Spring Entryway Decorations

The sunshine and warmer temps have definitely been inspiring. Our bright and happy Easter and Spring decorations have carried throughout the house. Here are a few pictures of the entryway.

Click any photo if you want to see it bigger!

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I don’t think I’ve shared a photo of this table yet. It was originally a dark cherry finish. The bottom has a glaze over powder blue and the top has been “crackled.” 

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This little lamb is so sweet, don’t you think? Plus, tulips in antique Ball jars is a no brainer. The chalkboard was picked up at Hobby Lobby and I used our barnwood vinegar stain from THIS POST to age the frame. Before, it was new and unstained. 

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This typewriter is a fave. I picked it up one year while on an adventure with my sister, Tara, at the Crabapple Antique Festival in Milton, Georgia. If you’re interested in finding other antique festivals in Georgia go HERE and HERE. (It’s an older post so the dates won’t be accurate, but you can put it in the Google-machine.) 

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Our Easter Mantel


//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.jsI thought I’d share a few photos of our Easter mantel this year. If you’ve read my past posts then you know that I like to decorate by “shopping” my house for items I can use. I always gravitate towards shopping for items of specific color. This time I was on the hunt for blue.

To see the photo larger, just click on it!

I can’t for the life of me remember where I bought the banner, but I am certain that it was one year after Easter and on discount. Then it sat in a Rubbermaid bin for a couple of years before Samantha and I put it together last year. We stamped “Hoppy Easter” on it.

The blue books on the mantel were easy to collect throughout the house. And well, Ball mason jars are pretty common around here. Let’s just say that I’ve hoarded passionately collected them. I regret every one of them that I’ve sold!

You might recognize the little bunnies from this post HERE. They’re from World Market.

I keep meaning to spray paint that candle holder. Warmer temps are here, so now may be the time!

I am pretty sure the bunnies (one piece) came from Hobby Lobby. The wall color is Danville Tan by Benjamin Moore. It’s been our wall color since we moved in ten years ago, and I still love it as much as I did the first day. It looks different at night than in the day. It’s very calming in person. (P.S. This color looks great in person. It looks totally wonky on my cellphone screen, so keep an open mind!)

Do you remember the barn wood that Ken and I got off of a an old barn/army building HERE? And also used to make THIS?

We used some our favorite pieces to make some free wall art for our mantel. The color is all natural and original. All we did was cut it and attach it together.

The “S” is for our last name. 😉 The window was picked up on one of our Craig’s List adventures.

I had fun pulling everything together. Everything other than the fresh tulips and the tiny bunnies on top of the books are things we already had. My favorite kind of decorating…FREE!

If you want to save any of these pictures, just click on the Pin It button and you can save it to Pinterest.

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Barn Wood China Cabinet: Before & After

I like refinishing hutches. I have a whole folder on our hard drive dedicated to before and after pictures of hutches that we’ve done. They are straight forward, and they sell really well for us. (BONUS!)

So I don’t know why it is that we hate china cabinets. But both Ken and I do. Somehow those simple doors on the front that officially make it a “china cabinet” also turn it into a project from hell. I also have a folder dedicated to before & after pictures of china cabinets. I hope I don’t ever have to add another picture to it. I don’t want to say, “never” but, I never want to refinish another china cabinet again. Unless it’s free. And unless I’m doing it for myself.

Ugly, ugly!

Here’s the before of the latest china cabinet that we’ve redone. It was next to free because the glass shelves on the inside were gone. Buying it we knew we’d have to invest in the expense of replacing them, but we know a guy. 😉 Not really. We know Ace Hardware. They sell and cut glass.

Now, this is the point that I also have to point out the missing pane of glass on the right. I wish I could blame that on the kids. But that was an adult in the house. And not me.

The other pane came out and some chicken wire went in. Because chicken wire definitely goes with what we had planned for this.

Yesterday I posted about how we came upon the jackpot of barn wood. Check out that post (here). Before we even started on this china cabinet we knew that we wanted to add some of the barn wood to it and change the look completely. This is where I get on my soap box and proclaim, “Please do not throw out furniture. Find a way to reuse it. Invest in quality furniture to begin with and you will never need to replace it!”

Ahem, without further ado, the AFTER:

This took over a week to complete. Seriously, it did. With prepping, cutting wood, installing wood, drying wait time, painting, drying wait time, sanding, curing wait time, waxing, hardening wait time, installing chicken wire, and new glass shelves it was a FULL WORK WEEK. The wood is priceless. It cannot be replaced or replicated. This is a one of a kind, truly unique piece. And since I’m never making another one (never say never?), there is only one opportunity to get anything like it from us!

Now THAT’S a makeover! Completely different.

//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.jsHope you enjoy the before & after. If you’re local and you’re interested in purchasing this, please use the icons at the top to contact us. Facebook is the best way!

Update: This piece has sold and is no longer available,

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Barn Wood: The wood that almost wasn’t.

The area we live in, a suburb of Atlanta, has changed a lot in the past 25 years. Like, a LOT. It’s not the same place it was when Ken and I grew up. There aren’t many open fields left. It’s mostly businesses and neighborhoods and concrete. And more people. And it wasn’t. Before.

Atlanta is known for having the native-born people far outnumbered by the transplants. But we’ve lived here our whole lives, and we know a lot of other people that have, too. So this story is for them. And us. But I have to start from the beginning:
Fort Daniel isn’t just the name of an elementary school in Gwinnett County, and Hog Mountain isn’t just the name of a road (or two). Fort Daniel was an actual military fort built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on Hog Mountain, which was the southern boundary of the Native American hunting grounds.  This area is approximately located on Scenic Highway and in between Old Peachtree Road and Gravel Springs Road. The fort was rebuilt in 1814, but there is some speculation as to whether it was completely rebuilt from the ground up, or rebuilt using the existing structures. For our purposes, it just matters that it’s old.
Recently a barn-type structure located near our home was being demolished. A sign invited anyone that wanted to take whatever wood they liked. And so, being us, we started the process of removing wood.  During our visits there to load up our truck, we talked with the landowner, Mr. Boyce, a few times. He was having the structure removed so that his two sons could build their homes there. Someone was supposed to come demolish the building and haul it away, but those plans didn’t work out. And, it turns out, this wasn’t just a barn. Mr. Boyce bought the property 25+ years ago, and he was told that at some point in time someone had moved one of the old barracks from Fort Daniel there, and it had been used as a storage barn ever since.
Ken carefully removing pieces of wood from the structure. At one point he was balancing
on a rotten tree stump to get the perfect pieces for me.
This wood that we got, is, at youngest, from the early nineteenth century. Each piece of wood is stunning. On the sides that were exposed to the elements you can see the faint, original green color, places where a “newer” (which may be decades old, as well) whitewash color shows. Mostly there is the much sought-after silver gray color. On the back, the sides that were not exposed, the wood is rich and brown. It is a color that you can only get with time, and a lot of it. This color is enough to move you me emotionally.
This is my favorite piece of wood that we got. Isn’t it beautiful?! I’m saving it for something special.
We’ve taken some of the wood that we collected that weekend and added it to a china cabinet that we’ve customized. The wood looks weathered and beautiful, but don’t mistake it as fragile and brittle. This wood is rock hard and strong. It has lasted a very, very long time. This wood is our history. It’s special. And it was almost trash.
Here’s the china cabinet! I was trying to avoid my reflection, so you have to see it from an angle. 😉
Ready to be filled with special things!
Ahhh! THIS WOOD is a dream!
This piece is currently available and can be seen by appointment. Use the icons at the top of the page to contact us. 
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To learn more about Fort Daniel, Georgia, visit these websites:
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/fort-daniel
http://www.thefortdanielfoundation.org/History.htm

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Before & After: Painted Wood Hutch

I’m so thankful for Spring. It really makes a big difference in my motivation. When it starts to really get cold again this fall, I’m going to give myself permission to forget about painting furniture until spring comes again. No expectations for myself to work in the cold, blah weather means no guilt for not accomplishing anything.

I’ve had this hutch in my garage. (We keep our cars in the driveway and our furniture in the garage. Don’t y’all?) I hadn’t planned on what I was going to do with it, but I got a burst of energy and motivation this week to just get it done.

Seriously. Ugly, right?

//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.jsI think what I disliked about this the most is that there was no visual interest in the wood. I’m not against wood furniture, but this one was just like a big blog of orange-y stained wood. And the doors. Tragic. This isn’t a giant piece. I’ve been lifting and lugging it around all by my petite flower of a self. (I really hope you read that with sarcasm.) But it is a piece of furniture that will be extremely useful to someone. Not me, though. No room in the inn.

Much better. Much, much better.

//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.jsNow there is some visual interest. I left the surfaces unpainted that would get the most use. You can see a similarly dramatic difference in a before and after picture of me in makeup. #redhead

//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.jsI’ve put some of my jadeite and jars on it so you can visualize what it would look like in use.

Hope you love it!
XOXO,
Abby

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Painted Black Doors


I couldn’t decide to pull the trigger on painting the doors in our house black. I’m not really into doing anything trendy. Read: All of you who painted chevron stripes on your walls will be repainting in a year or two. But the more that I saw pictures of doors painted black, the more I decided that it was something that could actually last a while. When I decided to go ahead and do it, my thought was, “It’s paint. We can always paint them back to white.”

I did a lot of research before I started. Check out my whole Pinterest board on doors, and you can see some of the blogs that I read on how to paint a door. One of the blogs I read said something like, “This was so easy that I decided to go ahead and paint all of the basement doors, too.” Yeah, in that case, I’m in!

Y’all. I’m all about telling you when things are easy. I’m all about empowering you to do projects. But I’m not going to lie, this was no cake walk. I may or may not said a few curse words in my head  the whole time a few times. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that if you hired a bunch of painters to come to your home, and they needed to also paint a few of your doors from white to black, that they’d make the new guy that they all hate paint the doors.

So I may have once thought, “It’s paint. We can always paint them back to white.” But make no mistake, I will move before I paint those doors back to white. I originally thought I’d do one blog post on the whole thing, but I’m going to break it up into three: 1. Before & After pictures so you can decide if you want to do it, too. 2. What I did while painting the doors, that you might want to try. 3. How I painted the doorknobs from gold to antiqued pewter.

Here’s a before and after of the hallway. The walls are Revere Pewter by Benjamin Moore. The color I used for the doors is Black Suede by Behr.


and here’s a before and after of the front door:


I’d love some feedback! Please leave me a comment below and let me know what you think. I’ll be posting soon with the how to’s and what-nots.

XOXO,
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Wait for it…Wait for it…

Once upon a time I painted my dining room three times in a weekend. Two of those times were in the same day. One of those colors was lilac. I make mistakes.

Enter: A chifferobe. This chifferobe started out in a cherry finish. And, well, no one wants cherry furniture right now. So since Ken and I were newbies to refinishing furniture, we sanded it. I can’t believe we did, but yes, we sanded it. Entirely. It took a lot of time. And then (embarrassingly) we used a vinegar barn wood stain on it. It was horrible.

After that the pig needed some lipstick, so we painted it white and put it in our antique booth. And there it sat. And sat. It got lots of compliments. And there it sat some more.

So we brought it home and put it in the garage. And one day I decided to slap some antiquing glaze on it, which was also horrible. It was so bad that it might as well have been cherry finish again. I cursed the chifferobe and spat on it (in my head) and turned my back on its ugliness for months.

Then last week I had a thought: Gray. And then I had another thought: Flat Spray Paint. Valspar sells some fantastic colors of flat spray paint at Lowe’s. So I picked up three cans and brought them home to introduce them to the chifferobe. But…gray is relative, apparently. And this wasn’t my idea of “gray” as much as “bluish ugly concrete primer color.”

So glad I quickly realized that the gray spray paint wasn’t the color I was looking for.

So, doing what I do best I went to Home Depot and picked out a nice shade of gray and mixed up a batch of “chalk” paint. And even though there was nothing wrong with the long mirror, I took it out. (hold the hate mail) I replaced it with some natural linen fabric.


We added a knob to the door after this picture was taken.

And now finally, finally, I love it. So I’m going to do what I do with all of my favorite pieces. I’m going to keep it (because I love it). At least for a few months until I decide that I love a paycheck more. And then I’m going to let one of you love it.

Mistakes are okay. They aren’t sins. They’re learning opportunities. I’ve made so, so many mistakes in my life. But I’ve also learned so, so much. I’m thankful for my learning opportunities.

Ephesians 4:22-24                
To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

XOXO,
Abby

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The {Final} Nitty-Gritty on Sanding. When You’re Done?

 

I’ve noticed that a lot of times tutorials that go over how to use “furniture” (aka “chalk”) paint don’t go over what to do once the paint has dried. I personally have several more steps to go once the paint is dry on my furniture. I sand it, seal it, and often glaze it.

Sand it when the paint is dry? For latex or spray paint, not usually. For “furniture,” chalk, or milk paint, yes. There is an incredible difference in the finish of “furniture” paint when you sand it after it dries and when you don’t. It becomes incredibly smooth and “finished” looking. The paint should dry 8 hours, or overnight, before you sand it.

Depending on the look I am going for, I will either use 220 grit sandpaper or “00” steel wool. Usually using 220 grit sandpaper with my Black & Decker Mouse sander will give more of a distressed look. That means whatever the surface color was before you sanded it (wood or a different color) will show through on the edges and raised details. If I just want to “finish” the piece and I don’t want to distress it I will use “00” (double fine) steel wool. Even when using the “00” steel wool, be careful on the edges and details.

DON’T freak out when you sand your painted piece. Paint dust will come off. Trust me when I say, do not sand indoors, even a garage. You will cover everything in a fine coating of chalk dust. The great thing about “furniture” paint is, if you sand off too much, just touch it up with some more paint. Also, don’t freak out if your paint color “lightens” up a bit. This is just the effect of the “chalk” or plaster of Paris in the paint. When you apply your wax the color will deepen again.

Before you continue the process of finishing your painted piece after you have sanded it, wipe it down completely with a DRY cloth. Actually, most of the time I vacuum the piece with my shop vac when I’m done sanding. You can even use the final sanding process as a way to be creative with your paint. Once you have done a final sanding, you are ready to finish your piece with wax, polyurethane, or glaze. (or all of the above) 😉

I will go over more info on using “furniture” paint in a future blog post.
XOXO,
Abby

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The Nitty-Gritty on Sanding {Part Two}

In my previous post I went over the reasons why I would or wouldn’t sand a piece before refinishing it. In this post I’m going to go over how exactly to go about sanding.

Three things that will make your life easier while sanding:
#1 An electric hand held sander.
#2 Know your grit, Sherlock.

#3 Always sand in the direction of the grain. (the direction that the lines in the wood are going)

An electric hand held sander is going to cut your time by at least 75%. I have an old Black & Decker “Mouse” sander and I love it. I want a new sander, but just because I love tools. This one works great. Sandpaper is made especially to fit it and is easily put on and off. I like this because I can switch in between sandpapers when I’m working on something. Yes, it is possible to sand using a sanding block, but it is going to take you a lot of time.
 
Know your grit. Grit refers to the roughness of the sandpaper. The lower the number, the rougher the grit. You always, ALWAYS start with a lower number and work your way up to the higher number. For example, when I am refinishing a table top I will start with 60 grit. The 60 grit will grind down through any varnish and stain to the bare wood. If you use 60 grit too long, it will eventually start to grind away at your wood. 60 grit will leave your surface rough. There will be visible sanding marks and your piece will not be ready to paint or stain.

After removing the paint, varnish, or stain you were aiming to remove, next you will be ready to start creating a smooth surface ready for your finish. I like to move from 60 grit to 120 to 220. Going in this order will leave you with a quality surface that looks professional and neat. Be sure to check the surfaces that you’re sanding from different angles. If you are able to see sanding marks, you will need to re-sand that area to get rid of them, which is why I like the mouse. If I am working with the 220 grit sandpaper and I see marks left from the 60 grit, I can take the 220 off and put some 120 back on, remove the 60 grit marks, and then move back to the 220.

Finally, always sand with the grain of the wood. “Grain of the wood” refers to the direction that the lines in the wood are going. Don’t argue; just do it.

If you’ve sanded properly, when you apply your stain you will be rewarded with a thing of beauty. If you apply your stain and you suddenly see marks from sanding, wait for the stain to dry and begin again.

Sanding is one of those things that when you do it right, it is completely rewarding. You can literally see your hard work pay off. I’ll go over how to stain furniture sometime in the future.
This is my 12 year old sanding a bookshelf for his room. Don’t be afraid to get started. You can do this.
 
Next up will be: Sanding when you’re…done?

XOXO,
Abby

 

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Don’t hide your crazy! History, that is.

Do you ever browse through the history section of Pinterest? I do. All I have to say is, there have always been crazy things going on in this world, there just hasn’t always been as many of us in it. When you find something that has survived through a lot of that crazy history, it deserves a little respect, doesn’t it?

You would probably assume since I like antiques, that I would also be interested in history. It’s true. I am interested in history and I have an appreciation for it. It’s so fascinating to me what particular antiques have actually survived and made it through to modern times.

I currently have a gorgeous vanity dresser available. This drop-center dresser was made circa 1850. It’s an early Victorian, pre-Civil War piece. Can you imagine what this dresser has “lived” through??

Solid marble is used for the surfaces in this drop-center vanity.

This dresser has been around through 32 presidents. When it was made there were only 31 states in the United States of America. The phone and the television were not invented. It made it through the Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam. This dresser was around during the time of Emancipation, Prohibition, Segregation, Women’s Suffrage, and human kind entering outer space. And it survived. Amazing, isn’t it?!
 


Talk about “made to last!” Check out those dovetail joints and the wooden locks on the drawers. I wonder what would have been locked up in them?

Ooooh! A secret drawer on the bottom!

A final reminder of just how long ago 1850 was: these shelves for a candleholder were necessary since electricity was not in homes yet.

XOXO,
Abby

***UPDATE*** Thank you for all of the interest in this piece. However, it has sold and is no longer available.
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Dresser’s Victorian Ornamentat (Google Affiliate Ad)

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