Merry Christmas & Our Dining Room!

It is just after noon on a lovely Christmas day!  The family just finished watching our new copy of Guardians of the Galaxy…which I will frankly admit didn’t impress me that much when I saw it in the theater…so I decided to take a few pictures and blog! 
That *is* rest and relaxation for me!  I have been too bush (or distracted) to do much of it lately.  The holiday house tours have come and gone, but I thought I’d share a few pictures of my (mostly) COMPLETED dining room before the Christmas decorations come down.

Yes, you read that right…mostly completed!  That means I finally built a dining table that I intend to keep!  Maybe I’ll do a full “reveal” at another time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath…

I bought this set of eight chairs almost a year ago from Ruffles & Rust in Snohomish, WA.  They showed pictures of them on their Facebook page, and I think I was in at opening the next day.  I built the table to go with them, and I think I used something like seven different coats of five different stains to get the color right!

Here’s my Christmas centerpiece…and old shutter, an IKEA sheepskin, some wooden beads, and a pretty candle arrangement I got from my mother several years ago.  I texted a picture of it to my sister and asked, “Is this too weird or just weird enough?”  She responded, “Just weird enough!  It suits you!”

Still not sure how to take that….

In the background you can get a glimpse of my antique pie safe.  This is the wall where my suitcases used to be…

…but I moved them to the largest wall (painted in chalkboard paint!) and added a couple new additions (the gray suitcase on the bottom left and the little train case on the bottom right).

I have a small collection of reindeer that gets displayed on my suitcases every year.  I love how they look on the chalkboard wall.

This is another new addition…this beautiful old pine hutch.  I’ve wanted one for years, and I scooped this one up for $75 from Craigslist. 

My girls helped me glitter some paper mache stars to hang on this old ladder.  I’ve had the ladder for over two years, and it just barely got to come in the house!

I made the curtains out of my beloved ikat…I have ikat curtains in our vintage geek family room too!

It has made me happy to have a pretty dining room for the holidays this year, and it will make me happier still when we fill this table (as well as our kitchen table) up with friends and family in a few hours!
From the Red Hen’s Home to yours…we hope you are enjoying a wonderful Christmas holiday!

 

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French Country Hutch

One of my latest furniture projects had a mind of its own…but what else is new?? I have been in love with this hutch (below) for months and months…in fact, I have it pinned to at least two different Pinterest boards!

I haunted Craigslist for days/weeks/months/(who knows) to find a similar piece for a good price, and finally came across this one:

It was $75!!  The only problem…it was in Kirkland, WA, while I was in Portland, OR, for spring break!  The owner was moving, and it HAD to leave on one specific day, and I wasn’t going to be available.  I fretted over that for a while, until an elegant solution occurred to me.  I was supposed to paint a small chest of drawers for a client that she was picking up IN Kirkland!  I made a deal…if she would pick up this hutch for me, I would paint her chest for free.

Everybody wins!

So the hutch came home in April, I think…and then it sat….and sat…and sat…until finally I was ready to do something with my dining room.

I tried my best to re-create the look of my inspiration picture.  I painted the body with a DIY chalk paint made from SW Creamy ceiling paint!  I distressed everything heavily, and also glazed it with a dark walnut stain .

I had a different vision for the backing other than beadboard, but I had to bring the hutch inside before I got to it in order to keep it “safe” from other garage projects. 
  I placed it against the dining room wall that was supposed to be it’s new home…and promptly hated it.

It was too. darn. big.

Sadly, I knew right then that it wasn’t staying.  I decided to use beadboard for the backing, painted a couple of shades darker than the rest of the hutch.

 
After putting it all together, I could appreciate that it was a pretty piece…just not for me!  It has moved on to a new home now.

<Sigh.>  Better luck next time!

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Black Beauty

Much to my dear husband’s delight, our dining room has a table in it again…although not for long!

I refinished this set for a client who had picked up this set for a song from a neighbor at a garage sale.  You can see that the finish on the top was pretty worn (it looked worse up close).  She had hopes of refurbishing it herself, but only got as far as replacing three of the seat covers (red instead of white) before losing interest!  I was happy to step in and help!

After removing the original finish, the top got several new coats of stain in a mix of Minwax Dark Walnut and Early American.

The chairs and the apron were painted in a DIY black chalk paint, and I distressed with a wet sponge to let some of the original finish show through.  I sealed the top with Minwax Wipe-on Polyurethane followed by a coat of DIY dark wax, and the painted parts were sealed with General Finishes High Performance TopCoat (satin finish) and DIY dark wax.

I recovered the chairs in this pretty dark fabric she brought me.  She has little ones, so DARK fabric was a must!

This set is HUGE!  The chairs are very generously sized and nicely padded, so it’s a very comfortable table to sit at.  There are two extra leaves for this table as well, so it’s perfect for large gatherings. 

I really love how it turned out…my dining room is moving up on my priority list of rooms to finish!

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Union Jack Dining Table

I feel lately as if I have been “jack of all trades and master of none.”  I’ve had a million things going on at once, and it doesn’t seem like I’m FINISHING anything.  Or…if I am finishing anything…I’m not doing a very good job of it.  Ugh!

But am I popping in this afternoon to show one thing that IS done and that I AM happy with!

A couple of months ago I purchased a table at a thrift store because it was on great, chunky turned legs. 

It wasn’t as big as I wanted it to be, so I pulled off the legs to use for another future table project.   You can see the top wasn’t in great shape, but it was certainly salvageable—so I did just that!  I stripped and sanded it down to bare wood.

I built a new table base out of stock lumber.  I’ve  had some questions about what the underside of my tables look like—here’s a peek.  I put in some cross-braces of 2x2’s to hold everything square and sturdy.

I also played around a little bit with my table legs, cutting each with a single taper.  I really like how they turned out!

Then I got a little crazy with painter’s tape!  Sorry; I didn’t take a picture of that part!  I used a reference picture, a ruler, and a straight-edge and pretty much “winged it.”  This is how it looked right after two colors of stain were applied (Minwax Dark Walnut and Mahogany).

The next day I stained the whole thing with that custom gray-brown mix that I am fond of.  As much as I liked the bold colors—there were definitely spots were there was a little bit of bleeding under my tape.  The new stain helped blur the boundaries a little bit, as did distressing the heck of of the whole thing!

And this is what I ended up with…

My kids are the biggest fans of this table (mostly because they’re big fans of Dr. Who and Sherlock) and keep asking, “Can we keep it??”

I am tempted…but I’m afraid not!  So hopefully it will soon find the home of another Anglophile to reside in!

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	Mod Vintage Life

Two-Tone Table, revisited

My love for farmhouse tables continues unabated, but I took a little break from that style this past week or so.

When I showed you the Wide Farmhouse Table I made for my friend Stacy, I mentioned that I had previously refinished another table for her, but it was looking a little worse for the wear after a few years with a family of boys!

My job was to make it beautiful again.  What do you think?

Here’s what it looked like when I got it:

And here’s what it looked like after the first re-finish job:

After some good hard family use, there were some real problems:

Not sure why my cell phone photos look a little blue!  Anyway, there was chipped paint, naturally.  And then the finish on the top of the table went very cloudy in places.  I blame an inferior polyurethane I got from Ace Hardware (sorry, Ace), as that is the only time I’ve ever used it, and I hated it even then!  I actually still had the same can in my stash…I have now gotten rid of it! 

I chose to use CitriStrip to get rid of the old poly, rather than sanding it down.  There really was no need to go back to bare wood, as I still liked the original colors underneath.

I did, however, refresh the color with a new coat of stain before putting on the polyurethane.  This time I used three coats of Minwax Hand-rubbed Polyurethane in Satin, followed by one coat of paste wax.

The chairs got a light sanding, and then I repainted with oil-based paint this time.  It tends to be a little more long-wearing, I think.  I recovered the seats in this pretty fabric.  You know I’m a sucker for typography!!

I love how the leaves on this table tuck away neatly underneath.  Pull them both out, and you have another 30” of table space!  Such a great feature.

I adore the legs on this piece…

I am so glad I got to be the one to give this set a THIRD life!

I have to say…it really looked gorgeous in my dining room!  It was hard to let it go…again!

What do you think??  Is there room in your life for both rustic farmhouse tables and beautiful antiques?  There is in mine!

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