Paint Your Wagon

Here in Utah there seems to be a small window of opportunity to do DIY outdoor projects, like painting furniture or building furniture—it has to be warm enough outdoors that your knuckles don’t freeze (done that), but not so hot you hate being outside. It has to be light enough that you have  sunshine at 6am to paint your first coat so  that your third coat at 9pm also goes on in still-necessary daylight. Maybe you don’t really need all these factors, but I say you do.

The month of June is the perfect time to tackle such projects. Last May 2010 (too cold) I made this headboard with my dad.

This year he helped me re-paint lots of my furniture in my house. He may never come visit me again with all the work I ‘make’ him do when he’s here!

But before my parents came, I tackled this room with a coat of  ‘Lunar Stone” by Millenium. (I had it mixed at Lowes so that’s all you need to tell them as their super magical computer can look up any paint color from any fan deck.)

And I absolutely adore how my fabric lamp shade turned out? I bought that awesome geometric fabric here. The embroidered pillows are old though—those are my damask monogram and bird on branch designs.

Once my Dad arrived we started on my TV cabinet the very next day. It was once black and I do love black furniture, but nowadays TVs themselves are so large and black. This corner just seemed too dark. I called it the black hole.

So on went a coat of this chartreuse green paint. I used the exact same finishing technique as I did on my headboard—paint, sand, paint, brown wood stain, sand, 2-3 coats of polyurethane. This time my dad converted me to water-based polyurethane as it dries much quicker. Hee haw! Still, it took 2-3 full days.

But “The Black Whole” is gone now! Giddyup.

We had a whole gallon of the “Spring Sprout” by Millenium so next we painted this very-abused kids’ book cabinet. It sits in the hallway upstairs and for once I love it. I need to buy another one from Four Chairs and paint it the exact same way so that I can get rid of the crap-ola white bookcases next to them. (No offense Target.)

Next we tackled my pine computer desk which I also bought from Four Chairs. It’s about 7 years old. We bought it unpainted. I painted it a boring cream color but I did a terrible job back then as I had tiny children and a baby and I didn’t have the time to spend on it. Yea, yea, excuses.

Then I painted it a greenish-brown about 3 years ago to match the double x-back chair. Well, I loved my headboard color so much that on went a coat of, you guessed it, “Turquoise Mosaic” by Millenium. No more brown desk, no more brown chair!

Love it against my cream walls in the office!

Here I am glazing it with “Early American” stain by Minwax. You don’t have to glaze it. But I don’t like the “Romper Room” look. (Please tell me you are old enough to know what Romper Room is?) I like bright, but I also like sophisticated. Just do what Mr. Miyagi did—wax on, wax off. Okay, not really. Brush on with a sponge-y brush, wipe off with old, lint-free sheets.

See how the glaze warms it up? I hate faux finishes, this is soooo not that. It’s just adding some…well…character and warmth.

Finally, we tackled this blanket chest. I actually made this blanket chest in a community carpentry class 8 years ago. It’s a long story, but I never finished it the way I really wanted too, which of course, meant I would’ve painted it. By the end of the class I was so tired and worn out (newborn baby) I had the teacher just shellac it. I didn’t even care that I didn’t stick to my mantra of “knotty-wood-is-evil” and must be shunned. I gave in and used mostly knotty alder because that’s what the teacher had available in the shop and I was too tired to keep going to a very testosterone-filled lumber yard just to buy clear alder.

But now it is kind of a 1930s glam look with gray paint and crystal knobs. Yum! And all those awful knots are now filled!

It really was a blast! Now if I could just get some energy to clean up my garage and put all the supplies away.