“Where do you get all of your furniture?” Hands down, the most frequently asked question in the store!
Garage sales, back alleys, roadside, thrift stores, occasionally a craigslist pick, customer donations…and once in awhile I will get an e-mail from a loyal blog follower offering up some pieces of furniture.
Last week, my husband and I made an after hours trek to North Pasadena to pick up these cute little french inspired pieces from a sweet family who has been following the blog for sometime.
I try to get my hands on this style of furniture anytime I can find it because, though it looks ridiculous in its original state, the transformation of these pieces is uncanny.
I opted to paint the three of these so that they could be purchased as a set…though, they are sold separately. A few months ago, I painted in french style highboy as a custom job in Provence. I had so many people inquire about the price and admire the finished product, I decided to replicate the design. The dresser and nightstand got a treatment with two coats of Provence.
Original hardware was left as-is!
And, then there was the desk. We experienced an Annie Sloan first with the desk! When the second coat of paint was applied and nearly dry, it started to peel off in chunks (kind-of like the milk paint does). I’ve never seen ASCP do that. Granted, the surface of these pieces is laminate and plastic, but the beauty of chalk paint is that you can paint over any finish. We (actually, Sabrina did most of the work on this one) ended up having to sand off all of the paint, applied a thin coat of lacquer to the whole piece and used the lacquer as a base coat to paint the Pure White. That worked well.
The finished result is a simple paint treatment that is very feminine.
Lesson learned: It’s never a bad idea to rough up a plastic or laminate surface prior to painting…even when you are using Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. It only takes a few minutes and is worth saving the time and cost of extra paint that went into this piece!
On a side note, we have updated the for sale page with over a dozen pieces of furniture! You can take a look at it to see what projects we’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks!
