Friday, February 25, 2011

Better Now than Never


These are for Shannon since she suggested I still post my Halloween decorations.
The leaf garland around the door is from Joa
nn's.

All the real pumpkins were from Wal-mart.
The wicker lighted pumpkins were from Hobby Lobby.
The fake crows were from the Halloween costume store.
The black lanterns were from Trees and Trends when it was still open. I almost spray painted them before Halloween and then I saw my inspiration picture and decided to keep them for Halloween. The black urns are from Home Depot.


This is my inspiration picture from Pottery Barn of course.
On a side note, I hope you can see these pictures. On my last post there are some blue squares with question marks. Anyone know why?

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Before and After Chair

Before:


After:
This chair was one of my last flea market finds. I've kind of shied away from any more big project/finds just because they are so time consuming and time is hard to find these days. I use to see some things and say,"I can make that look just like that one thing for a quarter of the price." Now it's, "Well maybe I should just buy it cause then it won't sit in my garage for 6 months."
Well it took me about six months or so to get this chair done, it could have been more. It sat in my garage for about 5 months and 3 weeks and then the other week I started stripping the white and gold paint off of the wood frame. I originally was going to sand it, but the details on the wood were so little that I couldn't get in all the cracks with a sander. And after stripping it I realized how much paint was on the chair too. It took me about a week of about two hours each day applying stripper from a spray can. I started with one that you apply with a brush but that wasn't very affective. So I used this spray kind, Klean-Strip brand:

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I placed the chair on layers of plastic and paper to protect the floor, but if you have a thick drop cloth that would have worked better. The stripper is very potent and chemically.
I sprayed it on and let it sit for about 20 min. then came back with a plastic scrapping tool and started to scrape the paint off. I repeated this step probably four times.
When I got to the last couple of times I used a wired brush to get some paint out of the fine details like the flowers and arm handles.
My plan was to get all of the paint off but I had repeated previous the step so many times that I was going to leave it as a weathered look.
I ended up taking it outside too, and spraying it off with the sprayer on the hose because some of those pieces just wouldn't come off cleanly after rubbing down with a clean dry cloth.
Keep in mind this was all before I took it to the re-upholsterer. So I didn't mind if anything, including the chemicals and water got on that fabric.
Then I ended up rubbing on a teak oil to finish it off (from Lowes)

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before it got reupholstered, so it won't stain the white fabric. I thought about using a wood stain, but I'm kind of into the whole unfinished wood look right now, and I couldn't find a stain color that I could commit too.
And that's the latest project. Let me know if you have any questions if you are thinking about redoing any furniture. Happy Wednesday.
PS- Is this text font hard to read? I really love it but let me know what you think.