Wednesday, July 31, 2013

For Pete's sake...what color??

The absolute hardest part of my furniture business is picking and choosing how it should be finished! Naturally I am in the business to sell... But that always leaves me with the question of WHAT SELLS??

Everyone has different tastes! Case in point.. When I was trying to finalize a color for the secretary desk I asked over and over and over "what color"???? I didn't get that many responses. The one thing that did work was a text blast to people whose opinion I trust. I mean, these chics (and my dad) have great taste! I included two pictures in my text blast... Similar secretaries, but one was grey, the other black.



Of course I got mixed responses! Ugh!! Overall, though, there was one that won by popularity. And so it was that my secretary desk was painted gray! And he's just beautiful! Now if I could just stop getting asked what color I'm gonna paint it!
The finished secretary desk can be seen here :)
Haha!! I painted in milk paint, which gives a naturally worn look. So it kinda looks like it "needs" paint, but it's totally beautiful to me.


And now I've got a dresser sitting in the shed waiting on that infamous question yet again....what color do I paint it?? I don't always paint. Well....lately I do because its so rare that I find a piece that DOESN'T need work! When we have to repair using new pieces of wood or wood filler then it usually has to be painted.



I LOVE this chest of drawers! I am certain I will be leaving the top it's dark wood color.
But for her body and drawers, I'm thinking a navy blue, like Miss Mustard Seed's Artissimo 
Or possibly French enamel or linen?

I would absolutely LOVE to paint it another milk paint color. And I'm dying to know your thoughts on it!!!

I feel another text blast coming on very soon!! If I say purty please will y'all let me know your thoughts on a color for this gen?

Purty please???

Monday, July 29, 2013

Previously...

I wish I'd kept my photos of previous projects more organized. They're impossible to find now. Major note to self: start organizing photos right away. If you are doing projects, too (no matter the kind) go ahead and start keeping a photo journal as well. It will be helpful in the future!

Now I just gotta figure out the best way to journalize my photos so I can keep up with them. I take lots of pictures with my iPhones and iPads but I change devices more often than not and all the pictures don't always transfer over!

So, anyway.... Here's a couple pieces I've previously worked on but can't find all the photos that show all my hard work ;)


This is a waterfall vanity I painted with chalk paint and glossy acrylic to bring out some accents. We made a seat of wood and padded it and covered it in a cute fabric from Hobby Lobby. I made sure the seat was removable in case the buyer wanted to use it as a desk or vanity. 


An old trunk got a makeover with some white chalk paint and a paisley stamp in neutral acrylic colors! This is something anyone can do!


How about this updated child's glider? It had an ugly ugly (and smelly!) green cushion on it. I had someone sew a new cover over new cushions for me. And then I realized I can actually sew on a machine ;)


You can always update something with a little paint. Take these two whatnots for example. The frog was painted the standard green with a light belly. The fish was that iridescent pearly color. I coated them several times with nothing but flat white spray paint and they are super cute now!

This is one of my FAVE half moon tables. The blue is what I call "peacock blue" and the top is stained in "Kona" it's such a pretty dark stain for wood!

My lesson has been learned!! I'm off to search for effective ways to keep a photo journal! See you on Google and Pinterest!

Sunday, July 28, 2013

The old home place



I wanted to share a story about the picture I use for The Picker's Barn.  


First, let me reiterate from a previous post... A great name is so hard to come up with! I eventually settled on The Picker's Barn (and I think it's quite catchy!) because for a few months now I've had a "picker" who buys furniture for me to resell. I don't remember how the words picker and barn came about to fit together but they absolutely did and it was perfect since my picker also keeps our stuff in his barn.

I thought to myself that i could get a picture of his barn, but I didn't think it would give the exact antique look I was going for. My second thought was to download pictures of barns (and I actually did, but obviously decided against it). My third thought was that I would go take pictures of a barn and use that. Who am I kidding??? I barely have time for all the stuff I don't have time to do now!

Then I remembered that I had taken pictures of this place about 4 or 5 years ago. And I knew it was perfect.  Although, its not a barn at all...... It's actually my maternal grandparents' old home place. It was located just outside of Douglas, Ga. My mama is the youngest of five children who grew up there. 




I'm 39 years old and when I was born this is the home that I came to! Nearly forty years later I'm sure it looks much different. I can imagine it in its original state, though. 


Except for the modern lawn mower I love this picture. It reminds me of the Dukes of Hazzard with that car hood :) I do realize the General Lee was orange, haha! But it still makes me think of the "Good Ole Boys" Waylon used to sing about.


I love the color of weathered and aged wood here. And look at that fireplace! It was built to last. You just don't see things made to last forever anymore.

Sadly, the house burned sometime within the last five years. I'm not sure to what extent. I keep telling myself I will make the trip to go check it out. 

I wish that I could remember this house from my childhood, these are the memories I would love to tell my son as he grows. I've got these pictures, though. That will have to be enough I suppose. 

One thing I will never forget or be ashamed of is where I came from. It's places and memories like these that make me the person I am today. Without the old, there is nothing new.  This is also my decorating style.  There's nothing I like more than a transitional space where the old and new are cohesive in the same room. Maybe it's because it fits me to a tee. 


This blog post is dedicated to my grandparents, Pete (who died before I was ever thought of) and Ella Adams because without them I may not have had this piece of history to share!


Now it's bedtime and I wish you well ;) 
Hopefully if nothing else I've inspired you to look into your past and find just where it is you came from. When you find it out please share it with me!

Goodnight ;)
Missi









Saturday, July 27, 2013

Simple makeover tile table

Who hasn't bought a piece of furniture a million moons ago because it seemed to work for the space in that moment? I may be the worlds worst! I have to say I've gotten better. I won't buy something if its "ok" in the space. It has to be perfect. And sometimes there's more than one perfect. 

I bought this table forever ago and it was passed around from one to another. It ended up back with me. Since I now have a space to sell my furniture and collectibles I decided to refurb this and sell it in our shop (it's called Vintage Soul).  

As usual, I forgot the stinking before picture, but I think you can get the idea. 


Just a simple wood table with tile inlays. With all my furniture I do a damp wipe down (just an old rag dampened barely) to get the dust off. I make sure to clean it up with the damp rag too... You know, with this old furniture there's always some kind of gunk somewhere...
Let your piece sit for a few minutes to make sure it's dry. Then I painted!


I used two coats of a chalk paint I mixed up. Best I remember I mixed ultra white Valspar  with cream in my coffee, which is Valspar as well. If you like a creamy color then definitely check out cream in my coffee! I will have a blog coming later that features that color. 
I'm also working on a post talking about paints and such. Not that everybody else hasn't already, just wanna put it all in my perspective. 

So the table is distressed and all cute now. Sorry, I didn't get the pic of the distressing either! I was slacking bad. Really all I did with it though was take some medium grit sand paper and work on the edges of where is painted. 

When I'm distressing furniture I imagine where the piece would get scuffed naturally and sand those areas the most, and lightly sand other areas just for looks. 



The table sold fairly quick, it was an easy redo, and I'm satisfied with that! Turns out it was pretty cute and had I needed a small breakfast table I would have out it to use myself ;)

Enjoy your day! Me and Kellan and Monkey (that's what he calls my roommate hehe!) are on a little trip today. Just my luck, it's sunny and the beach is nowhere in sight. This is where I let out a big sigh and sign off......

Smiles :)

Friday, July 26, 2013

Pop of lime!

I had a client who was working on remodeling her salon in Hazelhurst, Ga.  When I got there the walls were white or grey, I can't remember for sure... The workstations were grey, the floor was that outdated white and black tile. Lets just say it was all just outdated.  I should have taken before pics! One thing I've learned is that with every project I learn something new.

She had been on a shopping spree of sorts. I think she hit the yard sales and flea markets, and every vintage store in between. I'm so jealous, though, because she found some great stuff!! 

One piece I painted for her was this already beautiful china cabinet. 


There was nothing wrong with, except it was just too blah for what she had in mind for her shop. 

This fabric for her curtains was the inspiration for the entire salon.


Love it!!

The walls were being painted that turquoise-ish color of the birds. 

I painted four vanities for her workstations in a distressed white chalk paint. She mentioned that she wanted the china cabinet painted white also. She pretty much told me over and over she didn't want black furniture... But it just made sense! It's a relatively small salon and we already had all those white vanities. So I made my suggestion and she agreed. 

Let me tell you that when she picked up her new "product" cabinet she was SO excited!!! It's so pretty!! I have to agree ;) how about you?


I have to toot my own horn a bit... I matched the lime paint with the curtain from memory! I was so impressed with myself!


That pop of lime makes this cabinet!! 

Don't be afraid to get a little bold with your furniture. I usually am not a fan of these bright colors on furniture. I do, however, feel that a pop of color here and there adds some interest ;)

Like this little table I painted to match...

LOVE IT TOO!





Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Mr. Ebert's secretary desk

My picker won a secretary desk at an auction a little while back. I didn't even know what that was! I do now and I love it.


Me and Heather have been working on him and the china cabinet lately. The china cabinet is done (can be seen in previous post). 

I found out the other night that this secretary is about a hundred years old!! I'm always super excited to find that out about a piece of furniture I have. This one is made of walnut and was made by The Ebert Furniture Company. 


I decided to paint him in Miss Mustard Seed's Shutter Gray milk paint. 

The first coat is on :)

I couldn't work on it For a day or so (you know, toddler, my regular full time job, and sometimes mommy is just tired!). When I came back to it, omg!, you should have seen what this milk paint did all by itself! I could already tell the chipping thing was going to be gorgeous!! 

After his second coat of paint I waited til next day, praying the flaking would still come through.  It didn't let me down!!




He's waxed down too :)
Can you tell the difference? The top part is where I've already applied wax, bottom part I haven't waxed yet in these pictures.

And Mr. Ebert's secretary desk is complete!!









Sunday, July 21, 2013

My ironstone old lady!


Oh how I love you so!! I loved you from first sight!!

Have you ever fell in love with a piece of furniture even though it was obvious it needed a lot of love?? That's how I felt about this china cabinet.  This old lady was missing a drawer, some of her veneer was missing, she was just cosmetically not perfect. Her frame was solid, though.  Like she'd worked out her whole life. I was sooo happy my picker said she would be mine!!



What color? What color should my old lady be??  That's always a tough question to ask when you're in the business of refurbishing furniture to resell. What color will appeal to the most people? What color will match more decor? I'm always pulling my hair out on this one!!

Miss Mustard Seed Ironstone.  That's my choice and I'm sticking to it.  I honestly did post the china cabinet on our Facebook page called Vintage Soul, but no one offered any suggestions. So Ironstone it is.

Naturally the repairs come first... sometimes I wonder if I will ever find furniture that doesn't need repairs?? My roommate Heather does most of the repairs for me. She's getting pretty good at it, too!

The repairs are done and the old lady is ready for me!
I love painting!

I ended up putting three coats of paint on her. This is the part that I'm seriously impatient with.  The end result is always my favorite part.  Not that I don't like the work involved.  The work we do is what makes me appreciate the end result so much. The thing is it's rare that I paint a piece that doesn't get some sort of special technique. Usually it's some form of distressing. When you have to use more than one coat of paint you have to wait on each coat to completely dry before you can keep going. I've literally been so excited with this piece that I have just sat there chin in hand waiting... just waiting on her new coat to dry.




 
And now to make her even more beautiful with some natural looking aging. That's the cool thing about milk paint. It tells you where you can distress, not the other way around. 



Heather added a shelf to the area where the missing drawer once was. I've painted it with matching milk paint, added a knob to the door and she's finished!!



The cubby would be perfect for decorative bakeware or even some pretty baskets! 

All she needs now is a new home!



Pinteresting....

When I'm not searching for something on Google I'm searching on Pinterest! Everybody likes Pinterest, right??!

I've found some GREAT ideas on there, seriously. Here's some things I've tried that I think were successful!


This turned out awesome!! It is a Crown Royal bottle painted and decorated with some trinkets. I found the perfect trinkets at Walmart!


This pin was one in a million. When I saw it I knew I wanted to try it!! I heart this chair!!


I had recently purchased some doilies off eBay when I remembered seeing this painted canvas on Pinterest (on there it's grey, though). The lot of doilies were all different shapes and sizes...not all were suitable for framing. So I pulled up the pin and got my red spray paint! I kinda like it ;)


While having my usual morning cup of coffee I (as usual) was pinteresting around and came across a pin of some nautical items. This was before July 4th so I believe I had actually searched "nautical". There were some really cute glass bottles on a deck near water with this jute all over the bottle. What this is called I honestly can't remember right now...but I've seen it a lot on transparent covered glass balls hanging for decoration. I grabbed an old wine bottle I had picked up at an estate sale. I hang my price tags with jute so I pulled it out and followed the directions. i have to tell you the beginning and end of the process were a little tricky! But it turned out beautiful! I will DEFINITELY be using this pin again!


Every year in Georgia there's a massive yard sale spree that spans from middle Georgia all the way to the coast in Brunswick. I went for the first time this year and found this cute coffee table! It needed a little TLC but I'm no stranger to that... I'd seen this technique on Pinterest and wanted to try it. Essentially all it requires is lace and spray paint! To begin with I didn't paint the legs, I left them their original dark color. It sat at the store for probably two months with little interest. So I decided (as we sometimes have to do) to add a cream color to the legs. When I did that it really set the top apart from the dark color of the legs and sold almost immediately! It's amazing what a little paint can do for a piece!


And now for the not-so-hot moments from Pinterest. I'd seen a BEAUTIFUL end table made from part of a tree on Pinterest and decoded I'd search around and try it. A guy dropped off several pieces of a tree that had fallen. So I started chipping away the bark.


Ewww...gross. These little bugs with little pincher like things kept crawling everywhere! TERMITES!!! Yikes! I had to get that mess outta there before they tear up my house! Did you just get a mental image of the house being a big buzz if dist and falling to nothing like I did??

The moral of this story is to number one: get a piece of wood you know isn't ate up with termites. Number two: expect to do a lot of hard work!! The bark was HARD to get off and that sucker was HEAVY!!!

I see all these pins on Pinterest about painting jars and bottles. This one lady swears by painting the inside of bottles with paint and they looked so pretty. Best I can remember it said to mix the paint with a little water and coat the inside completely. I honestly don't remember now if it said latex or acrylic but I'm sure it must have been latex because that's what I used. I have plenty of acrylics, also, so I would have used that had it called for it.

I found some pretty bottles and did my thing. They look good about an hour or so later, right?


Here are those same bottles a day or two later. That's a hot mess right there!


Pinterest FAIL!

What successes or failures have you had with Pinterest? Please share them!


Saturday, July 20, 2013

The Picker's Barn

I'd like to tell you a little about myself...

My name is Missi.  It's not my birth name, but a nickname my parents gave me at birth. Of course back in 1974 they spelled it "Missie". I grew older and changed it to Missy, then even older and yet again to Missi. It's my nickname, I can spell it how I want, right?!? 

I promised myself never to name my child a nickname. When people see my business cards they ask which one is really my name! My nickname came from my middle name so it's way too confusing. My child would be called his first name. Period. Besides, I feel kind of silly at times being almost 40 years old and being called Missi. It's a hard habit to break, changing the name you want to be called at such an age. 

I finally did have a child at 37. He's a sport! He's my blond haired, green eyed rascal. And yes, I stuck by my lifelong promise to myself and named him so that the name I wanted to call him is his first name!! His name is Kellan. 

I started refinishing furniture about a year ago. I was moving into a smaller place and needed different furniture to suit the new place. It began with a redo on a china cabinet/hutch. When I saw the paint bubble up after I put that paint stripper on I was hooked! 

So I talked to a lady at a local store called Yesterday's Furniture in historic downtown Vidalia. I paid my rent and started filling up my "booth" with things I had to get rid of from home. And so it went... 

I called that space "ReDecor". My roommate hated the name, but I loved it! It was a name that to me symbolized the change that comes along in life as it pertains to redecorating our homes. Whether its simply replacing one piece of furniture with another or completely overhauling another. 

About 7 months later the opportunity came about for me to increase my space with a partnership with another lady I'd recently met and became friends with. Our tastes in things were similar and it just seemed cohesive. So between Stephanie and her husband and my roommate and I we are constantly on the lookout for new pieces for our space called Vintage Soul. It's still at Yesterday's Furniture, it's just a massive space rather than the 8 x 10' space I was in before. 

Stephanie and I spent a lot of late nights and early mornings (and everywhere in between!) coming up with the perfect name! I absolutely ADORE the name "Vintage Soul". It's catchy and even better, it's memorable!

I've been wanting to blog for YEARS!!! I love telling stories in my own words and having people read them. So about two weeks ago I began my first blog. You can find it at transitionalnest.weebly.com  I changed to the current site because weebly just hasn't been that reliable for me personally. No offense to them... It just wasn't working out between us! (It's me, not you kind of thing)

I wasn't crazy about the name of my blog, transitional nest, but I simply couldn't think of anything better at the time. I wanted something that meant transformation of my furniture, which is used mostly in the home (nest). It just never set well with me, you know?

So here I am on a new blog, with a new name. Story of my life, right? Haha! How fitting is that?? I actually love "the Picker's Barn", too. I have a wonderful picker (the person who makes it his business to find things for me to resell). And he even really does have a barn that he keeps my furniture in until I get it! 

I'm coming up with a logo for "the Picker's Barn now. I have a pretty good idea of how I want it to look, I just need to find the right photo. However, i spend a lot of my time working my full time job, raising a two year old, and a lot of late nights and early mornings or days off working on furniture. (Kellan and the furniture are my passions!). So hopefully I can make time for the logo pretty soon. 

If I ever have a store of my own (and TRUST me when I tell you that's the goal...to finally own my own store and spend my time doing what I love) I am going to call it "the Picker's Barn". It will be awesome. I'm claiming that right now!!

I sincerely hope that you enjoy my posts here in my blog. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated so please give me feedback!

Tonight I'm gonna leave you with this:

"One man's junk is another man'a treasure" keep it in mind when you're out and about!  Try to look beyond the surface and always think outside the box!!


Antique Ebert Furniture secretary desk

One of the most interesting things about what I do is finding a piece of history. I have come across several different pieces of furniture in the past year or so with some sort of history lesson to tell. To me, history comes in many forms. Although I may never know the story of each find, my eyes always light up when I realize I have something that's much older than I thought it was when I purchased it. 

Case in point is this secretary desk I recently acquired. My picker bought it for me at an auction and I've finally gotten my hands on it! He delivered it about a week ago and it's been sitting under the carport waiting for my undivided attention. 



I learned tonight that this handsome young man isn't some mid century or later piece of solid wood furniture. Oh, no... He's an early 1900s walnut secretary desk made by Ebert Furniture! 

While I don't recognize the brand, I know that he's been around for quite some time! 







Check out that NRA endorsement! 

I did the best I could with searching Google (my favorite search engine) but really couldn't find a whole lot. I'm curious to know exactly what the piece is worth! 

Ah, well... No matter... It's old. Born before my grandmother most likely. She was born in 1927 so that's pretty darn old! 

I can't wait to get this guy finished completely!