Friday night entertainment: painting furniture!

Years ago, when I was young and pretty and employed, on Friday nights the Mister and I would go out to dinner.  We would sometimes meet friends for dinner on these social Friday nights, and wine was frequently imbibed.

Flash forward ten years, and the last five Friday nights have involved me and a gallon of paint and an unsuspecting piece of furniture.  Sadly, there isn't any wine involved.

I repainted my dressers.  For the 400th time.  The high gloss black was too shiny, and the black made the dressers look too heavy.  I painted the dressers Benjamin Moore Camouflage, which despite these pictures, is actually a soft, neutral greenish beige-ish sort of color.  The pictures make it look sorta washed out white, especially against the warm beige walls, but the next house will have white walls and you will all love it then.  It looks very klassy.

I also painted two lamps and my jewelry box navy blue, and the mirror orange. (You can see how everything used to look here. And yes, I know, the bedroom looked much more put together in that post, but bear with me, I'm moving in two weeks, and I haven't gotten everything together for this design yet.)

This mirror will be going in Princess's room, and I wanted the mirror to have a pinkish orange hue.  I attempted that with thin layers of spray paint, but the Mister gave it the thumbs down (see the upper quadrant in the picture below).  I also tried some Krylon Celery spray paint, but it looked terrible. (See the whitish patch on the upper right?) So I painted it orange.

This Friday night I'll be packing!  Next Friday night I'll be moving! Who says I don't know how to have a good time?

I really hope the lighting is better in the next house.  That or I finally figure out how to adjust the aperture.

black sideboard + nailhead mirror

After the previous black fiasco, I managed to procure some black high gloss paint (from a Benjamin Moore Store!  In latex! Without an attitude! Who knew such a thing was possible?).  Despite my children giving me the stomach plague this weekend, I managed to get a few coats on the sideboard.

Before we had a white sideboard with red handles, and two vintage travel posters.

Now it looks like this:

The mirror was from Lowe's a few years ago and has been sitting in my attic for a while.  It had a dull and rough silverleaf finish, with a nailhead trim effect around the edge.  I wanted more gold, however, so I gave it a very very light misting of gold spraypaint. Now its a not quite silver, not quite gold color.

I have been informed that our household is at the max capacity for mirrors.  One more mirror will throw the universe into chaos.

I'd have plans to add some hardware to the sideboard, but I'm still looking. 

craigslist mirrors

When buying our craigslist chair this weekend, the seller told us to meet her at her storage unit in a shopping center.  We followed her instructions to pull around the back of the shopping center and parked behind a bowling alley.  There was no storage unit in sight.

The seller turned out to be a young woman, and she led us behind a dumpster into the basement of the building next to the bowling alley.  It had all the makings of a slasher flick, but she was about 80 lbs soaking wet, so I figured the Mister and I could take her.

Half of the basement was crammed full of furniture.  The empty half contained only the blue chair and a bookshelf.  We gave the chair the once-over, a sniff test, and decided to buy it.

I grabbed the cushion, the Mister grabbed the chair, and we started moving it out, when two mirrors caught my eye.  I asked the girl if all of the furniture was hers, and it turned out she split the storage space with a friend who owned a consignment shop.  She agreed to sell me the two mirrors, and I am now the proud owner of a federal mirror and a bullnose-ish mirror, which is super-exciting, because I have been looking for a federal mirror ever since seeing the Matters of Style house tour on Apartment Therapy.

The federal mirror lives above the blue secretary:

I don't yet have a space for the other mirror, but I'll figure out a place for it.

Princess is enjoying our new blue chair: