Love/Hate Before & Afters

I love Before & Afters and I kind of hate them too.  How about you?

The thing I don't like about them is that they tend to make the projects look like they just magically happen WITHOUT A TON OF HARD WORK!  The truth is, unlike HGTV, they don't happen in 24 minutes!    Okay, I'll settle down now, the exclamation points are getting away from me...that happens when I write with conviction!  Oops, I did it again, didn't I?

Well, as you might have guessed by now, this is a before & after post and tonight my shoulders ache and so do my hands, not to mention the fact that I finished this project this afternoon outside in 103 degrees with mosquitoes swarming!  Oh, what a trouper I am!  (Sorry about those pesky exclamation points...kind of reminds me of the mosquitoes.)

Here's the before photo of the bombay chest I decided, after going through an open house and seeing a companion piece that looked a little tired, needed a little refreshing...

Sorry about the crappy photo, I never featured this piece on my blog, because I think I've know for a long time it needed a facelift.  I've loved this piece for years, and it was hard to think about changing it.  You see, this was a gift from Mr. Wonderful many years ago and held such a special place in my heart and memory...aaahhhh.  

Now it looks like this........

White is my favorite color (yes, I do consider it a color) and I LOVE antiques, so I tried to make it look even older than it already is, but I will give you the wisdom of this journey too.  

First off, I used a liquid sanding medium to get the surface ready to accept paint and so far, so good.  Secondly, I used a self-leveling water based enamel paint that I have worked with before, but, that paint DOES NOT work well on a curved vertical surfaces.  I had nine kinds of trouble with the paint on this piece.  I think the paint would have worked fine on a straighter piece, but, if I had this to do over again and HAD to use the same paint, I would have added a paint extender to allow more time to work the paint before it started drying.  But, I do wonder if that would have made the paint run worse on the curved surfaces...next chapter, next time.

After it was painted several times, I forgot how many coats of paint, because I kept thinking I could sand out the runs and redo the paint and make it better, I took my handy palm sander and distress parts of it.  I LOVE MY PALM SANDER!

The final step was putting a coat of paste wax on it...it gives such a great luster and almost a little instant patina to the piece too.

Strangely, a good friend who frequents my home and has known this piece as long as I have, commented that she'd never noticed the carving on the piece before I painted it white.  The best part for me was when Mr. Wonderful saw the finished product and said, "Oh that really updated that nicely...I really like how you distressed it."  What can I say, he's mine girls!

Thanks for reading and putting up with my exclamation fetish!!!!

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