Painted Wardrobe With Highlighted Relief

This wardrobe was a 30€ bargain at my local brocante. You can see from the before photos below that it was a well made piece of furniture. With its interior lined with fabric, intricate carved details, it’s draw lined side cupboard and brass fittings – I fell in love with it.

• 

• 

• 

The wood was worn in places though, some of the trim had been knocked off and it was very dark in the little bedroom I planned to make its home. I decided to paint it with chalk paint and highlight the ornate carvings. I’m not going to bore you with the application of chalk paint – it’s not new and there are lots of how tos on Pinterest that are excellent quality. Instead I thought I’d focus on how to highlight the trim.

FYI – normally I’d remove all the hardware, but this was impossible with this scenario, so this has affected the way I’ve dealt with the piece.

Remove all the drawers

I spray painted the shelf like drawers entirely with gold paint. I then spray painted the interior of the other drawers. prior to painting them with chalk paint.

Paint with chalk paint

I know you will probably know all about chalk paint, but I love to use it as when it, inevitably, gets knocked and some comes off it doesn’t leave ugly, chip holes.

I put on about two to three thick coats. I needed the extra layer to cover the dark stain. Thank God the old stain didn’t bleed into the paint like when I up cycled this secrátaire.

Sand with very fine sand paper

I find doing small, circular motions the best to sand. It’s not a glass like finish, but it is smooth to the touch.

• 

• 

Start with the Flower

You can see my paint here, which is acrylic paint. You notice I have two shades of the pink and green along with white…

Start with the paler pink and paint the roses, not forgetting the underneath of the flowers…

• 

I needed a couple of coats, but there’s minimal drying time. Take a flat artists brush and put some coral pink on there, then start to dab it in the gap between the bud and its exterior petals. Add some within the centre of the bud and underneath and at the edges of the petals.Keep blending to have darker and lighter pinks.You’ll notice I used darker in the crevices on the bud’s petals.

As that’s drying move onto the leaves.

• 

• 

• 

• 

You can see my different shades of green with the white below. Start with the darker shade in the crevices, then start to add a little of the lighter green to give it some dimension, then start to add more lighter shades on the tips and high points of the leaves, as if sunlight is catching it there.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Paint the ribbon with the coral colour, without adding any lighter paint.

• 

Go over the coral and exterior trim with gold paint.

Start to highlight areas of the relief in gold as below. Just after this was dry I went round with my flat brush again and painted the chalk paint over the top to clean up the edges.

Wax the painted finish

Complete the entire wardrobe with chalk paint, highlighting the relief and adding gold to any other details you want to. When this is done wax the exterior of the wardrobe with transparent wax. Then you may want to take some dark wax and give it an aged feel.

Add gold to any interior areas you want to

As I had some interior areas that I felt could do with some extra highlight I painted these gold too.

Use acrylic varnish on the inside

The interior of the wardrobe is going to have a lot more wear on it, so you may want to varnish this with water based, transparent varnish. You can even use this on the exterior instead of wax if you wanted to.

This is what the wardrobe looks like when completed…

It reminds me of the one in Beauty and the Beast….,

(I don’t know whether that’s a good thing). It goes beautifully with the secrétaire in the corner. I’ve got a dressing table and some chairs to finish then I’ll post an update.

Enamelware Inspiration

I have a pot in our kitchen that I’m thinking of painting and have been browsing for design inspiration, so I thought I’d share here today. Have a blessed Sunday!

Secretaire

 

So my secretarie is finally finished – it was a hard slog. Just in case you’d forgotten here was it before.

After I’d removed the hardware and started to clean it I had what should have been my first indicator that things were going to be difficult. I cleaned it with a spray cleaner and paper towels and as I did so the towels were covered in brown. That had never happened before, but I just carried on regardless.

The attractive thing about chalk paint is that you are meant to be able to use it without any prep whatsoever and most of the time that works. This time however as I painted I had ‘bleedthrough’; whatever was used to coat and protect the wood before was seeping through my paint. I didn’t take a picture at that stage as I thought if I kept painting it would eventually cover it; it’s chalk paint, right???!

Wrong!

The stain kept coming through after two, very thick coats of paint. That’s when I started to duck, duck, go. The options where to sand through it or use and anti-stain primer. I decided to try sanding first. I realised though once I’d started that the details on the secretaire would make them difficult to sand to the extent I was having to to get rid of this treatment. So, on to the next…

I have functional French and can cope in most situations even if I’m not exactly smooth in my delivery. However it’s still hard communicating and understanding technical vocabulary, so I was relieved to get through the experience understanding what had been said to me.

After a coat of the kind of primer that stops stains they still peeped through, I was starting to get really worried. I realised that the design I’d wanted – the white exterior with pink interior that you can see on my research post – may have some serious difficulties. After a little more research I found lots of aged, green designs and figured I’d just work with the stains.

I had a can of moss green chalk paint and two coats of that went on and to my relief no stains! The interior had a faux leather writing area that couldn’t be removed, but after I’d used the primer on that too I could paint it with the moss green easily. However I wasn’t happy with the uniform colour and decided to try spray painting it gold – I’m so pleased with the results. Where the chalk paint creates a brush stroke the spray paint on top ends up with wonderful effect as some of the green peeps through. So pleased with it. I finished this area with two coats of clear varnish as previous uses of gold spray paint have taught me you must seal it to protect it from being gradually worn down.

I also use the gold spray paint on the sides of the drawers so there’s a flash of gold as you open them.

Then I hand painted roses on it with acrylic paints and stood back to admire my handy work. Even though the bleed through wasn’t showing the freshness of the paint was too bright, too new in the 19th century dining room. Particularly as, as you can see in the pictures, I removed all the carpeting and the original floor beneath is intact. So I decided to age it with some dark wax.

I’m not going to lecture you with a tutorial on this – its chalk paint, its been done a million times right?

I’m pleased with the result after all the mis-starts – whats do you think?

By the way, these photos are of my great, great grandmothers; cool huh?