Makeover Monday 2

 

Greetings  on this Monday morning everyone!

Is anyone else enjoying this season of spring like I am? Seriously, what could be better than falling asleep to the sound of spring peepers directly outside your bedroom window and waking up to birdsongs ringing through the woods?

The color green is so vivid this time of year, you can almost smell it! Here and there other colors are bursting forth..it’s like a land of magic. Our God is an awesome God in all his ways. To think that he created these things for our enjoyment is so much more than we, or I, deserve! I praise Him for it.

I love entering my little greenhouse shed and smelling the rich, damp soil of plants. Earlier this year I started some seeds, and though they didn’t all germinate, enough did to give me that feeling of awe and satisfaction at being able to plant a seed and watch it grow!

Here is a peek of my greenhouse from a couple of weeks ago.. (Hopefully I’ll get around to posting some updates soon)

The orange owl is my son’s. He got it this winter while attending a bible study class at church called wise guys. (how fitting, I thought :) ) He planted grass seeds in the owl and enjoys giving him a “haircut.” :)

 

Now, let’s get to the makeovers.. This past week I worked on a number of furniture pieces and I’ll share a few of them with you.

This antique buffet was one of the pieces..

An older piece like this always scares me a little. I try not to mess any piece of furniture up, but a family heirloom like this makes me a little nervous, though I enjoy the challenge.

Speaking of antiques…In the next few weeks I want to share a new and exciting discovery I made with a new product with you all. I got really brave and tried the product for the first time on an old hutch that was built in the 1800s! Thankfully it turned out okay. :)

Anyway, back to the buffet.. I’ve started to use a stain blocker on old pieces like this. It seems some of this old wood will start to show stains once it’s painted. The product I used for this piece is called B-I-N by Zinsser.

I brush it on because I had a bad experience with using it in my sprayer. To this day, I’m not sure if it’s just not meant to be sprayed on, or was it because my sprayer had a little water in it when I added the sealer and it caused the paint to become lumpy and clog my sprayer. (a nightmare to say the least!) So, I use a bristle brush to apply it. It dries super quick, almost too quickly, but once you learn how to work with it, it goes pretty good.

This is how the buffet looked with a coat of B-I-N primer…

I sand the surfaces after the sealer is dry, to even out any brush strokes.

Next, I applied a very light gray, almost white paint, called Spectral. After that was dry, I used the “cheat distress” technique, which is taking a paint marker and coloring the edges or any other areas to distress. In this case, I used black.

I also applied Polycrylic, by Minwax as a topcoat. I sprayed it on.

Again, the before…

After..

I enjoy setting a piece of furniture amongst flowers or other “props” just to see the color or texture combination it creates..

I also painted kitchen chairs for a client. I didn’t get a before picture, but here is the end result. The paint color is a nice gray called Rocky Bluffs.

Happy Monday everyone!

-Mary