Blue, clawfoot chair

I found this chair at a yard sale, in a barn, way out in the country. It was filthy but I could see the potential.  The leather padding on the seat was still intact, it had neat claw feet, and it was actually comfortable.

After cleaning 2 lbs of dirt from it, I taped off the leather seat with frog tape so I wouldn't get paint on it. I then gave it 3 coats of chalk paint, distressed it, glazed it (I didn't want it to lose the vintage feel) and coated it with wax a few times to protect it.

Of course I forgot to take the before picture!  Here is the after.

It's going on craigslist tomorrow but if any of my subscribers want first dibs, I'm asking $40.

Creating a bedroom

This little table intrigued me with it's unusual shape, so I picked it up at a little country yard sale.  It was an ugly brown and terribly scratched up.

I mixed up a little chalk paint using Sherwin Williams Dishy Coral, distressed it and glazed it. Super cute!

The lady that bought my blue desk purchased this for her daughter's bedroom night stand. She brought over her quilt to see if it matched:  it had the turquoise that matched the desk perfectly and the coral table was a perfect match also.

She was also the one I did the cream "dresser from hell" for. She picked up the dresser yesterday and is going to send me pictures of the room once it's all completed.

I can't wait to see! I'm so excited that this cutie patootie's little bedroom is going to be made up with some of my pieces.  (Monica, if your reading this let me know if it's alright for me to post the pictures on here too.)

Not mine anymore

I got a cute little three shelf bookcase at an estate sale. I thought it would be about the right size for a child's bedroom.

So I decided not to go my usual route with the distressing and making it look aged. I went for a bright sunny yellow and painted the back of the shelves white.

It looked a bit boring, so I decided I would try my hand at stenciling. I found a sweet one with flowers thinking it couldn't be very hard could it? Well let's just say my flowers looked like big yellow blobs. Not so cute.

So I painted over them and waited for it to dry.

Second attempt: better than blobs but still not flowers.

I painted over them again and waited.

So apparently, with stenciling the less paint on your brush the better. Third attempt looked really good! I slapped on some poly and had a darling little bookshelf perfect for a little girls room.

A few hours after listing it I got a call that they would pick it up that night but she was asking all about chalk paint and how it worked. I thought maybe the lady was wanting to learn how to do it herself.

When she came to pick it up she told be she needed to know what the chalk paint was made of because she was going to paint over it!!!! 

OMG!! She was going to paint over my perfect little flowers! She apparently had a son and wanted a red bookshelf.

So sad. I guess money is money.  We made the sale, my girly bookshelf became her property, and she could do whatever she liked with it.

If I had known that was the case I would have left it the ugly brown it started out to be. I guess you never really know what anyone is going to do with the piece you have slaved over anyway. I might be appalled at what some of my pieces look like now.

In my mind however, they all still look just the way they did when the left my house.

Sometimes ... a deal is not a deal

You know the saying "if it's too good to be true it probably is"? On this project I learned this the hard way.

I found this great deal on craigslist. It was a vanity with a cute circular mirror and an upright dresser with great carving from the 1930's.  $40 for the pair!  I talked my hubby into going to take a look at them (which is code for "Shanna's going to buy these").

We got there, and they were so cute! The only problem was that they were coated in lots of paint. Not just lots of paint, but lots and lots. My hubby tells me walk away. But no, I knew I could transform them.  As hard as it is for me to say this, it turns out that sometimes husbands are r-r-r-r-right.

The reason I use chalk paint is that I don't like to sand. I have rheumatoid arthritis and the sanding hurts my wrists. So the chalk paint is perfect because it adheres to anything and you don't have to sand beforehand.

These paint-saturated pieces had to be sanded.  There were big chunks for paint missing and if I painted over it, it would never be even.

Once home I coated the whole dresser with stripper and waited.  And waited.  And waited. Nothing happened, no paint bubbling up, no globs to melted paint-sludge oozing down the sides, nothing.

They had coated this in so many layers of what I guess was spray paint that it turned into a thick rubbery coating. Stripper, stripper and more stripper and nothing.

I had to peel the entire dresser by hand. Did I mention that I had to do this on the deck in 105 degree Kansas heat (which means wind and humidity to boot)?

It took me weeks. Once the spray paint was off, I realized underneath was 3 coats of oil based paint (which turned to goo when the stripper was on it) and for an extra treat several coats of latexy something under that.

I hated this dresser. I literally would have set a match to it or taken out some Office Space type of assault, but a super nice lady who bought two of my pieces for her darling daughter's bedroom wanted an upright dresser also and at the time this was the only one I had.

Long story short, it turned out to be a nice piece. I painted it an ivory color and once distressed, it was the right amount of rustic charm.

Now if you figured out how much I would have had to charge her to make all my hours pay off it would have had to be around the $3000 range but you live and you learn and you never buy furniture you have to strip.

Oh and if you're wondering where the cute vanity is that went with it? It's in my basement where it will probably be for the next 10 years or until I loose my mind again.

Oops I did it again!

Add caption

I love having before and after pictures of all of my projects. Some of them are really challenging and I felt like giving up in the middle of it. Once it's finished I like to look back at how crudy it looked before and I feel like it was worth it.

Here's my problem...I can never remember to take the before picture! I get excited about starting something new and once I have slapped a coat of paint on it, I remember that I forgot the before picture.

Look what my husband put on my studio wall to help me remember. You would think that would be enough to help me remember right? Nope. I have still forgot at least 4 times since he put that on the wall.

I need to focus. With a teenage daughter, all her friends, a cat and three dogs running around here sometimes it's hard.


This table is another great garage sale find for $4. It is a pretty, three tiered, really old table. I painted this one a hundred times. The original stain kept bleeding through. I have found that on some extremely old pieces that will happen. Sometimes they have had some water damage and that makes them bleed.

I painted it a really pretty aqua, distressed it and when I glazed it, it made the paint start peeling off for some reason. Uh Oh! I was half way through glazing so I couldn't stop then. The longer the glaze sat on it the more the paint peeled off.

So I decided the only thing I could do was move fast. It was the fastest I ever glazed before. Once I was finished it still looked really good. Yes, it was maybe a little more distressed than I thought it was going to be due to the paint peeling off, but it turned out to be a really sweet little table.

In the beginning, when I started a project, I would have a vision of what it would look like in the end and I would freak out if things went wrong. I am starting to learn that things happen. Paint doesn't always look the way it did in the can. Glaze can turn your paint pink. Paint can glob up and you have to start over. I've learned you just have to roll with it, and sometimes (most of the time) the project turns out better than I thought.

Leave well enough alone

I got this cute little round vintage table at a garage sale for a song. It was an ugly, orangey (is that a word?) brown.

I mixed a up a pretty turquoise paint, did several coats, distressed it and it looked pretty good. Then I thought maybe I should distress a spot right on the top in the middle. I rubbed and not much happened so I rubbed a bit more.

A HUGE chunk just peeled off. Ugh!!

So here's my pretty little table with the ugly orangey brown showing right through the top. So I tried to cover it up with some paint. No luck, how about a little more paint? You could still see it. So I had to redo the entire top of it all over again.

Like I said, every project that I do has some element of disaster to it. Some are large and some are small. I have so many projects where the piece looks great, but I think I need to tweak it here or there and that's when things go awry.

I need to just leave things alone.

Anyway, the table turned out really cute, and a nice lady bought it. I forgot to take a before picture (again!). So here's the after.

Should have stayed in bed...

You know when you have one of those days where everything seems to go wrong? That was today for me. Before I was even out of bed I had a grouchy teenager yelling at me that I had washed the wrong shorts for her last night. Pretty sure she was lucky I washed any shorts for her.

My husband's car was being worked on, so after having only two hours of sleep last night (insomnia) I had to take my daughter to school and him to work. I had a doctor's appointment so I had to kill and hour and 1/2. So of course I went to some yard sales. They were total duds.

I arrived at my doctor's appointment and they informed me that she was in surgery and I would have to come back tomorrow. Seriously? I was so tired and cranky at that point I thought the reception's unwillingness to pull my doctor out of an operation for me would result in her own would need for a teeny bit of surgery.

Anyway, I drove 15 minutes back home and as I'm pulling into the driveway my aunt calls with a tip on a great desk which was all the way across town. Of course it was.

So I flip around, find this desk (in a questionable part of town) and ask if anyone can help me load it into my car. The nice lady said she would help but she had a bad back. So she helped me but it was basically with all the strength that her pinky finger had. This is a seriously heavy desk to lift alone.

So by the time I was finished I was drenched in sweat. This desk had apparently been HEAVILY smoked around for the last 50 years and now my car stinks like an ashtray. So I finally get home, try to take a nap, and in one hour of rest I get six phone calls.

So much for the nap. Anyway that's enough of my crabby rant.

On a brighter note this is a little stand I got at a yard sale for $4. It was an ugly chocolate brown. I used a pretty aqua on it, distressed, glazed and waxed.