The Bedroom

I haven't done anything in here, project-wise;  I just finally got it all together and cleaned up for photographs - and I'm showing off, because I loooooove my bedroom.

Clockwise from the door:

My dresser, the Ikea SONGESAND, which took me nearly two months to find, because it was always out of stock.  Popular one, this thing!

This thing is a big block, but it seems less bulky in a tiny (9x10') room crammed with furniture than I thought it would be.  I love it, though - it's pretty, the finish feels nice, the color is gorgeously dark,  the drawers roll smoothly and quietly, and I have drawer organizers in some of the drawers to help corral my things, which works great.

My vanity, composed of:

•  an old hall console table that I painted
• A $10 Goodwill bathroom medicine cabinet, also painted, which houses things like jewelry, perfumes, beauty products, and hair things. 

The Tilden metal bed from Target, with Ikea bedding, a wooden jali screen from World Market, and an antique side table given to me years ago by a friend.  

As you can see in this pic, I have about a 3.5' walkway around the bed to move in, and that's all. It's a tiny room. But since I'm a person who doesn't really do anything but sleep and get dressed in here (I don't hang out in my room), that's really all I need. 

At the end of the bed is a wee nightstand table that I refinished years ago, the giant mirror from the fireplace at my old house, and my acoustic guitar, Ember (an Ibanez AEW40). The curtains on both windows are Ikea's MATILDA. 

This bedroom, the design of which I've been working on for three years now, makes me feel like a Jane Austen heroine.  I never thought I'd want white walls again, after I moved out of my last apartment in 2004; but I love the feel of this room, and I'm finally happy with it, and finally feel like it's complete. I didn't even have to paint this one myself. 

About that vanity cabinet...

Because I adore my cabinet, and I'm super proud of it, here's some more of it's awesomeness: 

It's made from a bathroom medicine cabinet I got at Goodwill for $10.  I cleaned it thoroughly (and cleaned gum off the inside. Gum! Who does that?), primed it and then painted it black.

The necklaces up top are hung on bronze-colored shower curtain rings on a tension rod that I keep meaning to spray paint to match.

There used to be a second shelf, but I got tired of having to pile my necklaces on it to get the doors to close, so I took it out.

The insides of the doors are painted in black chalkboard paint.  I draw little pictures and write inspirational quotes on them to perk myself up in the mornings.  How Pinterest of me, I know.  Currently, they say:

• "goooob morning", a tribute to Thoughts of Dog
• "I am enough", which is what it says on a ring that a friend gave me, because she said I needed it. ♥ 
• "Always use your full ass!"  Never half-ass anything. 
• "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'" ~ Shawshank Redemption (this is what I tell myself when I'm having a hard time getting off my butt to do things) 

Oops.   Loch Ness Handster.

Art Storage: An Ikea Hack*

In March of 2017, I started refinishing what would become my art table.  I got 2.5 legs stripped, and then had to stop because I broke my foot...and then I never got started again.  This will be one of my next projects, but for the time being, it still works great as an art table. Over the weekend, I picked up a couple of Ikea MOPPEs to create some storage for the top:

The MOPPE comes already assembled, so I didn't have much work to do here.


I stained the entire thing(s) with Minwax's "Dark Walnut", and added knobs and labels.

At the moment, I have butcher paper covering the table surface;  my plan is to make a custom plexiglass top for it once it's done, to protect the wood and so that I can just wipe up paint spatters without damaging the wood - as old as this table is (possibly early 20thC; more likely a 70s or 80s piece made to look like an antique).

Eventually, the table will be stained the same color, and my hope is that the table and MOPPEs will look like a single piece of furniture.

The knobs here are 1/2" button plugs from the hardware store, just glued to the drawer fronts (actually the drawer backs). 

The labels are cardstock from an old sketchbook, affixed with tiny black tacks - an idea I saw on Pinterest.

The end result is enough like a card catalog or apothecary cabinet that I'm kind of in love with them!





For now, though, I am LOVING the MOPPEs!!

Next Up: 

More living room?! 

* I refrained from titling this post “MOPPE It Up”. You’re welcome.

Guest Bath Chandelier - Finished!

I posted here and here about a pair of antique, homemade chandeliers that I was given by a dear friend. I've finished the lily chandelier, which was made by my friend's metal-worker great-grandfather in the 60s.  Here is the before:

It's a four-light candelabra chandelier, originally gold-leafed.  It's 54 years old, and was encrusted with dust and cigarette smoke.  The gold leaf was peeling, and the metal was rusting underneath. The wiring was all good, thankfully, though I did replace the main wire leading up from the center of the fixture to the ceiling mount.  I also scrubbed and sanded the fixture to remove the gold leaf and rust and dirt, bent some of the metal bits back into shape, spray-painted the bulb holders white, and primed, then sprayed the entire fixture in a pale, shiny gold.

My guest bath, meanwhile, had this three-light fixture in it:

Which was pretty, but not fabulous.  I wanted fabulous.  

Here is the after:

Yay!!  I love this SO MUCH!!


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Laura's Home For Wayward Furniture

Wow, I should totally just name this blog that. 

This armoire was given to me by a friend whom I helped move houses last weekend, as she no longer had a space for it.

Neat!   Tall.  Free.  Like.


Idk if you remember the craigslist dresser I refinished and put into my closet when I re-did it in 2012;  I had pulled it out and put it on this wall instead after a while, freeing up some floor space in the closet, and wall space on which to hang a scarf organizer last July.   I've moved it to the opposite side of the bathroom door in the bedroom (you can see the floorplan in the first closet link).  Show you when it doesn't have a pile of junk on top.  ;)

Anyway, this armoire is MUCH better on this wall than the dresser (and pile of blankets next to it in a plastic tub) was.

It needs a wee bit of work.   There's water damage on the top and on both sides, all  of which are thin plywood, and will need to be entirely replaced, one day.

It will also need to be refinished, due to some regular wear-n-tear (regular if you're a family of wampas (and no offense to Moving Friend, it was like this when she got it from Craigslist).

And also some places where the finish has just flat out peeled off.

The design up top is painted on, below the finish layers.  I guess this was supposed to be kind of art-deco-looking?

I can't tell where this thing came from or exactly how old it is.  It's solid oak and oak plywood, with iron locks. There's no maker's mark anywhere, inside or out.  Hm.

Until I get a chance to really put some work into this thing, though, it still makes a great blanket-holder.

You can see the line around the middle where it needs a shelf.

It could use an upper shelf, too.

The least I could do was slap some knobs on it for now, because, I shit you not, I cut my finger on a peeling piece of old, dried varnish at one point when I pried the door open by the edge.  O_O

That'll do, for the time being.  (And yes, they're level.  The picture is a really weird angle).


I'm hoping that I can find some keys for these keyholes, and maybe a keyhole cover for the door on the right in this pic (the lock is in there, but the cover is missing).
So pretty.




So what's the plan?  I have no idea.  Right now the plan is to keep blankets in it until I finish the other nine-million projects I've been doing lately and THEN worry about  

*

One of my "lines" (you know, those things you always say that your friends rib you about - like me painting things blue) is "Hm.  I could put a plant there."  That happened like six hours after I set up this armoire, lol.  So I did this:

P.S. - Don't even think I've forgotten about all those light fixtures I started in January.




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Furniture Restoration FAIL!

I'm trying to sell a piece of furniture on craigslist this week, and I thought I'd talk about it here.  Record it for posterity, as it were.

It sounded great at the time:  an Art Deco-style dresser/vanity from the 30s, complete with mirror and hardware to attach.  The finish had been "updated", but it still had all the original hardware and woodwork.  And it was free - a gift from a family friend.

I love refinishing and restoring old pieces - that's actually how I started out, when I was in my early twenties.  So much history in old furniture, so many stories to tell!  Repaired bits, layers of old finishes, gorgeous wood grain hidden under a grubby patina, children's graffiti, cat scratches and dog chews - this one had burn marks in the back, and the original manufacturer's mark!  It'd also been painted several times through its life...obviously.  I couldn't wait to strip it down and reveal the wood underneath, and put the *perfect* stain on it.

But the various paint jobs it'd received over the years turned out to be a huge problem: as I tried to remove the paint layers, I found that only once had the piece been stripped or scraped or prepared in any way prior to painting - it'd mostly just been covered over and over, and was all full of bumps and smears, bubbles in the finish, hairs and brush bristles painted into the finish!

Most recently, someone had lacquered the CRAP out of the piece- and I mean really lacquered, with layers and layers and sanding and poly-coats and the whole nine yards, not just the "looks like lacquer" spray paint or top-coats you can buy nowadays to achieve the effect easily and quickly.   It looked like whoever did the lacquer job had tried to remove the old paint, but had given up halfway through and just primed then started the lacquer job over a half-painted vanity.  The primer dried really thickly over the painted portions, but soaked almost completely into the bare wood where it'd been sanded. 

That made it impossible to get all of the finish off so that I could restore the wood.  I sanded by hand and with three different machines, I picked and scraped, I used every chemical and natural stripper I could get my hands on, even some new miracle treatment I ordered from TV because I was desperate.  Some areas - one side, the drawer fronts, and most of the top - came completely clean, but only at the cost of the wood veneer that'd originally covered the piece, which, sadly, had to be removed completely from the top, because of this and also because some of it was rotting - and therefore from the drawer fronts, too, so they'd match.  Fortunately, the wood underneath the veneer was pretty decent quality, and sanded up really nicely.   Most of the piece, though, was completely beyond salvage.  I just could not get all the paint off without completely destroying the wood underneath and trashing the entire piece.

So I removed as much as I could, and sanded the rest smooth so that it would take a paint job and still look nice and slick, and painted the whole thing black.  I repaired the joinery on two of the drawers where the dove-tailing had split and separated.  I replaced a scrap of wood on the bottom that'd been used to repair a falling drawer support but which had started to rot, and was failing itself.  I buffed the insides of the drawers smooth again (the grain had warped with age and was very rough), cleaned and oiled the wood to make it nice again and remove an..."interesting" smell in one of them.   The supports that held the mirror onto the vanity, and the mirror frame itself were almost completely rotted through.  I have no idea what happened to them, but at some point they'd suffered some pretty major water damage that the vanity itself hadn't been exposed to.  I threw the mirror frame and supports away, and hung the mirror over the dressing table in my bedroom.

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Art Deco, but it's sad, to me, that someone ruined what was once, and could have been again, a gorgeous, quality piece of woodwork.  Sigh.  It looks alright now, and it's in good shape, for all it's been through, but...it could have been so much more.  I never even replaced the missing hardware - there are duct tape flaps on it so you can get the drawers open.  I never had the heart to even look for new hardware, the thing was so screwed up.  

Its only hope is that some nice person on craigslist will fall in love with it - or at least say to him or herself, "Hey, that could work, for now," or, even better, someone will want to paint it and put spectacular new hardware on it, maybe turn it into an art piece.  Of course, there are a crap-ton of these on my local craigslist right now, so who knows.  Here's hoping.

Poor vanity. I hope it finds a good home. 


Update 7-6-10: It did!   It took a while, but I finally found a buyer for it:  a woman who's buying seven of these old vanities, painting them and updating the hardware and feet to match, and using them as work stations in the salon she's opening up this year!  How cool!  Good luck, Salon Woman! 

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