Another Piece of Charity-Shop Furniture gets a Revamp
If I was American I would say that I ‘upcycled’ this piece of furniture, but I’m not, so I won’t. I gave it a revamp, updated it, and brought it in line with my personal taste. To call it an ‘upcycle’ is a pretty accurate description actually.
We found this old dresser in a charity shop a few months ago, it was covered in a hideous orange-yellow varnish, sloppily applied in thick brush strokes many years ago by someone who didn’t care if they left thick dark drips of varnish to dry around the edges. Not much to look at, but it provided the storage space we were looking for and only cost us £20, so we bought it.
After making the mistake of not using a wood primer when I painted this chest of drawers, I was a bit more organised and went out and bought some wood primer, as well as a tester pot of lovely grey-green paint to paint the back of the shelves with. After sanding the whole thing to within an inch of its life, I painted it using two coats of primer followed by two coats of white silk emulsion, apart from the back of the shelves which I painted in the green colour.
Whilke I was waiting for the coats of paint to dry, I searched Ebay for some new knobs for the dresser, to help with the revamp and add a more finished touch. I got lucky and found some lovely antique-effect knobs in a dusty green colour, it was very exciting when they arrived!
I was very pleased with the end result, after all the hard work of sanding, painting, waiting for coats of paint to dry, and painting some more, the dresser was ready for the finishing touches of attaching the knobs to the two drawers and two doors, and…wow…I was very pleased indeed! Have a look for yourself:
all finished!
Total cost of this revamp:
£20 for the dresser
£7 for the wood primer
£12 for 4 knobs
£1.99 for a tester pot of green paint
The white silk paint was from a very large pot I already had.
Total cost: £41
Not bad.
We have an old grey filing cabinet propping up one end of our workstation, it was an offcast from my mum and it is very useful for keeping all our paperwork in, the only problem I’ve had with it is its austere office look, which is at odds with the rest of the room. I have been meaning to paint it for years – I even put newspaper under it ready to paint it about 18 months ago, but somehow never got round to it (do you have projects like that, that you just never manage to get round to actually finishing?)
see the old grey filing cabinet in the corner? Yep, pretty ugly.
Well, after getting rid of our old sofas, scoring two fantastic white ones on Ebay, rearranging the sitting room and getting the new furniture from the charity shop, I felt I really had to stop putting off the painting of the filing cabinet, so I donned my painting clothes and rooted around in the storage box on our balcony to see what paint I could find.
two old pots of gloss paint
As luck would have it, I had an old tin of dark turquoise gloss and another of white gloss, each with a very had skin of dried paint on the top that I had to cut away, but underneath there was enough paint left to do a bit of mixing and come up with a bright light blue colour that would be perfect.
Mixing the paint
a little more
perfect!
I gave the filing cabinet a good thorough scrub with sandpaper and then got to work. Two coats of paint, with 12 hours to dry in between, was all it took to transform the old boring grey filing cabinet into a bright, fresh piece of furniture that fit perfectly in our siting room. I love it. Mr. B loves it, even The Boy loves it, and all from two old tins of paint and a couple of day’s work.
after one coat of paint
all finished!
I hope I inspire others out there to go forth and paint their boring grey filing cabinets in bright colours of their choosing! Go ahead, you know you want to!
That last photo reminds me, do you see that screen on top of the workstation? Well, that is the screen we use when we want to watch anything online, or watch a DVD or play on the Playstation, because we don’t have a tv. We haven’t had a tv for about ten years now, and we’ve coped just fine really, but to be honest it’s not ideal to have to watch things on a small computer screen, or try to play a Playstation game on one either. We found watching a dvd together as a family or with friends almost impossible, computer screens are not built for multiple viewers. However, my dislike of tvs was so great that we stuck it out without one, I just couldn’t imagine one in our small sitting room. Mr. B started to comment more and more on how hard it was to properly enjoy a Playstation sesh with such a small screen though, so I thought it might be time to reassess my views on owning a tv, and we tentatively agreed that it might be time we actually bit the bullet and just got one. Mr. B pointed out that tvs these days weren’t the huge ugly boxes they used to be, we could get a thin flat screen one that would hardly be noticeable. And we wouldn’t get it hooked up to receive tv, so my objection to that would be upheld, but I’d be able to watch episodes of The Wire from the comfort of the sofa without having to drag a table over to put my laptop on. Mr. B went away and did hours of research (he loves to do days hours of research before making any kind of decision) and ordered one online. I forgot all about it. And then, a few days later, this was waiting for me when I got home from work:
My, what a big box!
Rather a large box, far larger than I had anticipated. I was quite shocked, to be honest, even after Mr. B reassured me that this was actually quite a small one, by other people’s standards, and his work colleagues had these size sceens in their kitchens and stuff (really?!). To me, it was still big, and I worried at first that it was too big for our house. Mr. B shared my worries, and even suggested that I make a fabric slip cover for it for when it wasn’t in use! Once the beast was out of the box though, and set up on the newly painted chest of drawers, it didn’t look so bad, and once I had watched a few episodes of The Wire on it, it didn’t seem too big any more! It’s funny how quickly you get used to these things. No one else has batted an eyelid at it, so all in all, I don’t mind it too much, and we get to watch the Olympics on it thanks to BBC iplayer, which has been great (although I still might make that fabric cover for it, it’s not something I want to have to see every day). In an ideal world, in the future, I will have a sitting room big enough to have a big cupboard in it that the tv lives in, behind closed doors, only to be seen when it is actually being used, but for now, this will do.
Refurbishing an Old Chest of Drawers from a Charity Shop
We’ve needed some storage furniture in the sitting room for ages now, especially after we took the broken cheap Billy-style bookcase (that I bought from Argos when I was a poor student) to the dump, and I have been keeping my eye out in all the charity shops. When Mr. B suggested we might have more luck at the out-of-town charity Ammaus, which is basically a warehouse full of old used furniture, I jumped at the opportunity and off we went. It’s a funny place, Ammaus, and you have to look really hard, and visualise each piece of furniture in your house, rather than in the cluttered warehouse floor, so it took us a while before we spotted two pieces of furniture that would work for us. Both pieces seemed quite ugly at first glance, but I saw the potential!
One of the pieces was a small chest of drawers, in cheap looking wood, but it was sturdy, the drawers all worked, and the handles were beautiful! The second piece was a kind of bureau, a tall piece with a cupboard at the bottom and shelves at the top (covered in a hideous orange varnish, but more about that later). Both pieces were bought for £40 each, and will be painted white, and I have just finished painting the chest of drawers, and it looks lovely now! It was worth the £40 for the knobs alone, in my opinion. I should have used wood primer before painting it though, as I had to paint five coats of white on before the chest was completely covered and even. You live and learn.
lovely knobs
painting
still painting
beautiful knobs, looking lovely against the white
I love second-hand furniture! It’s great how you can pick up really good quality pieces of solid well-built furniture for a fraction of the price that they would be new, and for less than you’d spend buying cheap flimsy flat-pack laminate rubbish from Argos.
Keep tuned, I’ll be posting about the second pice of furniture soon (still in the process of painting it, my living room is a complete mess!).
The title says it all really. If you were wondering what I have been doing for the past three weeks, it’s been that. The school I work at put on a big musical production every two years, involving all the children in KS2 (that’s equivelent to 2nd Grade through 5th Grade in America) and this year I landed the role of being in charge of all the props. What I failed to fully comprehend when I agreed to take the responsibility was the sheer volume of (bizarre and wonderul) props required for Alice in Wonderland. The characters, the scenes, the wierd and wonderful things… I had to make lists, and then make lists of lists, just to keep track of everything. Luckily I had a great team of people to help me, and everyone worked really hard together. And a theatre wardrobe company lent us most of the costumes, so we didn’t have to make those too!
If anyone out there ever needs to make props for a stage production of Alice, I hope the following photos and descriptions will be of some help!
Dodo mask, made out of papier mache (using balloons) and masking tape. More of a headpiece really, the boy had has face painted the smae blue as the mask, and then wore a blue cape with feathers all over it.
Dodo mask
The Lory Bird headpeice, made out of papier mache and covered in feathers. The child had his face painted orange and wore a cape of green fabric with feathers covering it.
Three crowns (one a spare) made for the Queen of Hearts and King of Hearts
Fake sandwiches (jam and cheese), for the picnic in the opening scene, made with dreid brown bread, yellow paper or red paint, and covered in PVA glue.
Dried out scones covered in PVA glue to preserve them and stop them crumbling or breaking during the performances.
Giant mushroom for the caterpillar, made, quite obviously, out of a big red umbrella and white circles of card!
Caucus race masks made by the children for their Caucus race dance. They used lovely pearlescant paint and pipe cleaners and feathers attached with a glue gun.
Eat Me cake, made from air-drying foam clay. Looks a bit like a burger but it did the trick!
Lobster masks for the Lobster Dance.
Hedgehog masks for the croquet scene
Flamingo croquet bats made using hockey sticks, papier mache balloons and lots of crepe paper! We had ten of them. One of the parents made them for us, aren’t they brilliant!
Axes for the executioners
18 axes, to be precise!
The tree/rose bush that stayed on stage the entire time, with different things hanging from it depending on the scene. Here are the pocket watches for the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter.
A clock for the tree. We made the tree out of cardboard, newspaper, papier mache, mod rock and lots and lots of duck tape!
Tears on the tree, for the scenes where Alice is crying
Pigs and pepper pots on the tree
Red and white roses on the rose bush for the scene in the garden when the cards are painting the white roses red.
Red rose made of crepe paper
Mock Turtle costume and lots of hats
A selection of teapots for the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party scene (yes, we changed a watering can into a giant tea pot!
A selection of different sized bottles for Alice to drink from, from my own bottle collection.
Some of the costumes we borrowed
Unfortunately I don’t have photos of a few of the props, including a giant teapot that the doormouse fit into, cardboard doors in a selection of sizes, and all the t-shirts that were painted to look like cards and took hours and hours of work to make by dedicated members of staff.
The performances were amazing, the children did two performances, on one day, at our local independent theatre, and they were all brilliant! I would say that for at least three weeks prior to the performance the children had rehearsals and practices almost all day every day, and it really paid off. The quality of the production was increadible. Even The Boy, who doesn’t like performing to an audience, did really well and came home buzzing and excited, talking about joining the drama club at school next term. Brilliant!
I really enjoyed being a part of this, as I have never worked on a theatre production before, and it certainly made me a lot more emotional and proud of all the children when I got to watch them on stage. I can’t wait for the next one now!
The Yarn Bombers have Finally Hit Cambridge!
This morning, as we were driving along Chesterton Road in the pouring rain, under a heavy grey sky, splashing through grey puddles, passing grey pedestrians walking along grey streets, suddenly I was bombarded with bright flashes of colour. I instinctively turned to the colour, and my jaw dropped open as my eyes rested on the most beautiful of sights. Anyone who knows Cambridge knows Chesterton Road is not exactly picturesque, so what I saw was even more eye catching for being so out of place. The grey bike racks opposite the Co-Op had been yarn bombed, guerrilla knitted, covered in knitted and crocheted bands of bright colour. What a sight it was! A few hours later I went back with my camera. Whoever is responsible for this, you are amazing and I love you! Please do more.
If I could knit I would do some of my own urban fibre art, to put a smile on people’s faces and brighten up this wet summer we are having. Yarn bombing (also known as yarnstorming, guerrilla knitting, urban knitting and graffiti knitting) has been around for about 9 years now (probably longer), and has turned the matronly pastime of knitting and cozying up with blankets into a rather cool form of urban art and beautiful, cozy vandalism. Long may it last.
so resourceful 