“A CARD IN A BOX”

Since I love being so crafty- I created a lot of the decorations used at our wedding.  One of my favorites was making our card box.  I wanted it to fit in with that antique feeling I was going for, but was looking for just the right piece.  One day, my husband and I headed up to a vintage store, and there we found an antique dining flatware box.  It had seen better days for sure.  I always try to envision what the story is behind each item.  When I came across this box my mind ran wild with ideas.  Perhaps it had been in a husband and wife’s home for years, and it is where they stored their fine china flatware, and maybe they received the box at their bridal shower or wedding.  How fitting since we were getting married.  Immediately it was a must have- “This is it” moment.  Here is how we found it:

I started by ripping out the inside of the box:

I sanded the box and painted it with Annie Sloan’s chalk paint.  Once it was dried I distressed it and used antique wax to add some depth and seal it.  I used fabric I already had, and then used the thick card stock from a gift bag I had lying around in the closed.  It provided the perfect lining for the drawer.

Now- to accessorize….. For our wedding I wanted to put this on display and stage it.  Here’s how I staged it:

 

By: Renewed Reloved

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Mad Hatter Tea Party

Wow, it has been a while.  The winter was extremely difficult, and I had no place to do any work!  Spring is here, and summer i’m going to go nuts doing work!  It was also my first year of teaching, and that proved to be quite difficult to do both.

Anywayyyyy.  I completed this really awesome custom order.  My client wanted to spice up her dining area.  She had a table with a bench on one side, and wanted chairs around the table to be all different.  There were five dining chairs, each one a different color, and we mixed and matched patterns.  The sixth chair will be used for a side chair.

My client went to a salvage/antique shop and picked a bunch of different chairs.  They were covered in lacquer, and took forever to sand down.  Here is one  of them prepped and ready to go!

When I was ready to paint, I came home one day, and found my paint sprayer hose chews, and when I took a closer look I saw that the cord had been chewed.  My lovely dog Prima must have had a meltdown because she chewed it up! Good thing it wasn’t plugged in.  The shoe is in there just for good measure.

So I had to buy a new paint sprayer, which set me back a bit.  I decided to try a new brand- Black & Decker, and I actually really like it.

It allows me to have a lot more control over the flow of paint, it is super easy to clean, and the price was on the lower end of sprayers.

Each chair needed a new piece of wood for the seat, new foam, and obviously upholstered.

Once assembled, here is how they came out, pretty cool I think!  Here is the purple chair:

Here is the yellow chair:

 

Here is the orange chair:

Here is the green chair:

Here is the blue chair:

Finally, here is the red chair:

Assembly row:

Turned out to be a very cool collection.  I can’t wait to see what it looks like at her kitchen table!

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“HOOSIERVILLE”

For those of you who DON’T know, and it’s ok if you don’t, but Hooverville’s were little shanty towns made by homeless people during the Great Depression.  The poor conditions that came with the Great Depression and it’s affect on the people, and the development of these shanty towns blamed President Hoover, hence the name “Hooverville.”  Ok, so what am I getting at?  This custom order I worked on is a “Hoosier” cabinet, but was in such AWFUL condition, I thought I would do a little play on words and call it “Hoosierville” clever, right? I thought so.

Anyway- this is what I was working with:

Ultimately, the whole thing needed to be reconstructed.  All I had to work with was the frame.  Even in the pictures above, there are pieces of fresh wood that my father and I cut and placed in it.    We cut a new top, new sides, new shelves:

Other repairs needed to be made as well.  The underside of the base was missing one of the ornate pieces.  My dad and I traced the other, and skill sawed a replica. (those are my dad’s hands by the way! haha not mine!)

Alright, the piece has been rebuilt at this point, and was ready for paint.  the doors were a different color the the frame, as requested by the customer.  I suggested that since the piece was so old not to replace the hardware because the holes would NEVER line up the same.  Instead I sprayed them.

A lot of love and labor later…. I have to say the piece came out incredible.

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“Wide Open Acres”

Wondering where the name came from?  The paint color! The paint I used for this piece was called “Cheyenne Green” by Benjamin Moore paints.  This was a custom order, and they had picked the color, and it is one I will definitely be using going forward!

The piece needed a tremendous amount of love, but it had solid bones and beautiful character.  The couple delivered it, I sanded it down a bit to rough up the old finish.

Sanding, prepping, and cleaning left me with a beautiful exposed wood piece.  It was ready to be painted.

The piece was so dry that it took three heavy coats, but once it dried in the last coat covered it real well.

I asked the couple if they wanted the piece distressed, and it wasn’t something that had crossed their mind.  I said there was some incredible detailing on the piece that should be highlighted with some very light distressing.  By distressing the piece, the character was pulled right out!  Signed, sealed, delivered, here is the finished product:

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Check Mate!

I have been holding on this really cool mid-century piece for quite some time, and I knew I wanted to make it unique.  The actual wood had some unique lines.

The hardware was also unique, so I didn’t want to spray them.  All I did was shine them up!  I decided to use two Annie Sloan Chalk Paint colors Coco & Versailles, pictured below.  However, the colors depicted on the website look NOTHING like in real life.

I liked the grain of the wood on the drawers that looked like a checkerboard pattern.  I taped it off, and alternated the colors.

The top also had some unique outlining.  I painted the outside Versailles, and the inside Coco, I hand painted over the black outline that was originally there so it could be seen better.

After I painted all of it, I sealed it with poly acrylic.  I have to say it is so much easier and has a much better sheen that putting on the wax and buffing it.  I slapped on the hardware again, and here was the finished product!

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Chew on this!

One night on my way home from grabbing some drinks with friends, I come across this gorgeous piece of furniture on the side of the road.  I immediately brake, and get out of the car to see it.  The drawers looked to have been gnawed on by a dog or something, and were pretty rough.  I thought free is free, and I could fix it. So what did I do? I called my friend Angelina who was a few minutes behind me, and asked her to help me load it up.  By load it up I mean heavy lifting into her car, god bless her, she went along with it.  I honestly don’t know how we managed to get it in, because it was the tightest fit EVER.  The next day, in natural light I asked myself “what have I gotten myself into?”  I would have to reshape the drawers where it had been previously chewed, and so began the process.

Overall, the piece was really cool, and I love how the doors in the front opened to gorgeous drawers for clothes.

I felt the piece really could be jazzed up, and I went with a color I don’t see often.  It is Annie Sloan Chalk Paint “Scandinavian Pink,” and then highlighted the drawer fronts, elevated pieces on the doors and the interior drawers in Annie Sloan Chalk Paint “Old White.”

I’m looking at these colors, and they look nothing like that in real life.  Anyway.  The piece is finished, and I put on new hardware.  All in all, I think it came out great, and it’s totally different than the plain old painted neutral piece.  Let me know what you think!

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“A Bright Idea!”

Sometimes it takes me a while to come up with a catchy/clever name for my blog post, but this time around it came to me pretty quickly.  I completed a custom order desk for a young girl in high school.  She reminded me a lot of myself- organized, school oriented, diligent, and above all she knew what she wanted.  I met with her and her mother to see and consult over the desk.  It was the young girls great great great grandfather’s (I’m pretty sure that is correct), and it had been sitting in the basement for 17 years.  The young girls parents had planned on doing it, but life happens, and it never got done!  The desk was in rough shape to say the least.  It has been painted years ago, but the paint had semi peeled off, and the bottom legs were missing chunks of wood:

The daughter and her mother asked if I could try to fix the missing wood pieces, and I was obviously up for the challenge.  I probably went through two containers of wood filler.  I had to build up the filler, sand it down, shape it, and repeat.  I did the best I could.  These pictures don’t look so hot because its wood filler, but with the finished product you can’t even see the difference!

Once the piece was sanded and prepped, it was finally ready to be painted.  The girl picked two colors, a nice cream white for the base and a nice bright yellow for the top (hence my “bright idea” blog title…. I know I know, I’m good!).

The desk was completely transformed, it was nice and smooth and freshly painted.  I ever so slightly distressed the detailing of the desk so that it would highlight the intricate work.  The craftsmanship on this desk is incredible, and the creamy white wasn’t doing those details any justice.  The light distressing truly completed it.

We hit a speed bump when it came to the hardware though.  So strange, usually antique pieces don’t have hardware that is standard hole to hole, it’s usually all weird sizes.  Well we ordered some beautiful hardware, but when I went to put them on, they didn’t fit.  We ordered 2.5″ because that is what I measured, but I was off by .5″… how could that be? I didn’t think to measure other drawers because why would they be different? So the mother and daughter went on hunt and found enough 3″ handles to finish he piece right? Wrong. When I delivered the desk, and I was putting on the hardware some of the 3″ handles were too big, and I was right back a the 2.5″ hole to hole spread.  What the???  Yeah, well it turns out that the bottom drawers are a 3″ spread, and the top drawers are 2.5″  so very strange.  Anyway, the pictures below are of the finished piece, but hardware is missing on the top drawers.  The mother and daughter were going to take the time to find a matching set.

     

Upcycled Heirloom

So my mother has had my great grandmother’s picture frames in the shed for as long as I can remember.  When I moved into my first house I took them with me, trying to figure out what to do with them, but instead they stayed in my basement.  When I moved to my new place, and saw the master bathroom with double vanity sink, I knew instantly I would transform the old frames into matching mirrors for the his and hers sink.  Here is what they looked like before:

They were definitely roughed up, but a little bit of patching and love I knew it was fixable.  Years and years of dust and grime had built up on the frames.  I decided it needed a good cleaning, but was afraid to use anything harsh on them.  I stuck with good old dish soap and hot water.

It was an instant improvement!  The chips that were on the frames needed to be patched.  I used wood filler, and did my best to shape some details in it, which proved to be difficult.

  

I decided to use Rustoleum spray in antique bronze.  They came out awesome!!! Once they were all cleaned, patched, and painted, I brought the frames to Wayside Glass to have mirrors put in them.  I was honestly a little nervous that they would not be able to put the mirrors in the frames because they are so old.  However, they managed to do it, and they came out wonderful.  Thanks to my wonderful boyfriend, they were hanged perfectly and they completed the whole vanity look.  Here is the finished product.

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“Worn by the Sea”

One of my returning clients wanted me to re-finish a very old piece of hers.  I loved it the second I saw it.  It was a five drawer dresser, all original hardware, on wheels, and even had cute little key holes:

The piece definitely needed some luvin’.  The inside’s of the drawers had fabric tack-pinned in them, and it looked as though it had been there for 200 years!

My client loved the two tone look I had done on a bedroom set, and thought it would look great on the dresser.  She picked her own colors, and we discussed that the lighter color on the drawers with the darker color on the outside would look best.  Since the hardware fit perfectly, and were quite beautiful, I decided to spray them with good old reliable Rustoleum.

I used my new paint spray gun (yes, I finally have it down ….), and I think the piece came out awesome!  We talked about distressing it ever so slightly to give it that beach look because her house is right on the water in Quincy, Ma hence the “Worn by the Sea” title, fitting I think.  Here is the finished product:

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Sleeping Soundly…. Finally!

WOW, I didn’t think this bedroom set would EVER get done. There were so many problems, I went through two paint guns, and had to purchase another one just to finish the job! Although I absolutely LOVE the way it turned out. I had done some staging for a lovely couple who was moving to North Carolina. They had this 1940’s bedroom set that they weren’t taking with them, and we made arrangements to have it Renewed Reloved. The bedroom set was in wonderful condition, it has really been taken care of over the years.

 

 

I love the original hardware on this set, and knew I was going to keep them untouched.  Ok, so begins the sh*t show.  I lightly sanded all the pieces so the paint would adhere nicely.  I used colors that I had left over from painting my own house.  I try not to use Annie Sloan Chalk Paint if I can help it, no offense.  I used “Mesa Verde Tan” for the outside, and the drawers were down in “White Down,” both by Benjamin Moore.

At first I painted the entire end table “White Down,” but I thought that it was just so boring, and didn’t do the set any justice.  However, I liked the dark original hardware against the off white. I loved the “Mesa Verde Tan” that I used for my master bedroom, and thought it looked really good against the off white.  So there you have it- a two tone set.  So I set up shop, ready to paint.  Little did I know that I would soon have a mental breakdown.

Honestly, every time I tried to attempt to paint this set somethings went wrong.  Both my paint guns stopped working.  Finally the new Wagner one I purchased did the job.  It was a long battle, and a big under taking, but when all said and done I think it came out incredible (yes I am patting myself on the back, but shush).  Check out the finished product.  All of which can be seen and purchased at 23rd & Bird located inside the WinSmith Mill in Norwood, Ma.

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