At Home

This cute bedside table and its match are in their lovely new home. I always love seeing projects inhabiting spaces that fit them so perfectly!

"Samantha"

This is an adorable antique vanity upcycled in a marshmallow white with seafoam accents and moderate distressing. It has a light coat of burnt umber glaze to age it back a bit--not that it needed any help on the aging front.

It's an ancient piece with the original wooden castors. That's old. It was in pretty bad shape with the veneer coming off in strips and the wood layers rippling and bubbling along every seam and corner. So after weeks of mudding, wood filler, and sanding, I got it mostly smoothed out.

I said mostly. Don't look too close...

The drawers stick. But cute paper lining the drawers makes the stickiness inconsequential. Kind of.

To add a little more color, this piece also got the stencil treatment.

Isn't it fun? I have another antique vanity similar to this piece but in better condition if you are interested in having one for your home.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bring On The Color!

                           

Fall is my favorite time of year. BY FAR. My husband doesn't let me start decorating for fall until midnight on August 31st, which is very generous of him, since (as he points out multiple times a day for weeks on end) fall doesn't really start until mostly through September.

This year, as I was pulling scarecrows out of storage in early September, he quietly suggested that I put sunscreen on them. Ok, so maybe it was 90 degrees out in early September.

This deep jewel blue on these nightstands is the perfect color for fall. Nothing highlights it better than warm golds, oranges, and browns. Though it also works well with cinnamony colors in winter and bright, light shades in spring and summer. Let's face it--peacock blue is always a winning color.

I used my usual bold turquoise blue base and highlighted it with a black glaze. Aren't those knobs fun? I have the same ones on my buffet, and my client loved them as much as I did and requested them for these pieces. A good hardware match is always the icing on the cake.

Thanks for stopping by!

Summer Turquoise

Turquoise is a perfect color for any time of year (and very trendy this fall), but summer turquoises are especially fun. This cute little farmhouse table that started out as tired maple is much more dramatic and exciting in its new hue!

Any-Fruit Bread

I know this is a mercenary furniture blog, but I’m including this recipe post because I need it online so I can pin it to my tastebuds board, and because it’s so good that it needs to be shared.

It’s a recipe from an old friend and it merges great taste, creativity, and practicality. Too many pears? Make some Any-Fruit bread. Mushy bananas? Throw them in, too. Try some berries, or some nuts. It turns out lovely every time. At least, so far=)

Joining the Coral Color Ranks

Having an entertainment center is rather a joke for us. We don't even have a flat screen TV yet. We don't have cable, and we watch TV once a month or so when the Braves are on a broadcast channel. We have bunny ears, and not the cute kind.

So for me, upcycling an entertainment center is really just a ploy to add another statement piece to our new family room. Finally, a place to store the blankets and the six DVDs that we own (most of them being Muppet titles).

I'd been on the lookout for an old MCM dresser for quite a while. I loved the piece found by my friend Rachel here, which is gorgeous and too lovely to paint. But it had the look I was going for. So when I found this dresser at Goodwill for twenty bucks, I hauled it home.

We removed the top drawers for components and put holes in the back for wiring. Some fun paper decoupages the inside, which Brian reinforced with thin plywood to support our many TV, cable, and game components DVD player.

Yes, coral is a fad color. But that's the great thing about painting furniture. In a few years, when coral makes us all gag and recoil, I can redo this piece in mauve or goldenrod or whatever happens to be faddish right about then...

I'll include some more pictures when we actually get this piece set up in the family room with our little TV and our freshly painted gray walls.

What pieces in your home make you happy? If you are doing more recoiling than smiling, it's time to get the paint out!

Thanks for stopping by!

In Love

I'm in love with Depression-era furniture--wardrobes, waterfall dressers and vanities, and, most of all, buffets. So I've been on the lookout for the perfect weathered buffet for about a year. I wanted one that was in poor enough condition that I wouldn't mind painting over it.

This beauty came from Craigslist. We picked it up from a gorgeous old farmhouse in downtown Simpsonville.

I viciously sanded off the old, peeled veneer and applied a heavy primer coat...

And then fixed her up with two coats of my favorite shade of peacock blue. Seriously, who doesn't need a peacock blue antique buffet in their house? 

I always freak out at this stage of the restoration. The unglazed color is so bright and almost garish. But then the black glaze goes on...

Catching Up

 New Baby is due in just a few weeks. Along with like ten other babies at church who are all coming within just a couple months of each other. Poor nursery workers. So I've been doing baby bump cakes instead of painting. And participating in the Great Zucchini challenge chronicled here.

Zucchini and feta scones

I don't do the whole pregnancy thing very well. I have memories of my mom effortlessly popping a new baby out every few years or so, with very little said between the time-span of the noticeable bump and the arrival home from the hospital with another sibling. No big deal, this scenario implied.

Of Babies and Buns

Here's a lovely set I did for a friend's new baby boy. I'd rather not say how long ago I started work on these pieces. At the time, I told her about my average two week turnaround time.

But then the morning sickness hit. Yes, that's an announcement.

And our basement flooded. Twice. Like inches deep. I had to redo the bottom parts of all the furniture I had been working on down in the basement. Thankfully, nothing was damaged beyond repair.

I kept getting violently ill when I tried to glaze. Apparently the new Bun doesn't like glaze.