Beachy Table

I realize that most of you don't come here to see random items of furniture I have desecrated, so I will keep this short and sweet.

I bought $5 antique drop leaf table at garage sale.

Then I completely destroyed my dining room for a few days (I do not work fast).

And ended up with this.

Which I then hauled outside to take pictures.

Yeah, because my dining room was still destroyed.

However, this destruction ended up being ultimately very productive, since it pushed me over the edge of sanity and threw me into an obsessive compulsive daylong cleaning/organizing frenzy. It was one of those days where my children did nothing but watch videos and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and no piece of furniture remained in it's original position, even if it had 400 lbs worth of books in it or 400 lbs. worth of toys underneath it. Jessie wasn't sure if he'd entered the right house when he got home in the wee hours of the morning after that night. He was super mad that I'd moved all that furniture by myself, in a "tickling will be your punishment" kind of way.

Take a gander

at my most recent project.

 Jessie picked this up for me at a neighbor's estate sale a few weeks ago. It looked like this before.

The sweet old lady who owned it had done a very drippy paint job on it probably 40 years ago. She told me she bought this furniture a few years before she was married (late 1940's). I would have liked to take home the whole set, but I had neither the room, nor the budget for it that day.

Since it's a full size headboard, and that size of bed is not used often anymore, I wanted to refinish it with an alternative use in mind. I think pretty headboards make great backdrops for decorating.

Could not wait to cover up that goopy copper paint on the floral detail.

I finished it pretty quickly (for me) once I actually dragged it out and got busy. I did change direction a few times in the process, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.

I originally painted the broad section a mint green, but it looked too crisp after I had antiqued the trim, so I brushed this blue over it, letting the green show through a bit.
 
Then I had fun playing with it on top of my piano for a little photoshoot.

 

Not exactly BHG, but you get the idea.

Farm Table Re-Do

As I've said before, this is most definitely not a DIY blog. But I have continued dabbling in furniture refinishing (at a very leisurely pace), and I have sold two of my projects, one of them being the chair and bench I blogged about before. That helps me feel justified to continue financing my habit.

Jessie and I picked up this table at a garage sale about six weeks ago. It is a solid pine Mexican table, originally purchased at Pier One. It came with four chairs, and the whole set was only $20. From the beginning I planned on changing it to a farm table feel, and that would not match the chairs (They were parsons style, and upholstered in an Aztec print). So I mended their cat-clawed edges and put them on Craigslist (where I recouped the amount spent, times two).

Then (over the course of several weeks) I sanded the tabletop and stained it a dark walnut,

and primed, painted, and antiqued the legs.

The pine has a lot of texture and worm holes in it.

I like the way the stain and dark glaze seeped into it.

The drawer in this table is super cool, and the hardware is awesome and a little rusty.

 I really would like to keep this one, but I bought it with the intention of selling it, so it must be sold. Hopefully it is gone by the end of the weekend. Our dining room is feeling pretty claustrophobic about now, and besides, I've seen what happens to tabletops in this house. I'm a little worried about it's long-term survival in our dining room.

This is the Before:

I liked the rough-hewn look of the original piece, but it had been abused pretty badly, with large parts of the finish flaking off, and paint splattered all over the top.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming....

I promise this will never be a DIY blog. I'm only a dabbler. I do read a couple of those blogs, and they've given me the little shove I needed to take my fate in my hands and actually attempt some things. And I've really been enjoying the sense of accomplishment I get when I do a project that actually has a beginning and an end. It's amazing to finish a job and then be done with it. Most of the things I work really hard at are repetitive tasks that are never really finished (i.e. laundry, dishes, food prep).

The chair and matching stool below are the first pieces of furniture I've ever painted. I painted the old piano bench a few months ago, then re-did it to match the chair more recently. I'm not particularly fond of either of them, so I figured I should practice on them since I didn't care much if they got "ruined". I'm in the middle of a dresser right now that I really hope turns out well, because I do like it.

Here is a before of the chair, which was a $10 estate sale item. It had a nasty flat red vinyl seat too. Sorry about the poor quality cell phone picture.