Shabby Chic Bistro Table

I always like to keep an eye out for free furniture to refinish.  Sometimes I find things in the free section of craigslist, sometimes things come from free cycle, sometimes a Facebook group, sometimes the local reuse center, sometimes curbside rescue, and sometimes friends.  I have a growing pile of items in my "to be refinished" queue (meaning there is ugly furniture placed strategically all over my house, in my garage, and on my back porch).  Some things are waiting to be fixed up for my house, some I intend to fix up to sell, and some things are simply waiting for something else to complete them.  This set is an example of the latter two.  The table came from a free site (craigslist I think).  It came with cigarette burns and a boy's named carved into the top.  

Not much to look at, but it had drop leaves and was structurally sound.  Without much (any) architectural detail to make it interesting, I knew this table would need a somewhat elaborate paint job and some cute chairs to make it sellable.  Enter my fantastic friends who keep an eye out for me.  Her neighbor was moving out and placing mountains of furniture at the curb.  I made SEVERAL trips and now can't get to the shelves in my garage... lol, eventually I'll finish all of these projects!  At any rate, one of the things I came back with was a pair of cute, petite wooden chairs.  They seemed a good fit.

    

First step, as always, was a good sanding.  Since the woods didn't really match, my intention was to completely paint the chairs and leave the base of the table intact.  I changed my mind when I saw the chairs post sanding.  They looked great just sanded!  Ok, so I guess I'll have to paint the table base.

I painted the entire table with primer  . . . . and the brush left awful deep brush mark grooves everywhere.  Sigh, ok. . . maybe a roller next time, or spray primer.  So I sanded it again.  Nope still there.  So I sanded some more.  grrr.... new lesson learned.  All sandpapers are not created equal, regardless of grit).  The sandpaper from the dollar store sucks.  :P So eventually I sanded away the brush marks, lol, and made my way to my strange assortment of free paints.  There is all sorts of talk on furniture refinishing blogs and whatnot about the best paint and finishes to use for furniture refinishing.  Chalk paint, milk paint, wax, poly, etc.  I have always been more of a "work with what I have" kinda girl.  Acrylic latex house paint?   yep.  That'll do.  I chose some leftovers of colors that I had already mixed for other projects and made some minor adjustments.  To tie the chairs in with the table visually I decided to paint the seats.

I painted the table base, edges and one chair seat with a grayish turquoise, the table top white, and the other chair seat yellow.  Now, for that "elaborate" paint job.  I had been loving stencil work lately, but can't afford to buy the ones for sale on the internet.  No matter, I'm handy with an Xacto knife and it only has to survive one project, so I'll make my own.  I found a picture I liked, printed it out, traced it, and spent an afternoon cutting tiny shapes out of an overhead transparency sheet.  Yeah, that took a while, but it was way more affordable!

Now there are lots of different ways to paint with a stencil, but stippling seems to be the most fool proof for this sort of job.  They, of course, make special round brushes for this purpose.  I just used an old acrylic brush I had in a drawer that had some bulk to it and it seemed to work fine.  I randomly (but somewhat evenly) stenciled blue flowers all over the table top and let it dry.  Then orange, dry.  Then yellow, dry.  I lightly wiped off the stencil between colors but didn't get too crazy.  I would rather have a bit of dried paint on it than tear it after all.  Next the "shabby chic" effect.  I sanded the whole thing down again, making sure to sand some places more than others, especially the edges so it looked like wear and tear.

Since this table was intended for an eat-in kitchen or something of the like, it needed to be able to stand up to use and food.  The chairs needed a little bit of strengthening, so I replaced older somewhat stripped screws with newer slightly larger screws and tightened everything up.  I still needed a clear coat of some sort though.  My original plan was to coat the table top and chair seats with some brushing lacquer that I had picked up from the reuse center for free, but after doing some research I discovered that using that over my paints could end badly.  Apparently the solvents in the brushing lacquer are so strong that it could actually dissolve some of the paints underneath.  Sheesh... that would be disappointing after all that work.  So I bit the bullet and paid full price for a new can of polycrylic.  I know, totally not me right?  But, sometimes you just have to have the right tool for the job.  I followed the instructions on the can precisely, and applied 3 coats to the table top and chair seats.  It worked great.  Here is the before and after of my shabby-chic bistro table! . . . and yes, it is sold.  Hope you like it!

The Garden Bed

Recently, my neighbor across the street moved out and a group of people spent a few weeks cleaning out the house.  Over the course of that time they placed several things at the curb that I brought home.  One of the neatest things they threw out was this Ethan Allen 4 post bed frame.  Of course, it was filthy beyond measure and had a couple of things coming apart, but that's just elbow grease.

I took this picture after I cleaned it and glued the pieces back together, so you can't really see how much work I did there, but suffice it to say that after seeing all the gunk that what was on it I didn't really want to use it in my house for a bed frame.  Instead, I decided to refinish it as a garden "bed" frame.

After sanding the whole thing down I gave it a few coats of exterior paint and added a mesh trellis.  Inside the bed frame I am attempting to grow a container vegetable garden.  I haven't had a lot of luck vegetable gardening in the past, but I am willing to try again!  I figure the bed will look really cute with all sorts of vining vegetables growing on it.

A few months later it has some life!  Still have some issues with my brown thumb, lol.... I think I need to move the whole thing to a more sunny spot (that'll be interesting with my tomato plant all grown up through it).  The bed frame is holding up fairly well to the elements I suppose.  We have had a REALLY wet couple of months and some cracks have appeared in the bed frame from the constant moisture.  I may attempt to fill the cracks with wood filler and put some more exterior paint on it to give it some more life (if it's ever dry long enough)...  but I knew a piece of wood furniture was likely to have a limited life span out in the elements when I started anyway.

Once I get some more landscaping accomplished I plan to move this to a more manicured looking spot with more sunlight.  Everything is still a work in progress around here :).

City Room

When we first moved into our home I decided that this room was one of the worst.  The blue and red is atrocious, there were holes chewed in the wall and door by a large dog, and the carpet smelled like a dog as well.  Unfortunately, we were financially unable to deal with the carpet after putting everything into closing costs, but after some vacuuming and carpet deodorizer the smell seems to have left (yay!).  Eventually I'll get some new carpet, but it'll do for now.

At any rate, This room was high on my priority list, and thus my second project.  First, wall repairs were done.  Spackle does wonders, I even used it to patch the door!  After using Kilz on the entire room (including that lowered bit of the ceiling... seriously who paints the ceiling like that?), I was ready to start on the walls.  At this point I had acquired many different partially full gallons of interior latex acrylic paint in various colors from various sources... Some were the remaining colors from the previous owners, some were gathered from curbside and craigslist, and some were from a local reuse center.  Lots of paint,  but not enough of one color for an entire room... I knew what I wanted (I had a pinterest board full of ideas after all), and I have a good eye for color mixing, so I got out my trusty paint mixing drill attachment and started mixing what I had together.

I knew I wanted a light brown for most of the walls, so I mixed that first (you can make brown out of almost anything).  I had also found a really cute room on Pinterest that had a 3 tone striped wall in turquoise, orange, and green.  No problem there... I added some white to the leftover turquoise from my daughter's room and played a bit with some of the previous owner's leftover gallons of paint for the orange and green.  Believe it or not, those colors are also significantly lightened.  The master bedroom is currently painted entirely dark orange... even the trim (yuck).

This room has a neat little angled wall, so I decided to incorporate that into my next idea.  Who says you can only have one accent wall in a room?!  My son really likes transportation and I wanted to do a mural in his room, so a city seemed to be the way to go. First, I got out my trusty Home Depot yard stick and drew a simple outline in pencil.. A city skyline is mostly straight lines, so with a little bit of measuring, that wasn't so difficult.  I also drew some fun flying vehicles in the sky.  To keep the color scheme of the room from going totally nuts I stuck with a darker brown for the building silhouettes.  This brown was an unaltered left over color from the previous owners.  The trim in the hall bathroom is currently that color... and the walls are dark green.... yep.

So, after painting the buildings dark brown I added details in white.  I didn't want an overly colorful mural with all of the other colors going on in the room.  Cute right?  But, not done yet... this mural needs to glow in the dark!

Insert Martha Stewart's glow in the dark paint.  It's a little pricey for my cheapskate tendencies, but I waited for my 40% off a single item coupon from Joanne's and splurged a bit... plus I have a ton left over for more projects.... I also have a white tank top that looks perfectly clean in the light, but has glowing smudges on it in the dark (a fact which I continually forget when getting dressed, lol).  It took a few coats on the windows and moon, but it didn't take too long to do, and you can't hardly tell that the glow-in-the-dark paint is there during the daytime.  

After finishing the mural, I decided that it needed something else... a road shelf?  sure!  My son loves matchbox cars, so this gives him a fun place to play and interact with his city mural.  Like the shelves in my daughter's room, these are leftover from a cheap bookcase that didn't survive the move.  Because of the location of this shelf (next to the door), I knew that sharp corners would be an issue.  So I traced a curve from a plate and then cut on the line with a jigsaw.  After scuffing the surface up with some sandpaper I painted all sides of the shelf the same color as the mural.  Then I simply painted the road on them.  Surprisingly, several months later, the shelf is still attached to the wall.  I was seriously expecting my son to break it (lol, he is VERY rough on toys and furniture).

The bed in his room is an Ikea bunk bed.  The low profile of his bed works well with the low ceiling.  He has had it for a while so when we moved it was covered in stickers and marker, but it cleaned up pretty nice.  Honestly, I was surprised.  I was expecting to have to paint it.  But after using my favorite Dollar Tree cleaner, Totally Awesome, on it, it looked great (seriously, this stuff will clean anything.  I used it in my art room to get virtually every kind of art supply off of the tables... even sharpie).  The dresser was a refinished garage find (see entry in the furniture section).  All in all, I am much happier with the finished look of this room than I am with my daughter's room.

Of course, it didn't look all nice and polished like that for long... sigh...

The File Cabinet

When we moved into our new home there was an old wooden file cabinet in the garage filled with random garage junk.  I knew that it needed to be my new art supply cabinet, but it needed some help first.  We cleaned out all of the drawers, but when we tried to move it we discovered that it was coming apart on the bottom.  Boo!  So I pulled out all of the drawers and used some scrap lumber to strengthen the structure.  I also removed an ugly locking mechanism and filled some holes.

Next, I set to work on the drawers.  They had some sort of folder locks that slid along a rail that had been pushed all of the way back.  While moving these around to clean them up I discovered something quite unexpected wedged between the panels.

Woah... I wonder how long THAT has been in there....

At any rate, after cleaning the whole thing up I took it out to the back porch for a good sanding and painted the whole thing light grey (with some paint that I had picked up at the local reuse center for free).  I decided to do another project with a chevron pattern.  This time I created a template the exact size of each drawer front on some paper.  Using a graphite transfer method I drew the pattern on each drawer front.  Basically, I scribbled on the back of where the lines were with a pencil and then traced over the lines on the front... essentially like using carbon paper.  I hand painted the chevron in with white paint.  Lastly, a little distressing with the sander.

Now it looked great on the outside!  The inside, however, wasn't designed to hold objects so the bottoms of the drawers were not solid.  No big deal!  I cut some foamcore to the exact size of the drawer bottoms and covered the pieces with dollar store contact paper. Viola!  Now it is filled up with art goodies and ready for use!

Our First Home - the beginning

In the beginning of February 2013, my family of 5 (the youngest just a few days old) closed on our first home.  It was built in the late 70s, needed some work, and a gang of sloppy painting monkeys had been hired to paint half of the rooms in an array of awful dark colors. . . If my doctor had seen me moving boxes and furniture about the house by myself just days after giving birth I'm certain she would have tied me to a chair (or worse).  But who can sit still when you have just moved into the first place that is actually yours?  (I didn't injure myself, but I certainly do not recommend engaging in this sort of physical labor so soon post partum.)  I wanted to get our belongings sorted so that I could begin the house make-over that I had been planning (via Pinterest) for months prior to closing (yes, it took 6 months to close.  Short-sales are evil.).  I began in my daughter's room.  It was one of the worst.

In my haste to begin, I forgot to take a "before" picture of the room, so I grabbed this one from the online listing for the house.  What you can't see here is that there is purple slopped on the ceiling, the white line is just where a piece of masking tape had been placed during painting, and that when all of these posters were pulled down some of the paint went with them. . . also, the walls were filthy and there was writing all over the inside of the door.  Suffice it to say, it needed work.  First, the peeling paint needed to be dealt with.  We decided that we would have to go ahead and peel off the bits that were already peeling.  So with a putty knife I scraped off everything that was loose.  My husband then cleaned the walls with TSP and I went to work patching with spackle.  Since the walls were dark, in bad shape, and glossy we put a coat of kilz over everything.  A word of advice... if you plan on living in the house while doing this, buy the low-odor variety... we didn't, and I learned my lesson.


I had been loving the look of rooms with teal walls, pink furniture, and black and white details on Pinterest.  So, I went that route.  I decided to also try out the Chevron pattern that I continued to see on decorating sites.  It was so edgy!  If you check out my Pinterest boards you may recognize a few other projects in the room.

Most of the things in this room were done seriously "on-the-cheap."  The black curtains were found in the clearance section for dirt cheap and the valance is basically a long tutu from cheap tulle.  The bunting is made from scrapbook paper and yarn that had been laying around unused in my craft supply bin for years.  The desk was originally another clearance find, though at this point the top had been damaged and it needed some touch-up work on the front.  Dollar store contact paper to the rescue!  The wall mounted shelves are sporting that dollar store contact paper as well.  The shelves themselves used to belong to one of those $15 small bookshelves from Walmart.  Unfortunately, the bookcase itself didn't survive the move, but being the forward thinking hoarder recycler that I am, I kept them just in case.  The dresser was a refinishing project (see the page about that in the furniture section), and the frames on top were garbage finds that I spray painted with the leftover paint from the dresser.

I love the chevron, but I don't love the whole room yet... I feel like it needs something else, but it's definitely a lot better than before.  I've decided to come back to this room later with a fresh look after working on some other rooms first. 

Homeschool - the beginning

My first teaching experience was teaching art to a small group of homeschool students.  I loved it so much that I went back to school to be an art teacher.  While in school, I went from having one toddler to having two children who were either beginning school or would be soon.  Even while still earning my degree I decided that I would prefer homeschool for my children, but I wasn't sure how that would work with my chosen profession of art teacher.  After teaching in a public charter school for 3 and a half years and watching my children attend classes there it became even more clear to me that homeschool would be a better option for their learning success.  Though they both had wonderful teachers (who I requested myself), I became convinced that the limitations of a standard classroom setting were holding my kids back from their potential.  Both of them were in the top of their class academically for most subjects and often couldn't move ahead because of a multitude of factors that come with a large class.  Additionally, my extremely smart 4th grade daughter was falling behind in math and I couldn't figure out why.  It seemed to me that somewhere along the line, in an effort to teach to the test, something foundational was rushed through, and without spending a lot of time with her (time I didn't have as a full time art teacher), I couldn't figure out what it was.  My first grade son, on the other hand, is a ball of energy who becomes bored easily.  A bad combo when you are more advanced than most of your class...

I entered my 4th year as an art teacher pregnant with my third child with all of this in mind.  It was our plan for me to finish out the first semester and then take off the second half of the school year to stay home with the baby (who was due just a few days after the first semester ended).  The kids, however, were going to go ahead and finish out the school year at the charter school, and if all went well I would begin homeschooling them after that summer...

Well, as it happened, I finished the semester and cleaned out my classroom before the baby was born, and my husband started his new job about the same time.  yay!  ...and we closed on our first home about 3 days after he was born... yay! but ack!  and moved in the next day.  double ack!  Unfortunately our second car died a few months prior to all of this hullabaloo, and my husband's job, the charter school, and our new home were on 3 opposite points on the edge of town.  A few weeks into the taxi-service with a newborn operation, we realized that this idea wasn't going to work...

....so we decided to begin homeschooling right then... lol, nothing like jumping right in eh?

Why I Teach Art

I have always been a student of the arts.  The study of and especially the creation of artistic works is a big part of what makes me who I am.  As a small child I spent so much time drawing that my mother had to bring home stacks of scratch computer paper from work so that I would have something to draw on, and as I grew through elementary and middle school I continued to use art as an important tool for expressing myself.  It wasn't until high school, however, when I took art classes under Mr. Floyd Tunson that I started to see myself as an artist.  I took every art class that I possibly could under his direction and grew by leaps and bounds in the three years that I attended there, graduating with high honors in art.  He encouraged me to pursue my own artistic vision while helping me to improve my skill and was the first person (other than a family member) that I can ever remember calling me an artist (a compliment that I dont believe he gave lightly).  I have no doubt that his influence on me is a major part of why I am an art teacher today.

On August 8, 2009 I graduated from the University of Florida with highest honors, a Bachelors degree in art education, and a minor in art history.  I was the art teacher at Imagine Nau (a local charter school) for 3 and a half years and had a blast watching my students grow.  As I change gears as an art teacher, I look forward to continuing to put my knowledge to work and making a difference in the lives of my students just as Mr. Tunson made a difference in mine.  It is my belief that education in the arts is an essential element of a balanced general education and that it will help children to better understand the world around them, foster creativity, encourage self expression, build artistic skill, promote appreciation for various cultures and other ways of thinking, and engage children in critical thinking.

The Blue Dresser - garage sale gold!

I spent a few weeks searching cragislist for a cheap or free dresser to refinish for my son's room.  I picked up this great find at a friend's garage sale for $10.  You can see it here in the best "before" picture I could find (also a before picture of my son's whole room).  It is cream-colored, on the right, and turned to the side.  When I got it the veneer was lifting up on the top and was missing in several places on the drawers, but other than that it was in great shape.  I had recently picked up a small can of navy blue paint off of the "oops" paint shelf at Home Depot and decided that it would look fantastic on this piece.  After the pink dresser fiasco (see previous post), I decided that there would be no skipping of the sanding step.  After removing the pulls, I busted out my little electric sander and went to work (so small task on a dresser with this much architectural detail).  Next, I worked on the veneer.  It was mostly lifting up at the edges.  I peeled off a bit that I deemed unsalvageable, glued down some, and then used wood filler on the rest.  After sanding that down I primed the entire piece with Kilz.  This is where I made my second furniture refinishing mistake.... I got too excited!  I applied 2 coats of the blue over the Kilz, but in my haste I did not wait quite long enough between coats... I mean it was dry to the touch....thats good enough right?  Not so much, especially when you are doing the work on your back porch in Florida in the summer, where the humidity and temperatures increase paint dry time.  Don't get me wrong.  It looked great! ...but after a month or so in my 7 year old son's bedroom it become apparent that the paint didn't really have the opportunity to harden well in between coats.  The top of the dresser is now covered in scratches from my son's rough style of play.  Boo.  I will need to do some more work to the top.  Luckily I have some more of the blue paint, but I have been busy with other projects for a while so it will have to wait.  I am thinking I may also put a few coats of polycrylic on just the top as well to protect this beautiful dresser from crashing cars, landing airplanes and exploding lego creations...  boys are rough on furniture.  sheesh. :)

The Pink Dresser - my first project

Recently my family of 5 purchased our first home.  For the first time I could paint walls on a whim and work on furniture projects without fear of getting paint on the landlord's property!  Yay!  I was so excited to get started! (so I excited that I didn't take several "before" pictures that I really should have. ah well.)  I started with my daughter's room.  Her dresser had been painted white some years before, but since then several pieces of veneer had broken off and various art supplies had been applied to the front and sides by my apparently under-supervised children :).  This was my first furniture project, and I was going to go big and bright, since that sort of thing seemed to be in style on Pinterest and I had spent the months prior (waiting for our house to close) loading up on Pinterest ideas for my new home.  I had pinned several pages that encouraged me to skip the sanding step by simply using stripper on the dresser.  This was when I learned that not everything works as well as it does on Pinterest :(.  What a fiasco!  Applying paint stripper made this job about 10 times harder then it had to be.  Not only did I still have to sand it (to even out all of the inconsistencies left by the stripper), but I also had to clean off gobs of glopping paint stripper and apply copious amounts of primer.  Luckily my mother-in-law (who is totally awesome) came over for a visit while my half finished project was sitting out on the back porch and helped me get it back to a paintable condition.  At any rate, after the veneer was repaired and the primer was applied I was finally able to use my watermelon colored high-gloss spray paint.  I left the pulls in their original condition because I decided the distressed white paint that was already on them looked good with the pink.  My daughter loves the result, but I could probably have done it much quicker and better if I had simply fixed the veneer, given the whole piece a light sanding, and then spray painted it without even using a primer.  5 months later it is standing up well to the abuse of being in my 10 year old daughter's room however, so I too am happy with the eventual result. :)