Armoire Facelift
Armoire Facelift
~A Before & After Story~
I grew up in a small town where sometimes there may have been major appliances on the front porch or in the yard, the house looked like it was falling apart and the grass was a mile high. Not every house was like this of course but the ones that were, caused my eye to twitch. As a teenager, I would drive by some of these eye sores on my way to the high school and I always had a strong urge to paint the house, cut the lawn and call someone to haul off the junk. After a while I learned to ignore it but my type A (a little OCD) personality drove me to dream about getting out of there. I needed pretty and clean surroundings! I guess this urge to perfect space and surroundings drove me to do what I do now and make a career out of helping others achieve the best before and after 's, while saving money at the same time.
Every "project" I finish gives me that feeling of success and a job well done. As I have said many times before and will sound like a broken record, painting for me is like therapy. It is yoga, meditation and work all at the same time and is the best kind of work I could possibly imagine. There is a certain artist in all of us. I've heard many people say, "I don't have a creative bone in my body", to which I laugh because they may have just organized a fabulous get together or created a presentation for work, But maybe some of us don't get the chance to tap into that creativity as much as we could or maybe we are not defining what we do as creative, but all of us have some form of creativity. Even if that creativity is balancing a budget for your household, and trust me when I say most of us have done that and gotten "real" creative when money needs to stretch further.
But I digress, painting is one of the forms of creativity that I can get behind. One of the reasons I find painting furniture fascinating is because it seems to take so little to yield some astonishing results. I have been painting furniture for a long time but I am still amazed at the transformation that takes place in the pieces. This armoire was not any different. I toyed with the idea of what color to paint it. Most of the time, I don't have a real problem with picking colors but this one piece did cause me to evaluate. For one thing, it was a piece made for a kid's room. It was a little different from what I normally paint because it was a manufactured painted piece that had some heavy duty paint over pine. Here is what it looked like before :
It had some water damage around the base and the drawer; where the paint was pulling away from the wood. It took some heavy sanding and scraping to get the chipped paint off and smooth enough to repaint. I decided to paint it gray and then distress it letting the previous white paint come through.
The result was really great and the detail that had previously blended into the all white really popped with the gray and distressing.
I sanded down to the bare wood layer in parts which gave it an even more cottage feel like you see here on the drawer pulls.
I staged the picture with my daughter's ballet leotard and shoes she used when she was 4. That sure did bring back memories! It's so hard to believe that she was that little just 10 short years ago. :(
The pink and gray looked so sweet together. Unfortunately (and I apologize), the lighting wasn't the best in these pics, but I had to go with them based on the time constraint to get this little beauty into our booth at Daisies & Olives Antique Mall. The past two months have been really busy at the store for me and I am refilling this baby every 5 to 7 days. It's become really hard to keep filled because as soon as I put something in, it sells quickly. Therefore, I wasn't too surprised when this armoire sold minutes after we had arranged it in it's new spot. A young woman and her mom bought it for her to use in her apartment, which was another surprise as I pictured it in a little girl's room. But just like that, I had another hole that I needed to fill again! LOL! It's a good problem to have I suppose. I am learning not to stress about it but rather focus on getting as much done as I can and still maintain a balance to work and family life. I am getting better about not putting so much pressure on myself but alas, I am a work in progress! So last week when normally I write a blog post I was working to get the booth filled. (sigh) It can be interesting learning to balance everything in the summer with kiddos home and we seem to be on varying schedules. Although it's busy and a bit chaotic sometimes, I wouldn't change a thing because I love when my kids are home and I love our crazy lives together! So there you go! We are due for some time off together and we plan on taking a whole weekend to hang out together with no work and ALL play! :) Yay!
If you have been following along on this blog journey with me, you know that my son Gram has been helping me and painting furniture while he is home from college. Here is a look at some of the projects he did last week.
Aren't these pieces great? He has done a great job! I'm loving this twin headboard that matched the dresser he did last week.
The dresser sold in 1 day before we could get the matching bed in but he was very happy about it selling.
Our sweet neighbor gave us this headboard and dresser he had planned to take to Goodwill. It was so nice of them and I thought it was a perfect opportunity for Gram to earn some money from his hard work!
I've enjoyed having him home these last few weeks! We have had great fun working together. I do wish the summer would slow down a bit! Does anyone else feel that way? Ah well, I've decided that if I can't control time, I will just have to get every last second out of it I can and enjoy the time we have the best I can. This next week I will be working on getting the hutch to my dresser in the bedroom painted. I will also be shopping for some more good used furniture to paint or refurbish next week to fill the booth! :)
Until next time.....thanks for reading this blog and here's to enjoying every last minute of every day!
Blessings!!!
