My Latest Project...

About a year and a half ago after I finished my table makeover I started looking for a buffet/sideboard (whatever you'd like to call it) to redo.  I found this gem on Craigslist for $75 and fell in love.  I love the legs/floral details of a French Provincial!

Pardon the fact that I never got a before shot other than the craigslist picture...Also I posted that photo a year and a half ago all gung-ho to get this project started.  I managed to sand the finish off the top of it before putting it into our garage where it sat until the floors were redone in the dining room this past fall.  Then we pulled it into the house and it sat untouched again.  See having a child, a full time job and a photography business plus being pregnant for 9 months of that time = Amber accomplishing NOTHING.  I was having a hard time deciding what color to paint it also, I didn't know if I wanted it to match the antique white of my chairs or the turquoise of my table with a wood top.  It took me a while to decide and commit to which way I was going to go with the color. Anyway while I sat here on medical leave before Alex was born I got sick of looking at a half finished project one day and decided to bust out the paint brushes and get my butt in gear.  As much in gear as an overdue pregnant lady can get. 

I did a quick wipe down of all the surfaces that I was going to paint with the liquid deglosser before adding a coat of primer (I used Zinsser Bulls eye 1-2-3)  After primer I went for my trusty quart of Cozumel (turquoise) which is getting pretty low these days after a table, dresser, large photo frame, large mirror and now buffet.  I applied two coats and then went back and did a third touch up coat where needed.  I'm not sure why I bothered seeing how I planned to distress this piece anyhow but the OCD in me just couldn't handle not making it perfect.

Then because I was ginormously pregnant (see OVERDUE and miserable)  I put the drawers back like this so that it could have days to dry and I decided that sanding/staning/poly should probably wait until after I had the baby.  For some reason it just sounded like a bad idea to do those thing pregnant.  So it sat like this for a few weeks:

 After Alex was born, and about 4 weeks old I again got sick of spending my day in a house with an unfinished project and I decided to get it done.  Of course this is Michigan and it's like perpetual winter...I usually use my palm sander to do my distressing on projects but since I seemed to have left it out in the shed and couldn't find it quickly enough to not be freezing or ran off by he squirrels who have taken over my shed this winter..grr.  I gave up and went to town with some sanding blocks and sand paper....

After I was happy with the distressing, I got out my can of Minwax Walnut (I use walnut on EVERYTHING mostly because I like dark wood stain, and I wanted this to closely match my table that I had previously done in walnut.)  Everything got coated with stain and allowed to sit on the painted surfaces for about 10 minutes...a little longer on the drawers (and it was not easy to wipe back off) because an Alex baby needed fed.

After the 10 minutes I used some old rags to wipe off the excess stain that hadn't soaked into the wood/painted areas.  I thought I would need to do more than one coat of stain on the top but it soaked it up so well the first time that I didn't need more.

I allowed the stain to dry for 24 hours and the next day I applied Polyurethane to the entire buffett.  This time I used Minwax Polycrylic, which is not what I had used in the past which was Minwax Oil-modified Polyurethane.  I applied two coats without sanding between to the painted surfaces and to the stained top I did 4 coats sanding with 220 grit in between coats.  I allowed 3 days for the poly to dry before I placed anything on the top of the buffet and before I closed the drawers fully or put the doors back on the cabinet ends.   I didn't want anything sticking because it didn't have adequate time to dry!

While I waited for it to cure I grabbed all the hardware and gave it a good bath in some dawn to remove any grease.  After they had some time out in the sun to dry thoroughly I sprayed them all with Rust-Oleum Oil Rubbed Bronze paint.  I love the way they turned out. 

 And now housing some of my Pyrex collection..

I notice that this color is incredibly hard to capture in a photo I think the second to last photo, the pulled back shot is the closest to true color along with the close up of the drawer pull.

Go make something!

Before the days of Pinterest (seriously they existed) I had more bookmarks in folders than anyone should ever have on their computer.  One of them included this image:

Source

that I had found on a blog in 2010.  I fell in love and I had been wanting to replace our freebie table for years.  After reading how they redid I decided I could do it too!  So I scoured Craigslist for the perfect table  I came across a ton of them but I am cheap frugal, and I wanted something low cost if I was going to strip it down anyway.  Last June I finally came across this gem:

You can read about that here:

http://ayanovich.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-newest-project.html

After I refinished the table:

http://ayanovich.blogspot.com/2012/06/dining-table-finally-revealed.html

I started working on finding a hodge-podge of chairs for it.  The hard thing was deciding how I wanted to do it, no matching, 2 sets of two, all the same color, all different?  I finally decided to just see what I could find cheaply.  First I found a set of  four wobbly well loved pressed back chairs on a local for sale board on FB for $15.

http://ayanovich.blogspot.com/2012/09/trash-to-treasure-tuesday.html

Out of the four only one of them was really sturdy so I refinished that one and a highchair that I picked up off the same board from someone else for $10.

And then it took me nine more months to sturdy up a 2nd chair out of that bunch of wobbly ones and also luck upon a garage sale selling two similar-ish press back chairs for $4 each!

http://ayanovich.blogspot.com/2013/06/another-weekend-has-ended.html

So now that I have it all together I thought I would post a final product post.

Here she is:

Not to shabby, and I love it much, much more than anything I ever could have purchased in the store!


Breakdown:

Table (craiglist) $15.00
Sanding pads (hardware store) roughly $15
Teal (Cozumel by Behr) Paint 1Qt - left over from previous project
1qt Walnut stain by minwax - $8.00
2 chairs (FB sale) - $15
1 Highchair (FB sale) - $10
2 chairs garage sale - $8
1 qt  Zinzer 1.2.3. primer - $9.50
1qt Olympic One in Heavy Cream- $12
1 Gallon of  Minwax oil-modified polyurethane in semi-gloss - left over from Addison's bedroom floors

Total Cost: about  $95.00
And I have plenty of leftover stain which I have used on multiple projects more than 1/2 quart of the Cozumel and
 hopefully enough of the Heavy cream for me to redo this craigslist find:

And just for fun, lets remember how pretty this room was just 2 years ago....

Dining room make over

Ugh.  Next, replace gross carpet!