Furniture refurb projects

Spring is here. A baby is coming soon. Our house has been buzzing with projects lately! Three pieces of furniture have been acquired cheaply/free lately and reinvented before making their way up into our living space.

Unfortunately, I spent quite a bit of time working on redoing my furniture, and almost none of that time was dedicated to taking very good pictures. Oops. But I have a before shot of the top of my new kitchen table here. This is after I sanded the living hell out of it for quite some time in an attempt to even out its complexion and remove a bunch of markings, stains, and writing indentations. 

This was obviously used by kids and teens before my neighbors got evicted and had their stuff tossed out on trash day. Lots of inane words and phrases, and plenty of colored marker stains. My eyes got all wide when I saw it sitting there on the street in the middle of a heap of junk, looking massive and solid and sort of.....Amish style as I drove out of the neighborhood in the morning. By afternoon I had my sister in law there to help me haul it down the street to our garage. I was pregnant. Not very smart.

 My hope was to just sand it down and refinish it with stain and varnish, but the marker and other writing wasn't coming off even as I removed quite a bit of wood with the sander. So instead of grinding it down to nothing, I just went with paint. My imagined color for this was supposed to be charcoal. By the time it was done and in our house it was obviously not charcoal. Or even close. But it's pretty! I used Martha Stewart zinc in case you were interested.

I also made my own furniture wax out of parrafin, coconut oil, and beeswax after buying a tin of miniwax and then reading the "breathe this and you and your unborn child will die!!!" warnings on it. Somehow I didn't expect something that was supposed to be wax to be so toxic. So I sent it back to home depot and researched making my own. We already had beeswax and coconut oil anyway.

The top is made of solid plank wood and visible nails. Kind of neat! Bless my husband and neighbor for bringing it up a flight of narrow, twisty townhouse stairs (those stairs are the devil!) because it is insanely heavy. The drawer alone must weigh more than Violet. 

 

Here's a real life shot of it in the kitchen, taking up more than half of the dining space, and all of my mess to go with it. It's where the magic happens. I LOVE having a table to cut fabric on now. 

 

 

Next up is this gross looking dresser with potential that we got on craigslist for cheap. It's either vintage or antique, I can't really tell, but I liked the interesting design and the low price. We needed to replace the broken down ikea dresser that I had been using for the girls' clothes. Most of the drawers didn't work right, and some not at all. Had to go. 

 

A lot of obsessing over the right shade of gray went into this thing. There were paint samples all over the place from doing our living room, and I slapped all of them on various parts of the dresser. After all of that, I went with the obvious choice of yellow.

 

It was supposed to be more of a mustard, truth be told. But I'm terrible, apparently, at getting the color I'm actually going for. Every time I see the Martha Stewart paint chip card with this shade on it, I always see mustard. But on the dresser, not so much. 

Clover wanted pink. But I'm mean. 

There's another finished item for our baby boy, but yet to be photographed....

I think I'm going to miss sanding and painting and painting and painting in our driveway while my kids play in the neighborhood. Watching a piece of unfortunate furniture or a room transform with a little work, time, and some paint is something I find very gratifying. More rewarding than other domestic things that you do day in and day out, only to do again again. 

Honestly, I don't consider myself to be such a great "homemaker" as I struggle with organization, keeping things tidy, knowing how to decorate, cooking etc, though I do totally love that I'm able to be home to care for my family. Sometimes I feel bad that I really want to be that 50's era mom, and get to stay home to attempt it, while other women may want it but have to work a day job.....yet I feel like I'm reaaaally slow to get very good at it. But there are a few domestic things that I seem to gravitate to naturally. Mostly things that involve a paintbrush, a sewing machine, or my vacuum.