Operation Secord: Mission Accomplished!
Feb. 11th, 2012 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI am done! Well, pretty much done. I think. The perfectionist in me is not quite willing to be finished, but for now I think I can live with it.
So the last piece to do was my grandmother's desk. I have lots of vague memories of it from my childhood, but it's been in storage for a few years and I couldn't exactly remember what it looked like.
The rest of the furniture, even the antique-looking chairs, are pretty new. I knew I had to go a lot more carefully with this one. I do kind of like the finish, and there were some nice details:
That top thing is leather. I was pretty confident in the primer being able to go on most things, but I wasn't sure about leather, or how it would look painted. Plus I really like the design on it. So I decided to leave the leather as is, and debated painting the rest.
On the plus side, it's a much nicer-looking wood than the other stuff. On the downside, though, it's going in a very small room. It was also scuffed as all hell:
I think this is the desk that Marinetti took a swipe at the one time he stayed over at my mom's. Not positive about that. Anyway, it was scratched to shit by someone or something. I had a few options:
1) Live with the finish and call it distressed. However, knowing my habits, once it was in the room, I was not going to ever re-finish it because I'm lazy. It's going in the library/study room, so it's going to be next to a bunch of teal bookshelves and one of the white chairs, so I would also have to live with the colour clash.
2) Sand it down and re-stain it to approximate the original finish. I'd have to live with the colour clash and the fact that it would end up looking less distressed than the rest of the furniture in the room.
3) Try painting the whole thing, leather and all.
4) Tape off the leather and paint the rest to match.
I also debated colours—teal to match the bookshelves, off-white to match the chairs, red to match nothing but I like red, a combination of one or more of the above—and ended up going with off-white. I felt that the leather part would be really contrasting and adding another colour to the mix would be overwhelming.
Here's how it turned out. The leather really, really jumps out. I'm not sure how much this will bother me or whether I'll look for a solution for painting over the leather or replacing it with something else; I think it's kind of interesting, and there will be stuff on top of it. Ack! I can't decide! Any suggestions?
Here's the detail. I just noticed that I put the handles on upside-down. Oops. I'm going to go fix that now.
And here's the rest of the painted furniture (minus the nightstand, which is in another room). As you can see, there's a lot of it! Overall, I'm very pleased with the results and I think it'll look fabulous once it's all in place. My very patient cat is also pictured. He decided to "help." Using his tail and somehow his ear. If anyone has suggestions for how to get paint off a cat, I am also taking those.
So the last piece to do was my grandmother's desk. I have lots of vague memories of it from my childhood, but it's been in storage for a few years and I couldn't exactly remember what it looked like.
The rest of the furniture, even the antique-looking chairs, are pretty new. I knew I had to go a lot more carefully with this one. I do kind of like the finish, and there were some nice details:
That top thing is leather. I was pretty confident in the primer being able to go on most things, but I wasn't sure about leather, or how it would look painted. Plus I really like the design on it. So I decided to leave the leather as is, and debated painting the rest.
On the plus side, it's a much nicer-looking wood than the other stuff. On the downside, though, it's going in a very small room. It was also scuffed as all hell:
I think this is the desk that Marinetti took a swipe at the one time he stayed over at my mom's. Not positive about that. Anyway, it was scratched to shit by someone or something. I had a few options:
1) Live with the finish and call it distressed. However, knowing my habits, once it was in the room, I was not going to ever re-finish it because I'm lazy. It's going in the library/study room, so it's going to be next to a bunch of teal bookshelves and one of the white chairs, so I would also have to live with the colour clash.
2) Sand it down and re-stain it to approximate the original finish. I'd have to live with the colour clash and the fact that it would end up looking less distressed than the rest of the furniture in the room.
3) Try painting the whole thing, leather and all.
4) Tape off the leather and paint the rest to match.
I also debated colours—teal to match the bookshelves, off-white to match the chairs, red to match nothing but I like red, a combination of one or more of the above—and ended up going with off-white. I felt that the leather part would be really contrasting and adding another colour to the mix would be overwhelming.
Here's how it turned out. The leather really, really jumps out. I'm not sure how much this will bother me or whether I'll look for a solution for painting over the leather or replacing it with something else; I think it's kind of interesting, and there will be stuff on top of it. Ack! I can't decide! Any suggestions?
Here's the detail. I just noticed that I put the handles on upside-down. Oops. I'm going to go fix that now.
And here's the rest of the painted furniture (minus the nightstand, which is in another room). As you can see, there's a lot of it! Overall, I'm very pleased with the results and I think it'll look fabulous once it's all in place. My very patient cat is also pictured. He decided to "help." Using his tail and somehow his ear. If anyone has suggestions for how to get paint off a cat, I am also taking those.
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Date: 2012-02-11 05:46 pm (UTC)I don't have the patience for such projects. I didn't even notice the handles were on upside down -- it looked usable to me.
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