Before & After China Cabinet

My grandparents had this beautiful China Hutch and Buffet set that my Papa bought my Nana for their 25th wedding anniversary.  It was big and heavy and solid wood.  When I think of family gatherings, parties, holiday meal in their dinning room growing up that piece of furniture is in every memory.  So when my Nana and Papa had to move to a smaller apartment because they were getting too old to take care of a big house they no longer had room for it.  I jumped at the opportunity to have it passed down to me, the only granddaughter.  Yep I played that card to get it.  But come to find out the buffet part was down in Houston at some cousins house for some still unknown reason to me and when we called to request MY GRANDPARENTS piece of furniture back, we were impolitely told no.  So I had this enormous hutch but no buffet/table to set it on.  So it just sat against the wall not looking right at all.

I spent nearly 3 years looking for a buffet that was in my budget and had the right dimensions to fit as well as it needed to be a solid piece of wood.  Then a few weeks ago I did a search on CL with just the dimensions and a dresser came up.  HMMM never thought about using a dresser for the buffet.  That day I found the piece I was looking for in the form of a dresser, Poppa went and picked it up and Momma got to work on putting it all together.

Now I learned a lot from working on this DIY project.  I opted out of sanding and went with 2 coats of primer instead.  Normally I'd sand but this saved me a lot of time and the primer covered well.  However next time I think I'll go with a spray primer as using a paint brush just took forever and made my arm very sore.  That's probably due more to the fact that I'm out of shape though. One thing good though about using a brush to paint is your little monkey can help. Boy we both are looking rough here!

Here she was so proud because she painted the letter C. 

I used a brush nickle spray paint to turn that brass into some sass! 

Black was the color of choice.  I've been collecting white dishes and serving platters for a few years and thought the black with the white would just pop.  Plus our walls are white in our rental home so need something to add contrast to it.  We took the doors off and once they were off we decided we liked the look of it and kept them off. (and please don't mind the red and turquoise squares still up from the Cat In The Hat Party, don't worry they are down now. )

I just love the way it turned out.  Sometimes I get home and just go and stand in front of it and stare it, I've even been caught hugging it. 
So once again here is the Before

And here is the After

My Papa died 2 years ago, 3 weeks after Monkey was born and so this piece has even more of a value to me.  I hope to pass it on to my grandchildren one day.  Until then though I will be showing it all my love! 


What do you think?  I was thinking of distressing it a bit and or glazing it but just haven't made up my mind.
I have a few more DIY projects I need to finish and get posted but they seem to keep getting put on the back burner.  You know cause a glass of wine or taking a nap always seems more fun. :)

Happy Friday Ya'll.

Trash to Treasure

Let's talk trash to treasure today.  I'm a lover of finding thrifty pieces of trash  furniture whether it's hand me downs, on the side of the road, garage sales, whatever your poison, there are many places to find thrifty pieces to revamp and turn EWWWW into AWWWWW!  Some of my favorite blogs I follow focus on this very thing, Better After, and Inrarrantly Creative's Roadside Rescue Party are just among the few where you can find some great ideas. 
I don't get to do this often as we don't have a truck to load up furniture in so my furniture redos are on the smaller scale.  But someday I'll beg Poppa convince Poppa we need a truck.  In the mean time I'll learn from watching others and practicing on my little revamps. 

About 4 years ago we acquired this dark cherry, very poorly put together Queen Anne wanna be coffee table.  It was nothing fancy but got the job done AKA became a bed for Maximus.  Yep my pup insisted on laying up on the coffee table.  We have since taught him that the coffee table is not a place for a dog to lay but back then he did. 

Isn't that sweet, even showed the Monkey how to do it.  Yeah she's since been taught otherwise too.  But of course I had to take a picture of it before I told her No, I mean what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't get the good, bad, and ugly? :)

Anyways you can see all those scratches and way to cherry color and well just no character to it table right?  So it was time to upgrade and by upgrade I mean buy one from my neighbor's garage sale and revamp it too, but that's for a later post.
Well the old tabel became a place where I'd spray paint and work from out in the garage but it was killing my back because it's so low so I was about to trash the piece of trash when I had an idea.
Love all the paint splatters?

So I ran to Hobby Lobby and grabbed these supplies.
Wrapping Paper that would match my bedroom colors
Wooden Letters that spell our last name
Brown craft paint
Modge Podge because I was out, um who runs out of Modge Podge?! 

Got home and started working on turning the trash into my little treasure.
Here she is before in our of her paint splatter glory

First I removed all of the legs and screws so that I just had the flat table top to work with.  I then painted the edges and the letters brown.
Then I modge podged the wrapping paper right on to the top of the table and cut and sanded the edges so make it smooth.
Once it was dry I just glued the letters to the table and hung that bad boy up on my never ending white wall. (If you haven't heard me complain about my white walls let me insert complaint here, (we lease our home, I hate having to paint a wall, then move out, prime and paint it back white, it's a big pain in my booty, so I paint one or two rooms in the house and dress up the rest with colored art, ok complaint over)
It dresses up this white wall nicely, and I still need to get a few more accessories to add to make it pop but I wanted to show you this piece now. 

I love the crowns on this paper, it's so me. :)

Since I had the modge podge out I went ahead and made these as well.  Just 12 x 12 boards with scrapbook paper. 

I look forward to getting the rest of the accessories to finish the room and show you the whole thing. 

So what projects are you working on these days?

A Dresser Redo

I am enjoying participating in the weekely blog parties.  My favorites are the before and afters, transformations, and DIY projects and crafts.  It's so amazing to see what some very talented folks can do with road side trash and how inspiring they can be for others to give it a whirl. 

A few years ago we moved from a place that was fully furnished for us to an empty apartment.  A new area, new home, new jobs, meant no $ to furnish or decorate lavishly so I took a garage sale find that was pretty cheap looking and quite frankly had no personality and worked her over until she earned a spot of her very own in my guest room. 

She started out looking like this, blah yellow tv stand/dresser.  The drawers are missing as I used them for something else which I'll show you in a sec.

I found another pic of one just like it online that someone painted just to show what she looks like with the drawers.

Still not my style but anything is better than that dull awful yellow look.

So after sanding and sanding and sanding and did I mention sanding? And then priming and painting she's now not so dull looking. 

The door had way too many shelves that didn't leave room to hold anything in between so I took 2 out and sanded and primed and painted black and then painted a design on them with my stencils, added brackets and hung on the wall.

I saw in a magazine where a decorator used old drawers as shadow boxes and hung on the wall and so I did my own version of that, I sanded again, primed and paitned the drawers, added brackets and hung on the living room walls and they've been a few different colors now but right now they are a dark green, but very soon they are getting redone to a brick red.

That's my little transformation for the day but I've got lots more to do and show so come back and see me.

This week I'm linking to
Metamorphosis Monday
A Soft Place To Land
Poppies At Play
Mustard Seed Creations
so hop on over there for more ideas and fun.