could quite literally eat it because it is food safe quality, but honestly, it doesn’t look that appealing as a snack.  I did feel quite comfortable using it indoors with no ventilation though, and now my chippy chair has a little more protection from all that dirt.

Next came deciding what fabric to use on the seat.  I had a couple of options in my stash.  The first was this H & M tea towel.  I liked that it had a blue border, but once I fitted it to the seat, I realized that not much of the blue border would show.

 

Next I tried a dyed grain sack.

I liked this idea in theory, but when I put these together I felt like the richer color of the grain sack overpowered the pretty blue of the chair.  It’s not a bad combination, just not the one I wanted.

Finally I tried an H & M pillow cover that I had on hand.

Ding, ding, ding.  We have a winner folks!

I like how the blue pops with the white fabric on the seat.  And a bunch of french writing?  What’s not to love?

So, a tip for you here.  These 20″ x 20″ pillow covers from H & M are the perfect size for the average chair seat like this one.  They are a mere $5.95 each (plus shipping though).  The problem with H & M is that their inventory seems to go fast.  They still have this style, but only in pink and pale green.  Another style they have that would look great on some chairs is this one:

So, my chippy chair is cleaned up and re-covered and now I just need to decide what to do with it!

 I’m sure I will find a home for it somewhere, and it will probably make its way into future furniture photo shoots.  Wouldn’t it look great paired with a chippy desk?  Maybe I’ll keep it on the front porch for now, it certainly looks nice next to the white hutch.