q is for quandie

I know I said I would share the completed potting shed project with you guys today, but I’ve been a bit under the weather this week.  No worries, it’s just a cold, but rather than try to push through and do a half-assed job of sharing the final reveal I decided to put that off until next week.  So I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stay tuned for that once again.

In the meantime, I had one last small makeover project to complete my furnishings for the shed so I thought I’d quickly share that today.

My friend/picker Sue found this little plywood chest somewhere.  She initially purchased it for herself and was going to put it on her front porch, but she ultimately found a piece better suited for that spot so she passed this one on to me.

I wasn’t planning on keeping it, it was in the pile of things to makeover and sell.  But as I was completing my work on the potting shed, I decided I needed something next to the wicker chair.  As it turned out, this chest was the perfect size for that spot.

So the next task was to decide what sort of look I wanted for it.  I didn’t want it to compete with the potting bench, and thus, I didn’t want it to be too busy.  So no florals.  I also didn’t want it to match the floor, so I decided no grain sack stripes in the Dried Sage color from the floor.  It will sit next to the green wicker chair, and I didn’t want to match that either, so no green.  After studying the space, I decided that I wanted it to be plain white (ie. Dixie Belle Drop Cloth), but I also wanted to pull in a little of the red from the florals on the bench and the chair seat.  So I went with the ol’ first aide cross in Dixie Belle’s Honky Tonk Red.

After painting the chest with two coats of Drop Cloth, I taped off the cross and gave it two coats of Honky Tonk.

I then added some scraps of wording left over from an old Seeds transfer to the top, and the small ‘1871.’ to the bottom front to give it just a little more detail.

I sealed the piece with a few coats of Dixie Belle’s flat clear coat to protect it.  The spot where it sits is below a window with a screen only, so it will be somewhat exposed to some weather.

Had I been making this chest over to sell, I would have done something with the inside too.  However, I never go the extra mile for my own pieces (are any of you like that?).  I’m just planning to store extra potting soil inside, so no need to get all fancy.

This was really a super quick and easy makeover, accomplished in an afternoon (and despite not feeling well) and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

It’s a perfect fit for the spot next to the chair, and I think it adds just the right touch.

What do you think?

I was digging through old photos the other day looking for a picture of my front porch floor for Monday’s post, and I realized that our front porch was a great example of how a space changes incrementally over time.

When we purchased our home way back in 1988, the front porch was very utilitarian with white walls, trim and ceiling and a grey painted floor.  The previous owners had mainly seemed to use the area as a place to stash stuff.  I was so excited to have an old fashioned three season porch!  And obviously it required wicker furniture!  In addition to the purchase of a set of wicker furniture that included a chaise lounge, a chair, a coffee table, a small round stool and a console table, my friend Sue helped me add a stencil just below the ceiling.

Don’t judge, it was the 80’s.  Stenciling like this was all the rage.

Unfortunately, that’s the only picture I have of the front porch until we got around to giving it a full makeover in 2001.  That was when I painted my first checkerboard floor.

Ahhh, who else remembers Martha Stewart’s Everyday Green paint color?  It was one of my favorites.  Oh, and by the way, this was before I went digital so I only have photos in a scrapbook from this timeframe.  As for that floor, my method was simple.  Paint the entire thing in one color, then measure and mark out the squares with a yardstick and a pencil (this is the trickiest part), then hand-paint in the darker squares.

After painting that floor I realized that the walls looked dingy, so I painted them in Paris Pink.  It was left over from the living room … yep, we had a pink living room back in the day.  What can I say, I was (and really still am) a big fan of the shabby chic movement.  And as you can sort of see in the photo below, I kept the stenciling ‘as is’.

My bff sewed the floral slip covers for the cushions.

This was clearly before I developed my aversion to matchy-matchy furniture sets, although I think I was beginning to realize it wasn’t a good look because I swapped out the wicker console for a china cabinet that I painted white.

These were the early days of my furniture painting, I’m sure I used a latex paint on that cupboard.

Flash forward a decade now to 2011.  I was totally done with the pink.  I’d already repainted the living room, and it was time to get around to the front porch again.  So after repainting the walls and ceiling in a pale aqua blue, and adding a fresh coat of white to the trim, we sanded the floor and gave it a base coat of white followed by black squares.

I remember specifically wanting to make the squares bigger this time around, for some reason I thought those initial green squares were too small.

I was also continuing to whittle away at that matched set of wicker.

The coffee table, small round stool and console table are gone, and I’ve added in a little washstand that I painted myself.

I’d also cut way back on the shaggy, trailing houseplants in favor of a simple orchid and a small fern.

The cushions on the wicker were recovered in a slightly less floral vintage bark cloth.

I also painted over that stenciling in favor of one of my first uses of a transfer when I added this phrase to the crown molding.

Jumping forward to 2014, Mr. Q decided he wanted one of the green Adirondack chairs from our deck on the front porch instead of the wicker chair.

I can’t say that I blame him, it’s certainly far more comfortable.  Our handyman/neighbor Ken went through an Adirondack chair making phase.  He made two of these for us for our deck.  He also made a bunch of them for our neighbor across the street, nnK, one for my sister, a couple for my friend Terri, some for Sue, and we sold a few at our occasional sale too.  I wonder if he kept track of how many he made?  But I digress.

I tried to make the lime green work by adding a throw pillow covered with vintage bark cloth that pulled together the lime green and the aqua, but in reality the color was always a bit jarring.

I’d also changed out the washstand at this point.  It’s not a very obvious change, but if you look at the drawer pulls above you’ll notice that this is different one than the one that was in this space in 2011.  I’ve also swapped out the piece in between the chairs for a chippy old trunk, and recovered the chaise lounge cushion in something more neutral.

Ultimately I just couldn’t live with the lime green though, so the next year I asked Ken to make another Adirondack for us.  I moved the green one back out to the deck and painted the new one white.

That throw pillow is from H & M Home.  They used to have the best stuff in this sort of style, but now they’re leaning heavily towards a mid-mod sort of aesthetic.  Just go look at the throw pillows on their site to see what I mean.  So disappointing.

At this point I also moved my black cupboard into the spot where the washstand was.

In 2019 I added a transfer to the inside back of the cupboard.

I had been contemplating selling this cupboard, but I liked it so much with the transfer that I decided to keep it.

At that time I had swapped out the china cabinet with the fretwork for a small farmhouse table with the base painted in a custom milk paint blend.

I’ve considered placing this desk (that refuses to sell) in that spot …

It would be a perfect fit.

However, this is the spot where I take most of my close up photos in the winter.  It gets great light for that purpose, so I need a neutral surface that I can move around and a small table with casters works perfectly for that.

However, the table top on that original table was less than ideal for that purpose, so I swapped it out for this one.

And that brings us up to the current day.

I do occasionally think I should get rid of that one last remaining wicker piece and find something more comfortable for myself.  Maybe we’d actually sit out here more often if I had a cozier piece of furniture in that spot.  I also should refresh the paint on the floor, I still love the black and white checkerboard but it’s getting pretty dinged up.  No amount of scrubbing with my new Norwex mop is doing the trick.

(that pic is for you Mary, LOL!)

That might be a job for next spring at this point though.

Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with how this space looks for now.

I hope you enjoyed this journey through the evolution of a space over 34 years.  If nothing else, I think this post proves that it takes time to decorate a room with vintage décor.  In addition, I always say that you’re never really ‘done’ decorating your home, it just keeps evolving.  I hope to do some decorating projects over the winter this year, but I haven’t quite decided which space will get priority.  Maybe the bathroom … or the dining room … or possibly we’ll turn the guest room into something more functional.  You’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

As I shared earlier this summer, the small structure in our backyard has seen a number of different ‘uses’ in the 34 years that we’ve lived here.  For a brief while it was even a smoking lounge.  That was back when my brother lived here and we wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, even in January (he has since moved out to Nevada, where he still smokes outside but the weather is a lot more accommodating).

After he moved away, it became a potting shed, and look, I found some old photos of it in my scrapbook.

Yikes!  If that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is.  That was before I painted the ceiling and floor (and developed a more refined aesthetic apparently).  Gosh!  Sometimes I have to look back at these photos to remember how far I’ve come.

Next up, I turned it into a ‘summer house’.

The walls were painted pink, the ceiling got painted white, but the floor was still unpainted.

Obviously I was heavily into my shabby chic period at that time.

That cane back sofa was not terribly comfortable, and I bet I could count on one hand the number of times I actually went out there and sat on it.  Although … forgive me if I digress for a moment … but I did take a nap on that sofa once.  This was shortly after my dad died and while napping there I dreamt that he came into the cottage, sat next to me on the sofa and gently stroked my hair.  I think he was saying goodbye, he always was a man of few words.

Anyway, ultimately I restyled that sofa like this …

and I sold it at one of my occasional sales.

In its latest incarnation, the shed became the photo cottage.

Back in 2014 I completely repainted the interior with a plan for using this space to stage furniture makeover photos.  I went with white walls this time thinking it would create the perfect bright lighting for photos.

I painted a checkerboard pattern on the floor, but I purposely kept it a little more on the subtle side with very pale gray and white squares so it wouldn’t compete with the furniture in photos.

Although I sort of made it work for a little while, ultimately it just didn’t.  I could never get the white balance right.  Red light reflected in from the carriage house turning the walls pink.  The floor would end up looking lavender if I corrected for the walls.

There really was only one very specific time frame in the mornings when the lighting was right to get good photos in there, so in the end I gave up trying to make it work.

For the last several years we have just used the space as a dumping ground.  But we don’t actually ‘need’ it to provide storage space, we have the entire upstairs of the carriage house for that after all.  So I decided to once again turn it back into a potting shed.

It’s unlikely that I’ll actually pot things up inside, but it will make a convenient space for keeping all of my gardening tools and supplies together and easy to find.  Right now they share space with my workshop, so this will also free up some space in there.

Plus, let’s face it, it will just be a fun space to decorate!  I’m thinking I may even decorate it for Christmas this year.  Why not?  I’ve got the time (well, we’ll see about that, I already have three trips planned for this fall/early winter and I may try to squeeze in one more).

The first step was to empty all of the junk back out.  Once I’d done that it became apparent that I’d have to scrape the chipping paint off the walls and re-paint.

I had really hoped to get by without that step, after all, I love chippy paint, right?  Well, maybe not so much on walls.  That’s when things stalled for a bit because I really don’t enjoy scraping paint.  Ugh.

But luckily my friend Annie offered to come over and help with this project and that motivated me to keep going.  Between the two of us we got all of the walls scraped and ready for paint, while also getting caught up on each other’s lives.

As they say, a job worth doing is a job worth doing right.

Once the walls were scraped, I also sanded them with my orbital sander.  Then I primed them with a stain blocking primer and finally painted them with some paint left over from previous projects inside the house.

Fortunately I did not need to repaint the ceiling, it was still in pretty good shape.

And that leads me to the floor.  At this point I realized that this was the perfect time to replace a board in the floor that was weak.  Every time I walked on that board I envisioned falling through the floor and breaking an ankle or something.  It made sense to take care of it.  So I asked my handyman/neighbor Ken to take a look, and he was able to replace the board fairly easily.

I then asked Mr. Q to pretty please sand the floor for me, which he did.  And really, once the floor was sanded it looked pretty good.  It had a nice aged, worn appearance that I liked.  Except of course there was now the problem of that one unpainted board.

It may have been OK if I had the same paint I used originally and could have painted just that board, but of course I couldn’t find this paint anywhere in my stash.  Also, as I thought about it, although I really wanted to retain the checkerboard, I never did like that shade of pale gray I used the first time around.

I’m a huge fan of checkerboard floors.  As you know, I have black and white on my front porch …

And I also have a stained wood version in my kitchen.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound right?  I may as well do it up right.  As my friend Annie mentioned while helping me scrape, I always was good at coloring inside the lines.  So repainting the checkerboard floor in the shed should be a no-brainer.

This time around I decided to use Dixie Belle chalk style paint.  I knew it would adhere well over the latex having painted over latex many times on furniture.  Rather than start over entirely from scratch with a base coat of white, followed by measuring and outlining all of those squares again, instead I carefully painted over all of the white squares in Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth using a good angled brush.

Today’s q tip:  when trying to paint a straight line by hand, without using tape, it’s really important to use a good, angled brush and go slowly.  I purchased a Zibra 2″ angled sash brush at Home Depot and it worked beautifully.

One coat of Drop Cloth was all it took to refresh all of the white squares.  Once they were dry I moved on to picking a color for the grey squares.  After using Dixie Belle’s Dried Sage recently, I totally loved the color.  Rather than looking like a green (which I assumed it would based on the name), it’s really more of a gray with a green undertone.  But just to be sure I would like it, I painted one corner of a square with Dried Sage and one with DB’s French Linen which is more of taupe gray according the the Dixie Belle website.

Ultimately I felt like the Dried Sage was a little dark full strength, so I lightened it up by adding some Drop Cloth and then it was perfect.

To be honest, it kind of surprised me how easy it was to repaint this floor.  Now that I know how simple it was to ‘color inside’ those lines, I’m much more motivated to touch up that black and white porch floor too.

After letting the paint dry for 72 hours, I protected it with several coats of Varathane clear matte water-based poly letting each coat dry for 24 hours in between.  Some of you may remember that we had our upstairs floors refinished a few years ago.  We used a matte finish on them and I still absolutely love them, so I wasn’t afraid to go matte on this floor.  I did a little quick research online and found this article which explains that basically matte poly provides the same durability and protection as shinier versions.  In addition, the higher the sheen, the more scuffs, scratches, and footprints will show.  So hopefully this matte finish will hide a multitude of sins in the potting shed.

Now that I have the painting finished, this week we’ll be moving the furniture back in and getting the potting shed styled.  I’m a little bit nervous to see how my potting bench is going to look with that floor.

Fingers crossed that they work well together.  Be sure to stay tuned for a final reveal post later this week!