Melissa's Armoir

My good friend Melissa asked me to paint one of her armoirs. It was mid summer when I agreed to it, and late summer when I finished it. It was a labor of love...

The Greens

These are also hand-me downs, but I have no idea where they came from. It was funny how I didn't realize how messed up they were until I painted them.

More Furniture

The air is cool, sort of, the Arizona winter is here. As I type a soft rain is falling steadily, a cool breeze lazily twirling through my open window. It's a lovely night, the kids and husband are asleep, and I have time to blog.







It's also the time of year that my garage is a hospitable place again. I am excited to be back in the furniture business.







I started this year by doing what I have been thinking about doing for some time. After moving ten times in ten years, my wood furniture is MESSED UP. It's what I call, BTH... or beat to H***. So I decided to banish the dents and scuffs and dried milk and Sharpie with a little sandpaper and paint.







I started with my bedroom dresser. It was in my parents bedroom all my childhood, I remember. It was in my brother and sister in law's (Brent and Emily) bedroom for a few years. Emily actually put the cute silver knobs on it.

I picked red paint... it turned out great and looks good in my room....

Dress Up Clothes... Where to Put Them All?

Elli is slowly accumulating donated dress up clothes and I have been stuffing them in a plastic drawer. I have been looking for a bench with a lid at all the garage sales. Last Saturday I went with my friend Molly to a community garage sale (basically where multiple households set stuff out in their driveway and you just putt putt around the neighborhood instead of chasing single sales all over the valley.) We hit the jackpot that day. It was really fun finding great deals all over the place and trying to find a way to stack our treasures in the back of Newell's truck. At one point we were trying to use these old straps that Newell gets working in seconds, and it took us half an hour to figure out the old metal gears. I mentioned we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies at the end of the day with all our furniture over-flowing.

I saw this bench and when the owner shrugged and said I could have it for $5 I knew I had found the one I had been looking for. They had let their (hopefully) daughters use cheap craft paint and glob on layer after layer of letters and hand prints and other indistinguishable markings. We stood there for awhile trying to figure out what the writing on the front said. I understand the concept of encouraging creativity, but I must be a bad parent because seeing this thing in my daughter's room every day would literally be painful for me.
So I carefully washed off what looked like pizza sauce and other unmentionables, and sanded it down numerous times until the wood grain started to resurface. Then I painted it all black and let it sit in the garage for a few days. I don't like to sound like a cheesy artist, but I would stand there for a few minutes at a time, walk around it, and let it speak to me. I tried to imagine what the structure wanted. I decided to decoupage a portion of it and then I went to Hobby Lobby with my friend Kris. As I was browsing the scrapbook paper section I saw a large package of gems in swirling patterns for $5.99. I grabbed those, some paper, and some Modge Podge (Dumb name, I know. Seriously, who thought of that? But it's a life saver for any crafter...).

So the bench is done, complete with a red crystal knob on top. Elli just sits on it all the time, singing and playing with her toys. I think the bench still needs something, but I will wait for it to tell me what it is...

Go out and try this! Happy Decoupaging...

Elli

Mother's Day, in the car on the way to see my Dad speak in his branch. She is so pretty!

Pretty in Pink

I bought this dresser from a craigslist about two weeks ago. I think I probably paid too much for it at $50, still learning at this point. It's up points are that it's solid real wood and it's large and simple in structure. All the pieces are wood, not plastic. The down points are that it's pine and not heavy hardwood. One thing to remember with wood furniture is that wood that comes from trees that grow quickly, like pine trees for example, is soft and doesn't scratch so much as dent at the slightest trauma. Hard woods come from slow growing, usually deciduous trees. So this would be your maple, hickory, etc. These don't dent, they scratch. Scratches are very easy to sand away. Dents, not so much. Pine is also light and not terribly resistant to breaking.

So, my kind husband drove me out to deep Queen Creek where an eccentric older woman chatted with us about her dogs and repeatedly informed us of her 11 back surgeries. She also rolled her incapacitated husband out of some hidden back room to explain, in detail, his recent experience with suffering a massive stroke. I could practically hear Newell biting his tongue. He hadn't signed on for this.

We brought it home and I began work.



So I went to Walmart thinking I would go with the standard black, but I kept thinking about something my Dad said a long time ago about how I am always painting over wood and how it was a shame that I cover the natural beauty of it. This didn't make me want to refinish this cheap piece of pine furniture, because I personally think wood grain is out of fashion right now. But it made me think about changing it up a little. I don't know how my Dad's voice in my head helped me pick out this color, but it did.

It's called Ballet Slipper and it's a Krylon color. I think it's really perfect for a certain kind of bedroom. Pink is my favorite color, has been all my life. I hope that when I am 90 and drooling I still prefer pink roses over white. It's a little bit of the little girl in all of us women.

Dresser and Armoir--- Fun in my Garage

I picked up two more pieces from Goodwill. I keep thinking about those "before and after" shows like Design on a Dime and Designed to Sell. We all like them... some of us more than others. I would put myself in the more category. I am ashamed to say I even enjoyed Extreme Makeover, the regular edition. The one where they mangled people and made them look like strange plastic versions of themselves. I liked the before and after aspect of it. So here are two ugly girls in need of plastic surgery. The Armoir portion comes tomorrow.

The dresser struck me just because it was unusual and was, once again, solid wood with the dovetail construction on the backs of the drawers. It is also unusual because it is tall and narrow. It was a little pricey for Goodwill at $40, but I didn't see anything else there that day. I broke one of my own rules, which is, always be willing to walk out empty handed.

So I brought her home and sanded her down, meanwhile discovering the scent of cedar during the sanding. Then Newell came home and pointed out a few indicators showing this was a home made piece. I probably would not have bought it if I would have known that. I am trying to see if I can turn this hobby into a money making venture, and I think the style of the piece is a little unplaceable. I listed it on craigslist and didn't know what to call it. Not shabby chic, not classical, certainly not french provincial.

But I do feel some satisfaction in one thing. As I carefully cleaned and sanded and painted and fixed this piece, I thought over and over again about the carpenter. I am sure he made it in his shop, carefully planed and then sanded and stained each individual piece. Then he carved a pretty design in each door. No doubt he was making it for someone, I would guess a woman, maybe a wife or daughter, and no doubt he thought about her as he made it. He put thought into it's natural beauty, the waving lines of the cedar planks, and made the shiny finish perfect for her. It made me think about love and the things we do for each other. Then it was used, certainly for years, maybe even decades, and maybe passed down. Then in became antiquated, supposedly "ugly," and then someone dropped it off at the donations center at the Queen Creek Goodwill. It reminded me of the Velveteen Rabbit.

But I digress... here are the Before and After photos. Enjoy.

Updated Family Shots

Some of you see our family almost every day, some of you do not. All my blog posts feature very old pictures. Here are a few so that you can see what we look like now. The blog will not always be just decorating stuff... promise.

Another Project...

I really enjoy refinishing wood furniture, it's a hobby that I picked up recently. My friend Rachele, that I have mentioned before, paints professionally and she taught me a few tricks and now I am hooked. Newell and I decided to try buying old, neglected beauties, and fixing them up and selling them. I found this old dresser at Goodwill for $25 and then bought about $12 worth of spray paint. When I saw it my heart skipped a beat. Sitting there, covered in yellow and gold paint and scarred by layers of dirt, dried makeup, and even a substance that looked like caked-on ice cream. There was crayon and nail polish and the paint was scuffed and the wood was even a little dinged up in places, but it was still a diamond in the rough. There was nothing on it that I couldn't cover or fix.

Some of the things I have learned that you must look for are:

• If the drawers slide in and out easily. It's hard to fix the moving pieces of wood furniture. Not impossible, but difficult.




• Avoid a plastic or even wood veneer if it's thin. This will give you limited ability to sand away scratches or nicks in the surface. It's not a deal breaker for me, but finding a solid wood, dove tail constructed piece like this dresser is a wonderful find.




• If the basic shape is good. There is nothing you can do for an orange, oak, flat panel dresser with rounded edge pieces. It's ugly in any color. If I offend, I am sorry.

I love love love Krylon satin paint. I get it at Walmart for $2.79 a can, and it's high quality and the nozzle is incredibly comfortable to use. Most pieces need anywhere from 3 to 6 cans of paint, so it can add up in price and energy used to do the work. They also have a lot of colors. I stick with the ivory and, of course, the black mostly but there are many more to choose from.

There is also a special attachment you can buy that hooks onto a regular spray paint nozzle that works like a trigger. It's great for when you have to use a regular nozzle from a primer, for example. They are plastic and cheap at Home Depot (thanks again Rachele for giving me this tip!).

Ok, so go out and have a refinishing adventure of your own!

P.S.

Goodwill has an interesting structure for their sales. Items are assigned a "week" as they come in. I think this week is like week 17, or something close to it. When an item has been on the shelves for a certain amount of time, I think it's six weeks, it goes through a series of sales as the week progresses. This week the sale items were from week 11. So last Wednesday everything that was week 11 or before that was 50% off. Then Thursday all the week 11 items that were left were (drum roll please) .... ONE DOLLAR. That's right. One buck for sofas, head boards, dressers, DVD players, etc etc. The trick is browsing early. So if something comes out and the warehouse guy in the back priced it too high (like a beat up old dining table for $75) then chances are it will sit for the six weeks and not be purchased. Then, fifty percent off Wednesday comes, and even at $37.50 this table is over-priced. Well, show up at 9 am bright and early on Thursday and that beat up old table (aka diamond in the rough) is all yours for $1. This happens each and every Thursday at your local Goodwill.

Re-Upholstery 101

So I bought these two ugly chairs from craigslist six weeks ago for $20. I was determined to try reupholstery. I liked the idea of getting exactly what I wanted for much less than what I would have to pay if I got exactly what I wanted. I needed to choose my fabric and I was conflicted on what colors I wanted. Again, I really don't want to paint, so I needed to pay attention to the fact that my walls are all white.




I decided to go radically different than anything I had seen recently. My friend Molly helped me choose a beautiful color of pale turquoise at my new favorite fabric store, Home Fabrics on Baseline and Stapely. It also had some gold and chocolate brown in it.

I began to take these chairs apart and was shocked at how difficult this step was. It was hundreds and hundreds of thick, stubborn upholstery staples rammed into hardwood. I just worked on in piece by piece and saved all the fabric for a pattern and slowly got the darned things apart. My mom, wonderful woman that she is, came and helped for three days and stayed all day while I ran between kids emergencies and upholstery duties.


Basically, if you want to do this yourself, you have to have time, patience, and some skills with a sewing machine (or a mother who does). Things you should avoid to keep things simple: custom made piping, overstuffed cushions involving lots of seams (the kind that are sewn onto the back of the couch or chair), skirts, and patterns with a large area of repeat, meaning look at the repeating pattern of your new fabric and if there is more than six inches between repeats, you will end up throwing a lot of fabric away. Also stripes and plaids become crooked easily and look terrible, so be prepared for this. I ignored most of these rules and lived to regret it. It was about 13 yards of fabric when all was said and done, and the fabric I chose was just under $7 a yard.


I bought four throw pillow at Ross for $34 and now the project is complete. The whole thing probably cost me $180, including an ottoman that I have all the fabric for but haven't gotten around to finishing. It's a pretty good price considering they are the perfect shape, color, and size for what I wanted. Usually when you are on a budget you must compromise what you want for what you can afford. Not so much this time. Many thanks to my mom, Molly, and my husband for putting up with the mess for six weeks.

Adventures in Decorating

I recently moved into a ward that is full of fabulous decorators. I feel we LDS women with large families and small budgets are part of a new movement I call "Recession Chic." I have been inspired to hunt out the best possible deals and have been schooled by my friends and family at watching the local bargain hot spots.

I have been attempting to decorate Jennie's room for months, and not having much success. The fact that her room is full of white furniture and since I really did not want to paint (We are renters and our landlord is OK with painting, but I don't like investing time and money into something else's house) I had to make do.

She loves the whole Paris trend, and since it is a trend there is a lot of little odds and ends at places like Hobby Lobby and Ross. I decided on black and white with very few red accents.

I started by painting the dressers, one which was high quality and had been in my bedroom when I was Jennie's age, but had been unsuccessfully stripped and looked like it was covered in dried tree sap. The other I painted for Elli's nursery when she was a baby, and it was an ugly color of blue. I painted them both black with regular glossy latex paint and a paint brush.

My good friend Rachele Oram later informed me that the best way to paint furniture is to sand, prime and paint, using spray paint in a satin finish. She said that all spray paint is oil based, and therefore is more durable and has a better finish. I wish I could go back in time and paint those two pieces, yet again. They are the only Frankenstein pieces in my whole house... and I probably need to sand them to death and just start over. But they look alright from a distance.

Then my mom bought Jennie's bed spread for her birthday, and I finally had a place to start, an inspiration. I brought out all her white furniture, other than her headboard and footboard, and painted it all black, this time using Rachele's advice. They turned out much better, even over Ikea's part plastic, part organic finish.

That same morning I had been out with friends checking out local garage sales, and we stumbled into a boutique right in our neighborhood where I spotted a great idea for bow/flower storage. My friend Kris took a sneaky look at the back of it and it was just a small canvas, covered in batting and fabric, and covered in different colors of ribbons. All of it was just stapled on.

I had a 40% off coupon for Michaels, so I grabbed a $20 canvas, slightly larger than the inspiration piece, for just over $12 and then ran next door to Target and bought a $5 satin pillow case that was black with white polka dots. I probably could have done better than that at a fabric store since it wasn't more than a half yard, but I was short on time. Then I gathered all the ribbon I could find and began my project. I am not a crafty person, and this took me just over 15 minutes to complete. It looked great for her room and I love the way it turned out.

The room turned out great and Jennies loves it. I actually sat and drew it out on paper in 3D before I started and this really helped me move the project forward. I still need a large horizontal something for over the bed, and a few other things, but Jennie's room is almost finished!

Jennie

These are two of Jennie's closest friends. They are awesome... from left, Savannah, Karly, and Jennie