Gray Herringbone End Table for Sale

Hi friends! I realize it's been a long time since we caught up, and I'm planning a post to show you what I've been up to over the past month or two. I also have some pretty big news to tell you about. Until then, I wanted to let everyone know that my gray herringbone table I did a while ago is now in the shop.

If you follow me on Instagram (@sbridga), you may have seen her replacement this weekend. I bought this beauty at Home Goods in Tysons Corner and she. is. gorgeous. There was also a similar sofa table and smaller end table with a small chip in the mirrored top if you're in the DC area and share my love of geometric metallic goodness.

I still love the shape of my little gray table, but I just don't have another place for her right now and need to let go. Can't wait to send her off to a new home!

Update: This table has been sold. 

Beautiful Blue Chairs

Happy Saturday everyone! When I picked up this pair of chairs, the finish was poor and they had cracked cane seats. I really liked the scale of them and how skinny the spindles were, so I knew they were a good candidate for a re-do. I painted them in Benjamin Moor Advance Satin Marine blue, applied some upholstery webbing over the cane just for extra support, and padded them with batting. Then I used bold fabric from Premier Prints over the batting, and trimmed it out with white trim tape.

This pretty pair of chairs is now available in my shop. I can picture them at a little cafe table in the corner of an apartment. Have a great weekend!

Linked: Miss Mustard Seed, My Repurposed Life, Primitive & Proper, Redoux, Doodles & Stitches

Hinged-Top Waterfall Dresser

When I see a beautiful piece of unpainted furniture, I am often torn between wanting to keep the original wood, and wanting to paint it. Sometimes I make my decision based on the style of furniture. For example, something that screams 1970s is the worst of ways might look fresh and modern with a clean, glossy coat of paint. Other times, I find pieces that are so hopelessly beat up that only people who enjoy cruel and unusual punishment would attempt to refinish the wood.

That’s what happened when I stumbled upon this waterfall dresser on craigslist. It needed some serious help. Veneer was missing all over the place, the top had something crusted onto it, and a piece of the frame was missing between the top drawer and top of the dresser.

It was actually that missing piece that sold me. Seeing that 2 inch gap between the uppermost drawer and the dresser top made me realize just how much wasted space was in there. “I could do something with that space,” I thought to myself. So I went and picked her up in my trusty little Fiona Fit.

At first I planned to chip off all the veneer from the drawers and the top. That proved to be nearly impossible, even when I used vinegar mixes that were supposed to loosen the adhesive.  I ended up sanding the veneer off the drawers. Underneath the veneer was some kind of porous wood that had holes all over it (not just grain, but real holes). I filled the holes with wood filler, sanded them, and repeated the process. I also used some wood glue and clamps to tighten the drawer joints a bit.

After tackling the drawers, I got to work on the frame. The first thing I did was remove the top by unscrewing all the places it was connected to the frame and using a rubber mallet to gently loosen any areas that were glued down. Because so much of the veneer was left on the top that I couldn’t chip off, I sanded it down with my power sander as much as possible and then used wood filler to level out the places where the veneer was missing. This took a lot of layers of wood filler and sanding to get a good smooth finish. I used a sanding wedge to try and get a level surface.

Once I had tackled the top, I got to work on constructing the replacement piece for the frame. I couldn’t find 2 inch molding in the style I needed, so I glued two pieces of small dental molding and a couple pieces of wood from Home Depot together to make the top piece. Then I drilled a pocket hole with my mini kreg jig on either side so that I could attach the new piece to the frame. I also filled any cracks in my puzzle of molding to make it look like one piece. I used Kregg screws to attach the piece to the frame.

Then came the fancy part. I decided to build a shelf in the top of the dresser to utilize all that dead space at the top.  To do this, I had pieces of wood cut the size of the inside of the frame, drilled pocket holes in the them, and screwed them into the frame. Then I had a piece of higher-quality plywood cut to slightly smaller than the inside of the frame. When I got home, I used my Dremel Multimax saw attachment to cut out corners in the shelf to accommodate the four corners of the frame. To hide the gaps between the frame and the shelf, I cut small pieces of molding and glued them along the frame. It was a process, but it was oh-so-satisfying once I finished. Unfortunately I was so focused on building that I did not take a single picture of the process. Fail.

Once I built the frame, it was finally time to start painting. At first I primed everything with Zinsser Cover Stain, which I had read from various sources was the best primer to use. But the wood grain on the drawers was SO pronounced, and you could see where it was interrupted by the wood filler spots, so I did some research and found that if you really want to seal wood grain, you should use Zinsser BIN, which is shellac-based. So I used two coats of Zinsser BIN primer over the drawers and the whole frame to seal the wood. Shortly after, I purchased my Benjamin Moore Advance paint and read that it should only be painted over oil-based primers, not shellac-based primers or “undercoaters”. Whoops. So I sanded the surfaces with 220-grit sandpaper and applied a final coat of primer, this time using Zinsser Cover Stain. I sanded the surface again when I was done, and then got to the real paint.

Prior to applying the actual paint color, I made sure that the top actually fit on the frame. It’s a good thing I did, because the top wasn’t having it. When I attached the new portion of the frame, I inadvertently narrowed the space at the top of the dresser. No worries! I just sanded the sides of the top quite a bit, recoated with primer, and was ready to paint again.

I used Benjamin Moore Advance Satin paint in “Once Upon a Time”. It took three coats and some touch ups to get this baby covered.

After letting the paint cure for a loooonnnng time, I attached the hardware that would allow the top of the dresser to open up and allow access to the new shelf. I used regular brass hinges on the back of the dresser and a lid support on the inside. As I experienced with my TV cabinetdresser retro-fit, this took a few tries.

To give the dresser a finishing touch, I used Brasso and the rough side of a kitchen sponge to remove some of the tarnish that had built up on the original hardware. The hardware was REALLY tarnished, and I didn’t have the patience to remove all the tarnish, so I got it to a point where it looked a little tarnished but not dirty. I actually think that look works well with this dresser.

So there you have it, the story of rebuilding/enhancing this art deco relic. This girl came to the Lucketts Market with me, got a million compliments, but didn’t leave with a new owner. I think she is pretty taste specific, but I can picture her in a bedroom with her top shelf full of pretty little china saucers and teacups full of earrings and necklaces and bracelets and other pretty things. I also think she’d look really pretty with a mirror on that underside.

Update: I realized that I didn't bother to record that this dresser has a paper label on the back with a that shows that it was manufactured by Johnson Carper Furniture Company in Roanoke, Virginia, and that it was shipped to John Bujewicz in South River, New Jersey. It looks like the company started around 1927 and manufactured furniture through the 1930s, which confirms that this is an authentic art deco piece. Maybe someone will be looking up their family and read this blog and recognize the dresser or know how it ended up in this neck of the woods. Wouldn't that be cool? If you are a Bujewicz and you are around my age, this might have belonged to your great grandfather or uncle, or maybe it belonged to your grandmother. I got it from a family in Alexandria (maybe they are Bujewiczes too?). Anyway, let the powers of the interweb bring us together.

Linked to: Miss Mustard Seed, Primitive and Proper, Simple Home Life, Southern Lovely, Rolled Up Pretty, Embracing Change, Trendy Treehouse, Shabby Creek Cottage, The 36th Avenue, 504 Main, Chic on a Shoestring Decorating, The Shabby Nest, Common Ground, Redoux, Somewhat Simple, My Repurposed Life, Domestically Speaking, Primp, 52 Mantels, Tatertots and Jello

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My First Sale

You may have noticed the blue glass insulators that pop up in a lot of my styled pictures:

I brought a bunch of insulators with me to Lucketts, and realized that a lot of people don't know what they are. Never fear, I'm here to throw some knowledge on you. Insulators are placed at the top of electrical or telephone poles, where wires are wrapped around them to prevent the wire from touching the wood. Today you can look at the tops of electrical poles and see stacks of ceramic insulators, but before the 1960s, most of them were made of glass.

I love insulators for many reasons. I'm a sucker for blue translucent glass, they catch light beautifully, and they are great for styling just about any surface, especially if you're going for an eclectic (electric?) look. But insulators are near and dear to my heart for another reason: my grandpa collected them.

My grandpa spent his career as a telephone man. This influenced my family quite a bit. My dad and uncle know how to run wire pretty much anywhere in a house, and the entire family has a propensity for backing into parking spaces. I even grew up playing with old rotary telephones that my grandpa gave us when we were kids.

When the telephone company started converting their insulators to ceramic, my grandpa collected the old glass insulators. When my grandparents downsized, he put most of the insulators on a shelf near his workshop. He and my grandma also scattered them throughout their house, a small symbol of the pride my grandpa had in his work long after he retired. When he died, all of his children and grandchildren acquired portions of the collection.

Insulators make me quite nostalgic, and I always think of my grandpa when I see them. But that's not the only reason I decided to acquire some extras and sell them at Lucketts. My grandpa was an extremely handy guy, and as I've mentioned in past posts, he did amazing work to furniture that looked beyond repair. I still remember how every Tuesday, he would go visit his friend Freddie and repair furniture in Freddie's workshop with some other friends. It wasn't unusual to come across a few broken chairs in the cellar waiting to fixed up or re-caned. My grandpa's appreciation for old, well made furniture, his ability to see beauty in broken, beat up pieces, and his sheer love of tinkering and working with his hands undoubtedly influenced my passion for refurbishing old furniture.

My grandpa died six years ago last week. He lived a long and extremely fulfilling life, the kind that you can't help but use as a benchmark for your own. My only real regret is that I didn't fully embrace my furniture refurbishing hobby until after he died. There's so much that I still wish I could learn from him and work into my craft.

So where am I going with this? Well, as I stood anxiously at my Lucketts booth Saturday morning, not having sold anything right away, I wondered if this whole experience was going to be a big bust. But as the boy likes to remind me, I should have had more faith in myself. As the title of this post would suggest, soon enough, I made my first sale. And it was, quite appropriately, an insulator.

My Grandpa played baseball for the Cooperstown Indians on Doubleday field!

Lucketts Favorites: Mid-century Modern Herringbone Tables

Thank you SO much to Becky from Preparing for Peanut for sending me this picture she snapped during the market!

Shortly after I found out I would be selling furniture at Lucketts, I picked up these mid-century modern tables on craigslist.

The finish on both tables was in really bad shape, and had alligatored in a lot of places. The tops both had water rings on them. 

They were very solid and had potential, so I was excited about the acquisition.

To take off the bad finish, I sanded until my hands were about to fall off. I even bought a Dremel Multi-Max with the detail sander attachment to help sand the places where I was struggling and make the process go faster. 

Once the finish was gone, I applied a coat of wood conditioner and then a coat of Minwax Antique Walnut stain. I really didn't like the color I got, which was much closer to black than I wanted, so I put two layers of General Finishes Java gel stain over the Minwax to darken and richen it up a bit. I let the stain dry for a couple days before I got to painting it. 

I knew I wanted to paint a herringbone pattern on these tables in an effort to kind of exaggerate their mid-century, "Mad Men" style. My original plan was to use some of my white Benjamin Moore Advance paint to paint the pattern, but I was coming down to the wire and really didn't have time to wait for the dry time of Advance paint. So instead, I ran off to buy some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Pure White from the Stylish Patina space at Stifel &Capra in Falls Church. 

I chose to use chalk paint mostly because I knew it would dry quickly and cover well. I taped out the row of stripes that faced one direction first and painted the pattern on the table there. Once that was dry, I taped out the rows of strips facing the opposite direction and painted those. 

Here's what the table looked like after I painted the pattern. 

Another advantage of using the chalk paint was that I could sand the pattern very easily without making the paint peel. When the herringbone pattern was dry, I used 220 grit sandpaper to sand the edges of the color and give it a slightly distressed feel. Then I wiped off the dust with a damp cloth. 

To seal the table, I first brushed on a coat of Annie Sloan clear wax. After giving that about an hour to set, I mixed a tiny amount of my Java stain with some wax and brushed that over the entire thing to make the graphic herringbone pattern not quite as severe. I buffed off that wax almost immediately so that it wasn't too dark. 

Side note: Can  you believe this is the only good picture I have of them? Can you believe this is the one I consider "good"? Fail. 

Thank you SO much to Becky from Preparing for Peanut for sending me this picture she snapped during the market!

Unfortunately I didn't take very good pictures of the finished product. They were a hit at Lucketts--so many people stopped by to look at them--but they didn't sell until Sunday. So, note to self: just because something looks really cool doesn't mean that a ton of people will want it in their living room/bedroom. I ended up selling the tables to Amy Theodore of Hunt & Gather, who had some really rockin' mid-century pieces in their tent too. I'm mega flattered that those girls loved these tables as much as I did. 

I know some people came by and took pictures of them, so if you were one of those people can you pleeeeeaaaaase email them to me? You would seriously become my bff. 

Linked to: The Shabby Creek Cottage, Domestically Speaking, Miss Mustard Seed, Redoux, Shabby Nest, Making Lemonade

Lucketts Favorites: Blue Rocking Chair

When I was getting ready for Lucketts, a lot of my friends asked me which pieces were my favorite projects. So, I thought I'd do a few posts about my favorites.

I bought this rocking chair at the last minute, about a week before the market. It had a cane back and cane bottom. The cane bottom looked new, but the back looked terrible. I haven't yet learned how to weave cane furniture, so I decided to reupholster this chair. And I was in such a rush to finish projects that I forgot to take a before picture. Bummer.

Using spray primer, I primed it and painted it with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Provence. I mostly primed it because I didn't know what color I wanted to paint it, but I'm glad I did because I didn't want any of the black paint to show through anyway. After the paint dried, I went over it with a coat of wax.

I was actually planning to put different fabric on it, but at the last second I realized how gorgeous the retro flowered fabric looked with the blue, so I decided to use that instead. Once I had upholstered the front and back, I had to figure out what kind of trim to use. I wasn't really wanting to sew double-welt cord, so I looked around my house to see what I had. That's when I saw my big bag of cord that I would ordinarily use to sew double weight cord. The oatmeal color looked perfect against the fabric, so I doubled it up and attached it.

I am so in love with this color fabric combo to the point where I might actually do our unfinished dining chairs in this style. I sold it to a lady who has two little boys and was decorating a nursery for her little girl on the way. I love that this chair will look adorable in a nursery but be able to grow with the little girl too.

So that's my favorite. I'll be back later this week with more info.

P.S. Tonight I'm going to see a lecture by Jonathan Adler at the Corcoran with some blogger friends and I'm so pumped. Anyone else in DC going?

Linked to: Primitive and Proper, The Shabby Creek Cottage, Domestically Speaking, Miss Mustard Seed, Redoux, Shabby Nest, Making Lemonade

Craigslist Scam Alert

I posted a couple of the items that didn't sell at Lucketts on Craigslist yesterday, and got this fun little response:

 Hi
Thanks for the swift response to my mail inquiry .i completelysatisfied  and comfortable with your advert,hence still available, Iwill send a Bank check to cover the cost of my purchase  as well aspickup logistics.sincerely  i am keen on having  this to be mine .sokindly avail to me the details of whom & where to mail the paymentpackage.It will be delivered by the Fedex courier Service within2-3days of the receipt of your details.Please note Fedex do notdeliver to  P.O.Box addresses.,The below is required:

   1.Name to be on the check   2.Home address   3.Mobile #

In otherwords i presume a sealed transaction so,Kindly delete theadvert on Craig's List as am totally committed to buying from you tosave me cost, My mover will be coming over for the pick up right onlyafter the payment as been delivered and I want you to understand that,I would have love to call but i am hearing impaired and i am alwaysvery preoccupied with work  site inspection all week long , so do me afavor by sending me emails and pictures if available.

Thanks for your warm understanding

Wow, thanks, but I wasn't born yesterday. Also, if you're trying to steal from me, maybe don't send such an obviously sketchy response.  I had heard that there was some serious scamming going around Craigslist, and it finally got to me. I think most of my readers are savvy enough to know that you should never enter into a deal like this, but I wanted to let you all know about it in case you end up with an offer like this. Don't even respond!