Weekend update, with furniture tutorial

[sabotabby]

I have been a busy sabotabby this weekend.

I went to see Tomboyfriend's EP launch on Friday night, which was fabulous. It was also the premiere of culpster's video for "Hot Divorcee":

Watch on YouTube

Fitness and Vag Halen opened. Both of them were highly entertaining but I was especially into Vag Halen. As some of you may know, I have a serious weakness for hair metal. It's a guilty pleasure. If the same songs are covered by talented women, it's all the pleasure without the guilt.

I just returned from seeing Hercules, Handel's almost-opera. It was also really amazing. minussmile and I had gallery seats for the first act (until we swiped better seats at intermission) so it was all bald spots and vowels. I've never been to Koerner Hall before and the acoustics are spectacular.

In between all of this activity, and school, I have been packing and painting all the things. I am pleased to announce that the first project in Operation Teal has been completed!

Another kind-of-guilty pleasure I have is for shabby chic. I don't like the all-white look (for me—I like it for other people, but I can't imagine living in it), but I like the distressed look with splashes of colour. The rooms in my new place are quite small, which means that my usual decorating method of bold, dark wall colours will not work. Accordingly, my furniture is going to be dramatic instead.




I think I've had this nightstand since I moved to Toronto, maybe even before, and it was secondhand at the very least. It matched my childhood bedroom set, which obviously I no longer have. It's an entirely serviceable nightstand—it holds a drawer full of jewellery and a drawer full of...things that are not jewellery, a lamp, and my alarm clock. There's nothing terribly wrong with it.

Except that it could, well, be more teal.

I started off by sanding it, but not nearly as much as you'd think. When I took the handles off, I found that someone else had found the nightstand not quite to their satisfaction, and there had in fact been a prior set of handles on the drawers:


Ugh. These got plugged and filled with wood filler, then sanded some more.

There's a wonderful primer that the guy at Home Hardware showed me, called 1-2-3. It's acrylic, dries in an hour, and sticks to everything. One coat was pretty well opaque even before I got to the actual paint.


Mr. Marinetti inspects the paint job.

Okay, it's a nice colour. A little too nice! So next, I got some burnt umber acrylic paint, watered it down, and splashed it everywhere, then wiped it off with a damp paper towel:


You can see a little drip, illustrating the proper consistency.


To give it that distressed look, I removed some of the paint with sandpaper.


Finally, check out the knobs I scored!

Here's what the finished piece looks like:




I'm pretty pleased with it. I'm less pleased with the prospect of doing three bookshelves and a thing that is going to serve as a bookshelf for the time being, four chairs, and a desk. On the plus side, this one took me three days, two of which involved a few hours of work after school, and would have been even faster had I not run into problems with the hidden holes and the charger for my power drill having gone missing.

Finally, some people have requested a picture of the Black Coat of Swoop, so here I am in full-on winter gear:



Okay, now off to bed—a bookshelf awaits in my kitchen for tomorrow morning.

Comments

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Man, you're good at this! Do you know how much the shops on Queen Street charge for this kind of faux vintage?

[sabotabby]

In fact I do, having spent quite a bit of time in expensive furniture stores on Queen St. :) That's where I got the idea.

(To be fair to Châtelet, at least, a lot of the furniture they get is more structurally complicated than what I'm working with and has far more serious repairs that need to be made to things before they get resold.)

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've been to Châtelet yet! But same difference...