For Sale: Coral & Gray Dipped Side Table {31 Days: Day 19}

Sometimes loving what you've got means letting some other things go. While I LOVE this little side table I painted over the summer, I sadly don't have a place for it now that my trash-can-turned-end-table took over its spot in the living room. Holding onto things I don't need adds clutter to our itty bitty apartment, and it's hard for me to love my space well if I've got too much stuff hanging around - know what I mean? So I'm decluttering in phases slowly over time. I sold a few things in a yard sale, donated a bunch of things, and now it's time to get to selling some things via Craigslist.

This little table is going up there next week, but I figured since y'all got to see the process of its transformation, I'd give you a shot at it first. If there are no takers, I'll Craigslist it. I'm asking $35 for it. Email me at mayricherfullerbe{at}gmail.com if you're interested. Local DC-area pickups only, sorry for you non-locals!

I'm going through more things in our home over the next couple of weeks, so I'll let you know if I'm selling anything else :).

Hope y'all are having wonderful Saturdays!


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Loving What You Have: Inherited Furniture {31 Days: Day 18}

After showing you my "loving what you have" home tour last week, I thought about putting together a source list of items in our home since that seems the norm once you put a home tour out there. Turns out, I can't provide much useful information since many of our household items and furniture were either gifts, thrifted, or inherited...so any source list I'd give you would be painfully short and kinda pointless. I can't even tell you what the paint color is on the walls since we rent our apartment and that soft brown-gray is the color that came with the place. (Side note: I actually love the paint color, and have even asked my landlady about it, but she doesn't remember what it is!). 

BUT, coming to that realization that I wouldn't really be able to provide a source list also made me realize that I kinda love that about our home. It's an eclectic mix of traditional, vintage, modern and antique pieces that work together pretty cohesively (in my humble opinion!) to make our home uniquely ours. So while I can't give you a source list, I can tell you some of the stories behind these pieces. I'd love tell you the history and some memories I have about the history of a couple of the inherited pieces that have taken up residence in our tiny apartment. I love family pieces, y'all.

First up, I want to show you the jelly cupboard:

This might be my favorite piece of furniture in our whole apartment. It's huge, has tons of storage and is just plain pretty. I keep serving pieces, pitchers, our liquor and various other decor odds and ends in here.

This is an antique piece that I inherited from my mom's parents, who I loved and dearly miss. I spent a lot of time at their house as a kid...most of it was spent running around with my cousins and hanging out with family. This jelly cupboard lived in the formal living room, which was the first room you saw when you walked in the door. We always spent Christmas morning in that living room with our whole extended family - aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents - gathered around on couches and on the floor since the tree and the presents were there. That jelly cupboard sat right along the wall next to the Christmas tree, and I remember it as the piece of furniture that housed some of the Christmas decorations along with some other odds and ends, and there were always playing cards in the top drawer. You never knew quite what you'd find in there, and, being a curious kid, I had a habit of snooping around in that drawer and others all over the house. Call me nosy, but I found candy and other treasures hidden in drawers often enough that it was totally worth a peek. :)

That piece of furniture reminds me of so many memories, and I'm glad it lives with us now. I'm hoping it'll be something I hold onto and pass down to my kids someday as well!

Another favorite are the end tables on either side of the sofa:

{This was the best photo I had of the end tables - it's pre-gallery wall!}

These are beautiful antique drop leaf end tables that belonged to my dad's parents. Sadly, my grandfather passed away before I was born (I so wish I had known "Grandpa Tom"!), so I mostly remember them in my grandmother's apartment, and then in her assisted living facility as she got older and needed more care. I'm so glad she held onto them (well, I suppose I'm glad my parents decided to move them with her :)), even when she lived in the nursing care wing and had a very small shared room. They were a sweet reminder of home, and it made the somewhat hospital-like environment a little more lived-in and familiar. When we would visit, I was always glad to see them there. When she passed away, at the ripe old age of 93 I might add, my parents took these end tables to their home, and I subsequently snagged them for our first apartment in Richmond.

I love having these pieces of furniture from both my mom and my dad's families. It's such a gift to have inherited them, and a cool reminder of memories I have from so many years growing up with them around. It's also a reminder of how much I was loved by those grandparents. They really set an amazing example for me and I hope that one day I'll have a chance to love my grandkids just as well as they did me. Lots of things to be thankful for today!


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Vintage Kitchen Cart Makeover

Good morning, good morning! If you caught up on my Fourth of July holiday adventures yesterday, you saw a sneak peek at couple of projects I did at my parents' river house over the weekend. Today I'm sharing the first of those - a vintage kitchen cart makeover!

When my parents first bought the river house, but before they closed on it, the previous owners had an estate sale at the house. It was FULL of stuff. So much stuff. My parents bought a few things, which they then left at the house since they had just bought the home - kind of funny, huh? :) One of the things my dad spotted at the sale was this awesome/but horribly painted vintage kitchen cart.

I didn't even know it was one of the items from the sale until a couple of months ago, when I spotted it in the garage and asked if I could give it a new paint job. I mean, it's just begging for it, right? That orange is...let's just say...not my ideal color. It was also a little rusty in certain places (although it was hard to distinguish rust from the orange paint). It had probably been used outside a ton in its previous life.

I started by giving it a good sanding with some low grit (60 - very coarse) sandpaper to remove as much paint as I could and rough up the other surfaces so that the new paint would stick. Turns out it practically flaked off the handles, but wouldn't budge off the tray areas. That makes me think that the handles were originally unpainted.

I sanded and sanded, but it soon became clear that the surfaces, especially the top tray, wouldn't ever be perfectly even. Oh well! It's just an old cart, after all. It didn't have to be perfect. I made sure to clean it off really well so I didn't have any flaky old paint or dust messing up the new paint job. I could at least control that part!

In this next photo, you can see the leftover rusty, rough spots on the tray's surface even after I sanded, but hey, anything's better than that orange :).

Then I got to work on painting it a happy light aqua color. I used Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint in Ocean Blue (Gloss). I found the best price for it at Walmart (about $3.75 per can). It took me two and half cans to cover the entire cart with two coats. Not bad! The key to a good spray painting job is to move quickly and apply it thinly and evenly. Remember that it won't look perfect on the first coat. Take your time.

The final product turned beautifully! Take a look:

My mom and I had fun styling it up on the screen porch for a little photo shoot. I put some bright pink placemats on the top tray surface, which was both functional (cover up the rougher patches you saw in previous photos) and pretty since the color complimented the aqua nicely.

A few glass tumblers, an ice bucket and a pitcher of water made for a cute little drink stand. Oh, and a few flowers from my mom's yard don't hurt either :). Don't you just love hydrangeas?

We played around with the styling a bit too. Why not have some cookies there as well? Mmm...oatmeal raisin...

Or maybe some silver water goblets?

It's a perfect addition to the screen porch (in my opinion - mom, do you agree?). Turns out it's really nice to have an extra surface near the dining table out there. We even put the computer on it at one point so my parents, Charlie and I could all Facetime with my brother and his wife out there! The fact that it's a cart makes it easy to move and use in different places as well. I'm sure we'll be using it a lot.

Let's take a look at the transformation one more time, before and after style:

What a difference, huh? Watch out parents, I might have to steal it from you some day. It's just such a fun piece with its new aqua color!

Have a wonderful day, y'all!

Have you made over a cart like this before? If you have, what have you used it for?

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Coral and Gray Dipped Side Table {DIY}

Happy Monday to you! I hope y'all had wonderful weekends. We spent a good deal of our time cleaning out our closets (ack!), shuffling some of our under-bed storage, and compiling a somewhat embarrassingly large donation pile. If I want to see that particular area of our apartment ever again, I'll have to take a nice little trip to Goodwill in the very near future.

I did set aside a little bit of time yesterday to do a quick paint project though (as you saw in the title and photo at the top of the post). I've been enamored with the "dipped" paint look for awhile now, and after showing y'all the Sweet Beast's take on it for her entryway table on Friday, I decided to go for it.

This little side table was the perfect candidate for a dipped paint experiment. It was a $5 yard sale find from about 3 years ago that I had spruced up with a little white paint and a cute glass knob.

In it's original original form, it was natural maple with a coat of poly on it or something. The white was certainly an improvement over that in my book, but over the past few years it's accumulated some wear and tear - especially on the top.

Instead of throwing another coat of white paint on it, I figured I'd have a little fun with it in the form of some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in French Linen that I had on hand, and a sample pot of one of Valspar's spring colors in Sonora Rose. It's a nice bright coral - much brighter than I would usually choose!

(Side note: I got the sample pot for free thanks to a Lowe's coupon I pulled out of a Real Simple magazine a couple of months ago. Lucky for you, if you have this month's issue, there's another one in it! Take it to Lowe's and grab a sample of your favorite color or try out a new one.)

First, I painted the whole side table with two coats of chalk paint with my favorite Purdy paintbrush. I prefer two thinner coats to one thick one, even though the chalk paint can says you only need one coat.

And yep, I painted right in the middle of our living room over the comics section of the Sunday paper. It was pouring rain outside, so no balcony painting this time! Thankfully, chalk paint doesn't have any nasty-smelling chemicals in it, so painting inside isn't an issue.

Once the chalk paint dried (I only had to wait about 45 minutes - that stuff dries fast!), I used some Scotch Blue painter's tape to mark off the "dipped" paint line on the legs.

I arbitrarily chose to tape off each leg 5.25" from the bottom. I made sure to really press down the edge of the tape to seal it off so that the paint line would be nice and crisp.

Then I went to work with two coats of Sonora Rose on each leg. To really make sure I got a crisp line, I made sure to paint from the bottom edge of the tape down toward the bottom the leg. That way, I wasn't pushing any paint underneath the tape's edge and messing with the seal.

I let the paint dry for about 15 minutes, then pulled the tape off while it was still wet (another helpful strategy for a crisp paint line). It worked perfectly! Crisp, solid lines all around. Just look at those beautiful dipped legs!

Ah, the magic of paint. She's a real beauty now. Plain Jane to a knockout - ha! Here she is all dressed up next to our sofa.

And one more time before and after:

Just lovely!

Now here's the thing...she may not stick around our house. As much as I love this little side table, especially after her transformation, I don't really have a good home for her. She's living next to an upholstered chair in the living room for now, but she's too tall for it, and the rest of our living room furniture leans a little too traditional for her to fit in well with her punchy, modern style. I'm holding onto her for now, but she may end up on Craigslist soon. I'll let you know if that happens!

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linking up to: DIY Showoff, Rain on a Tin Roof, Home Stories A to Z, Uncommon Designs, If It's Not Baroque, Liz Marie Blog, House of Hepworths, Blissfully Ever After, Design, Dining and Diapers, Crafty Scrappy Happy, Craftberry Bush, The Shabby Creek Cottage, Tatertots and Jello, Serenity Now, It’s Overflowing, House of Rose, Love of Family and Home, Dear Creatives, Madigan Made, First Home...Love Life, Simply Dream and Create, Whipperberry, A Stroll Thru Life, Remodolaholic