MORE CABINETS!

Some people are addicted to pickle onion flavoured Monster Munch,  crack cocaine or botox facelifts, whilst others can’t get enough online bingo, fried chicken or fast cars but for me it’s cabinets. 

Another vintage addition is currently in pieces on the lounge floor undergoing a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from coffee-cup ringed crappiness to upcycled utopia.  As Depeche Mode once said “Just can’t get enough” and it’s so true, I really love doing these transformational projects!

 

Just can't get enough cabinets

This cabinet started life in another charity shop clearance corner priced at a tenner. 

 

Darling, would you like to come back to my place?

Its condition was not quite as good as the last one.  A veneered top covered in heat ring marks, door trims in danger of falling off and dinky dents everywhere. 

 

Top ruined by ring marks and stains

Door veneer has seen better days

Door trims damaged and almost falling off

Little remains of the original woodwork that is salvageable without a great deal of restoration work so I’ve given the whole item the turquoise treatment to cover up all visible defects.

 

Primed

Painting the interior

Loving this colour.  It’s called Sainte-Maxime from B&Q’s Good Home furniture paint range.  It’s a lusciously rich peacocky blue/green, beautiful depth of tone after two coats and a perfect companion to metallic gold or copper paint.

 

Sainte Maxime furniture paint

What a glorious colour

Partnering my peacock paint is a strip of chinoiserie style paper featuring exotic long-tailed birds perched among delicate foliage.  You can find this Boutique Biyu mint floral metallic effect wallpaper in B&Q for around £26 a roll.

 

Boutique Biyu mint floral wallpaper

The blue tail feathers on the birds are an almost perfect tonal match to the paint so together they look fabulous.

 

A lovely colour combination

Looks fabulous

Unlike the last cabinet that had black painted legs to correspond with black painted trims, I’ve pushed the boat out on this one and painted the legs all in gold to give it a real touch of opulent luxury. 

 

Painting the legs gold

Now a word here on using gold furniture paint.  As the lounge is currently my furniture workshop, spraying paint is out of the question which limits what I can use for these projects.  Compared to the self-priming paint, I’ve found metallic furniture paint to be thinner in consistency and that means lots of coats are needed to get an even, rich finish.  One website I visited suggested a clever way to achieve the metallic look but with less expense was to paint the first couple of coats in a similarly coloured matt paint first then finished off with a couple of coats of metallic paint.  Worth considering for next time.

 

Lots of coats needed to get depth of colour

There is a small wooden trim on the inside of the glass side panels which I have also picked out in gold to add a little extra glamour to the interior.  Very fiddly so super small artists brushes required for this bit.

 

Picking out the interior wood trims in gold paint

With the main cabinet body almost finished it’s now time to pull on some legwarmers, find a lap cat to snuggle under and let Shelby decide if my handiwork is up to scratch whilst the paint dries.

Waiting for paints to dry

Tortoise quality control check

Keeping warm with a fat lap cat

I'm charging a 'feed me' tariff for my heat

ANOTHER CABINET REFURB

Fate has a strange way of throwing a curved ball into your life at moments like these that often leads to unexpected projects. 

A few weeks ago on my way to buy fuel for my dirty diesel, I just happened to be passing by one of those larger charity shops that sell furniture.  By chance I had a cardboard box full of stuff in the boot that I’d been meaning to take down to our local Stonepillow charity shop so I thought I’d pop in to see if I could leave my donations. 

Naturally you can’t visit a charity shop without having a quick mooch round to see what’s on offer.  It’s like going to a sweetshop.  You know you’re always going to leave with a little bag of chocolate brazils to tuck into on the way home.  That’s when I spotted this little beauty tucked under an array of table lamps and tat.  Cupid’s arrow struck and before I knew it, the shop assistant and I were squeezing the cabinet into the back of my Peugeot ready for the journey home.  And this is how I found myself getting into yet another cabinet refurb project.

 

Lovely old display cabinet

In need of a makeover

Now I’m not sure how others go about planning their upcycling projects but I tend to look at the item itself to see if it speaks out to me in terms of colours/designs.  There’s plenty of inspiration online but sometimes I feel that often it’s too much of the designer trying to assert their artistic individuality on an item rather than just bringing out the original character of the object.  

In refurbishing my cabinet, I’ve kept as much of the original veneered look as possible but added a few simple touches to give it a fresh, sophisticated look.  Here’s how I went about it: 

Begin by removing the door and glass shelves so that you can take a good look at the interior.  It also makes it easier to work on the inside if you can lay the cabinet down onto a flat surface.

 

Remove the door & shelves

Examine your item from all angles

See how it has been put together

I toyed with the idea of covering the back and bottom of the cabinet in some kind of retro fabric similar to that already used but to keep the cost down, a free sample strip of wallpaper has been used.  This lovely bit of wallpaper is called Grandeco beige flamingo – a creamy/light beige background with a dark gold tropical motif.  Perfect for an Art Deco look.

 

Grandeco Beige Flamingo - B&Q £20 a roll

Measure and cut the wallpaper to fit the back panel of the cabinet.  Do the same for the bottom panel.  Stick into place with wallpaper paste or PVA glue.  Smooth out any lumps or bubbles then leave to dry flat overnight.

 

Measure and cut your paper to size

Stick into position

Next mask up any areas of the cabinet that are not being painted.  I’ve chosen to paint the legs and raised sections of wood trim black as well as the fine beading around the glass side panels.

 

Mask up any areas not being painted

Normally you would lightly sand off any veneer at this point but I’m using Zinsser’s 1-2-3 Bulls Eye primer which pretty much enables paint to bond to almost any surface.  Dries a white colour so you do need to take care when applying.

 

No more sanding

Primed areas ready to paint

Apply two coats of furniture paint

Once the primed parts have dried, two coats of matt black furniture paint are applied to the legs and also to the raised trims/beading using a small brush.

 

Legs and underside painted black

Raised trims and beading painted black

To give the top of the cabinet a bit of a luxurious look and separate the veneered area from the black trim, I’ve painted a gold border using metallic furniture paint.  This border is approx. 1 cm wide and three coats of gold were applied to give it a nice rich even finish.

 

Add a gold border

Using metallic finish furniture paint

Carefully peel off the masking tape.  Apply one or two final coats of clear satin furniture lacquer with a brush to give added protection to the paintwork.

 

Finishing lacquer protects your paintwork

Being an old cabinet, the wood veneer has its fair share of visible scratches and minor defects that need to be treated.  Unless you are a professional furniture restorer it’s almost impossible to make these completely vanish but you can tone them down so that they are less noticeable using a combination of furniture wax crayons or a liquid scratch remover.  Apply carefully until the defects have colour blended into the veneer.

 

Used to disguise small defects in the wood veneer

Whilst your cabinet is drying, work on the door.  Carefully remove any locks, handles or other door furniture that may be in the way or need replacing.  Again, mask up any areas not being painted and repeat what was done with the cabinet taking care not to scratch or break any glass.

 

Painting the cabinet door

I’ve picked out the raised wood trim and beading with black paint then used the metallic gold to finish off the leafy arrowhead at the top.

 

Looks great with all the detail picked out in black

When dry re-attach the door to the main cabinet body.  I replaced the hinge screws with new ones as they were all rusty and the heads mashed up.  Luckily I didn’t have to replace the lock as it would have been tricky to find an exact sized one but some hardware stores do sell small gold wardrobe catches that might fit or there’s always a few vintage locks for sale on Ebay.

 

Re-fit the door to the cabinet

A new gold escutcheon plate was purchased (Ebay) to fit over the very ragged keyhole which matches nicely with the gold-coloured top border and wallpaper design.

 

Mini gold coloured keyhole cover/escutcheon

Time to insert the clean glass shelves back into the cabinet.  I added a layer of self-adhesive furniture felt to the top of the square metal shelf supports to provide a cushion for the glass shelf to sit on.  Again, a few minor dinks in the glass but its not too expensive to get new glass shelves cut to size if you happen to buy a cabinet that’s missing one or two of them.

 

Shelves re-inserted

To finish off your masterpiece, apply a thin coat of Beeswax polish to the wood veneer and buff up with a soft cloth.  This brings the natural colour and wood grain pattern up a treat leaving a beautiful shiny smooth surface.

 

Beeswax natural polish to bring out the beauty of the wood

And there you have it – my £15 charity shop purchase has now been transformed into a superb vintage glass display cabinet perfect to show off all my Art Deco treasures.

Wow what a difference

Simple but stylish

A nice vintage addition to our home

Looks great in the hallway

FENCE OR WALL?

Is it a wall or is it a fence?  I guess it’s a bit of both, a ‘gender’ fluid kind of garden structure in keeping with the very modern times we live in where nothing is quite what it seems.

 

Is it a wall or a fence?

Having constructed a double skin brick wall of 8 red brick courses topped with a decorative row of blue engineering bricks, the landscaper’s next challenge was to make a wooden frame on which would sit some decorative wood screening. 

Cue early morning timber delivery as there’s no way we can squeeze 3.3 m lengths of screening in the back of our puny motors.

 

You're gonna need a bigger car

Now before we go into the build details, let’s recap on why we’ve chosen to go with this particular style of boundary.  The lower brick wall section is acting as a root barrier to prevent further encroachment from next door’s unruly winter jasmine and the upper slatted arrangement is to enable stray branches to grow through the fence rather than push against it thus preventing future fence damage.  Any branches that have snuck through can then be snipped off from our side.  I doubt even her hedge will be able to push down this wall but plants can be remarkably strong so you never know.

The encroaching plant menace

Okay back to the project in hand.  The slatted fence arrangement sits on a rectangular frame made of 2 inch square timber that is screwed into the thick fence posts at either end of the wall.  You can just about make out the frame through the gaps.

 

2 inch square timber for the internal frame

The slats are made of timber in a rhombic profile design so they’re not completely flat but angled to allow them to neatly slot together.

 

Rhombic profile wood screening timber

Each length of rhombic timber has been cut down and screwed onto the 2 inch timber frame with wood screws.  The beauty of this arrangement is that any tatty old slats can be individually replaced when required rather than having to replace an entire fence panel.  They’re also about an inch thick so should be able to withstand the brisk Chi winds that regularly batter our fences.

 

Surface slats sit on a wooden sub frame

The finished arrangement is nice to look at, not quite as unappealing as a solid wall might have looked.  With a coat of paint or coloured varnish it’ll look fabulous.

 

The finished fence/wall

And so the first part of our hard landscaping projects in the back garden has been achieved but that’s not the end of the story.  There’s still the rest of the old fence to be replaced, a low retaining wall to be built at the front of the flower border plus a special two tier raised bed that I’ve got planned for this corner.  

A two tiered raised bed to be built in this corner

The finished patio area

Can't wait to get the table and chairs out

Ah, there’s no rest for the wicked!