Friday 30 May 2014

I've got the bug.

I've definitely got the bug. Shabby chic-ing, furniture painting, upcycling... Whatever you want to call it- I've got the bug!

I thought I'd share about a few projects I've 'done' recently and hopefully inspire you a little. 

I got this nest of tables for £15 from a charity furniture shop in our city. I try to go there quite often to scout out furniture to upcycle! 



I wanted these '3 shades of grey' to go in our new lounge, so I bought some Annie Sloan Paris Grey chalk paint and tester pots of Old White and Charcoal, thinking I would lighten one and darken the other and have Paris Grey in the middle. Whilst painting I realised I wanted them a bit darker so didn't use the old white at all, I just made the greys darker with the Charcoal chalk paint.




I was then faced with the problem of the little table no longer fitting in to the nest! Bummer!! After a few weeks of the tables sitting around and me thinking 'I really need to sort those out' I finally got down to 'distressing' them a bit and sanding down a LOT where the table should slide in! It still wouldn't go in, so I asked my hubby to have a go at it, he had greater succes than I. It now slides in and out, if a little juddery, but it does actually fit! Hooray!




So, with almost a whole tin of Paris Grey paint left, I took to painting our beautiful old chest. 

This chest is VERY special to me, it belonged to my Nanna and was built by my great grandfather, who was a joiner. In it's later years it was used as a blanket box and stank of moth balls, but in it's heyday it travelled the world as a trunk. How cool is that! It has screw holes where it was screwed shut to travel on a boat when my grandparents set off to Gibraltar and Durban. I love the history it holds. 

When my Nanna passed away we inherited the trunk and my husband set to work on it. He used paint stripper to remove the two thick layers of gloss, he then sanded it down and removed 2 layers of black paint and one layer of varnish. Hard work! It looked great and we enjoyed it 'bare' in our lounge for a few years.






Having moved house and changing our colour scheme a bit it no longer 'fitted' in. The wood was too orangey and stood out a bit.



In comes the Paris Grey chalk paint.



Our chest now looks so beautiful in the lounge and will continue to be loved and used (containing our board games), even though it still smells of moth balls when you open it. Yum!


More blogging on upcycling coming soon!

Update from my dad: 

The box went to Canada and the USA (Detroit) in the 1920s when your great grandad took his family there to find work during the depression. It did Durban twice and then Gibraltar in the 50s and 60s