Fabulous Freebies

As my family is updating each room of their house, I am being gifted with their old and outdated furniture. My most recent acquisition was this drop-leaf cherry end table.

Don't you just looooove the old school brass Chippendale style handle? (And my sarcasm?)

The awesome brass lamp was another freebie as well. It's rocking the same style as the table. I remember these pieces growing up and never thinking twice about them being "out of style". They were simply the normal things that I saw everyday. I couldn't wait to remake it.

I started by taking the lamp apart slightly and taping the electrical components for a few coats of spray paint.

For those of you who don't know much about lamps, see this diagram.

Source

There are two ways to put a shade on a lamp. One way is to keep the harp attached and to place your shade on the top. (Such as the method shown above.) Another method is to take the harp off and sit the shade around the socket at the top. Stores sell lamp shades to fit these two different styles.

I started by twisting off the finial, squeezing the harp, and lifting it off the socket. The socket twists off as well and I pulled it out slightly revealing the wires. I protected the electrical components with a sandwich bag and some painter's tape.

Now comes the fun part - spray painting! Instead of waking up to coffee brewing and the birds chirping on a Saturday morning, my neighbors woke up to the smell of Robin's Egg Rustoleum outside their window. That's one of the awesome benefits of living above me...

By the way, you can get your security deposit back if you left a rectangle of over spray on the patio...right?

After doing a couple coats of spray paint on the lamp, I turned my attention to the table. It had a very smooth top coat and needed to be scuffed up before I painted it. I took off the hardware and used a very rough grit sandpaper to create a surface my paint would adhere to. (Looking back, I probably should have upgraded to a softer/higher grit because you could slightly see the strokes underneath the paint. Live and learn.)

Wood lovers, avert your eyes!

I knew that I wanted to replace the dated handle with something else, so I removed it and plugged up the holes with some wood filler. As a tip, I like to put a strip of painter's tape along the inside of the drawer to help hold the wood filler in the hole.

When it comes to deciding which type of paint to use, you have to take into the consideration the finish that's already on your piece, how much prep work you want to put into the piece, and what type of material it is. Miss Mustard Seed's Milk Paint wouldn't work very well on this piece due to the smooth top coat. She supplies a bonding agent for her paint, however I would need to do a lot of prep work to get rid of the top coat on this table and I just didn't want to get into another can of paint stripper.

Chalk paint would work better such as Annie Sloan. Ultimately, I decided on Persian Blue by General Finishes because I had more of that leftover from a previous project and I wanted to try out their High Performance Topcoat instead of doing a furniture wax or hemp oil.

Here's the first coat going on.

At this stage in the game, it's important to do multiple light coats of paint than a few heavy coats. You'll get drips if you paint heavily. Doing a few light coats helps to eliminate those drips that you'll have to sand out later because you didn't catch them quick enough. Not that I've ever had to do that...

Here she is in between coats 1 and 2.

Painting Tip - Always turn your furniture upside down when you're painting! You will notice drips, spots you missed, etc.

Here is a perfect example of some spots I missed on the underside of the legs. Even though people probably wouldn't see that, you still want a quality paint job.