A Tale of a Bureau

When I was growing up, I remember sharing a bedroom with my younger sister, Emily. At times, it was great, and then again, like all siblings sharing a bedroom, there were times that it was horrible. We argued like all siblings do, but when we got along, things were great. One of the coolest parts of sharing a bedroom was that our beds could be made into bunk beds, giving us so much room for activities (Can you name that movie? Don't worry, they were made to be bunk beds - we didn't have to nail them together!). The other thing that I remember about our bedroom growing up was a bureau, which I have recently learned was a part of the bunk bed set. When we moved when I was in middle school, the bureau moved with us to our new house, and I had it in my bedroom since we each had our own rooms at that point.

When I went to college, the bureau stayed in my old bedroom and I used it to store clothes I only wore during the summer and items I didn't bring to college. When Dylan and I moved in together my senior year, the bureau finally made it's way into our new apartment. It has since traveled with us to every place we have lived since then - Indiana included. And turns out, that's not the only traveling it has done. This bureau was in the house that my mom's side of the family owned in Newport, RI.

The family owned house in Newport was purchased in the late 1800s, and then during the 1920's, was used as a boarding house, run by a close friend of the family. This bedroom set was purchased for one of the bedrooms in the house. Once my grandmother was married in the 1950s, the house was returned to single-family home status, and my grandmother lived there with my grandfather, my uncle, and my mom. The bureau traveled with them when they moved from the house to New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and then back to the same house in Newport again. When my mom married, she took the bedroom set, and that is how I ended up with it.

Now, since the bureau was built sometime around the 1940's, it was scratched up and had a lot of marks on it from it's years of moving. With it being in my possession now, I wanted to refinish it. It was a reddish-brown color, and I wanted it darker, so using my random orbital sander, I took off all of the polyurethane and all the stain, bringing it down to it's beautiful maple hardwood. Because of the detail, I actually used my Dremel to sand some of the more difficult parts of the bureau.

Before staining the bureau, I actually contemplated making a slight modification to it. The detailed rounded pieces along the bottom of the bureau are not exactly the style that I am drawn to, and since they are just decorative pieces that frame out the bottom and hide the legs of the bureau, cutting away some of the wood wouldn't compromise the structure of the bureau. I measured out the squared shape that I wanted and had my Dremel saw ready to cut, but realized that not only was my blade not long enough to go through the wood, but I didn't really want to make it look different after hearing about it's history in the family. Even though it's not my style, I figured that keeping it's original skeleton was important in a piece with so much history.

Therefore, not making the cuts to the bureau led me straight into refinishing it. The raw wood was absolutely beautiful and in great shape, but to help it accept the new stain, I put on a coat of Minwax Pre-Stain Wood Conditioner and let it sit for fifteen minutes. It's funny too, because the color of the wood with the conditioner on it was just slightly lighter than the original color. I wish I had a better before photo, but the one I took was super blurry and I don't have my picture backup drive unpacked yet.

I wiped the excess off and then applied my first coat of Minwax Jacobean stain. You can see that the last coat of poly on the top was so shiny that it was reflecting the drop ceiling grid onto the surface! Aside from that though, this bureau looks absolutely beautiful now!

Two coats of stain, and three coats of polyurethane later, and the bureau was finished! Dylan helped me put it in the guest bedroom this morning, and it's the first piece of furniture in the room! I'm so excited to finally get the house put together, and I'm so excited that this piece of family history has a new place and a new look. I really love the dark tones of the wood and even though Dylan and I just spent hours painting the moulding in this room white, I think I like the way it stands out against the white beadboard and trim.

I just need to find some cool hardware for the drawers and then it's all set. Oh, and it will need a lamp and some books too, just to finish it off.

I've got a few more pieces to refinish, which should take me a about a week each, since I don't have a lot of time after work to get these projects done, and then we'll be at the point where we can actually look like we live in this house!

Have you been refinishing furniture lately? What's your favorite stain color?

Sanding Indoors Makes a Mess

Whoa there, it's been a while, huh? I've kind of fallen off the wagon with blogging, and more specifically, Flash Sale Friday, because things have been so much busier than normal and I just haven't had the time! I'm really hoping to jump back on, so look for one at the end of the week!

In the meantime, I've been up to a lot. I have started to refinish some of the furniture for the house, and am still constantly looking for other pieces to add to our decor. I knew that I was taking a risk in sanding down the furniture in the basement, but it's just been too cold outside to do this in the garage or the driveway.

What I didn't realize was that even though my random orbital sander has a dust bag attached that it wouldn't catch everything. So, my basement ended up covered in a sheet of sawdust. And I'm talking like 1/8" of sawdust, everywhere, including on the top of the laundry detergent bottles and covering the hot water tank. Everywhere.

Prior to this, I was using our house vacuum to clean things up because they weren't that messy, but I just didn't think that my house vacuum would like that dust all that much, so I bought a Wet/Dry Vacuum, and boy am I glad that I did. The basement was a mess, and this thing worked soooo well, thankfully.

And now that the basement is clean again, I've started to actually paint and stain the furniture. It's a lengthy process, especially when I only have time to work on the projects when I get home from work.

All set up for painting, this is the two-piece hutch that will be going in the craft room. Along the right side of the picture you can start to see the drawers of the bureau, which will be refinished for the guest bedroom.  Once these two pieces are done, I'll start on my favorite item - the card catalog! One thing I have learned from this process is that I will be making a sanding station in the basement, cordoned off with some drop cloths, that way the entire basement doesn't end up in another layer of dust!

Live and learn, right?

What have you been up to recently? Any plans to refinish furniture?

And It's Mine, Mine, Mine

I've finally found it!

And 5 points to Gryffindor if you can name the movie that the title of this post comes from!

Yesterday, you may have noticed this little gem on both my Instagram feed and the Rhody Life Facebook page.

I drove all the way from Rhode Island to the Connecticut/New York border to pick up my lovely.

And if you can't tell from the picture as to what this is, here's the full shot!

Isn't it beautiful?!?!?! Please ignore the paint swatches on the wall and the absolutely terrible picture quality - my real camera battery was dead and this was taken with only two hallway lights and no day light since it's dark at 5pm now.  

I can't believe that I found myself a library card catalog! I have been looking for one of these at a reasonable price for almost a year now.  I've driven to probably 10 different antique stores, in addition to emailing every library in Rhode Island (yes, seriously), and stalking Craigslist on a daily basis. I've seen plenty of these card catalogs pop up online, but they are either not the style that I was looking for, or the seller was asking over $750!  I paid way way less than that, even talking the seller down from his asking price, which is one of the benefits of buying items from Craigslist.

The piece isn't in perfect condition, but I knew that for the price that I wanted, that it wouldn't be perfect.  The wood veneer on one of the sides is missing a few pieces and is peeling, but that will just take some glue and replacement veneer to fix.  Also, one of the pulls is pinched closed, so I'll have to unbend that, and the shelves are a little wobbly.

I haven't quite figured out if I want to stain it a different color or if I should paint it.  Part of me thinks that this piece is so sacred that I should just clean it up as much as I can, but the other part of me wants to make it so colorful and fun, since I'm going to be using it in my craft room, holding all of my thread spools, my knitting needles, craft paints, and all those other fun things I use.

Here are some of my favorite inspiration pictures of what I'd like to do with the piece.

Image via DesignSponge

Image via Red Hen Home

Image via Dishfunctional Designs

What are your thoughts? Restain the card catalog? Paint it? Stain it dark or light? One color paint, or multiple?

Too many options!!!

Choose a Color, Any Color

We may have had a blessing in disguise happen to us.  I'm not going to go into too much detail about it right now, but we may have been given the opportunity to have the hardwood floors in our house refinished.  If you remember our house tour, the first floor hardwoods are your typical light stained oak, which was the standard for homes built in the 1950s.  The hardwoods in our house are original, and they are in great shape, because it seems as though they were carpeted over at some point.  Having grown up with rooms that had the traditional light stained oak, I am more than fine with the color that they currently are, however, with the opportunity to refinish the floors, I'm actually considering changing up the stain color.

As a reminder, here is the current color of the floors in the house.

When comparing the floor color to Minwax, which is one of the two stain brands that I am using to choose color, this floor is a close match to Ipswitch Pine.

Stain Colors via Minwax

I'd like to make the floors darker, and while I know that will show the dust and the cat hair more, I am hoping that it will actually help in motivating me to keep the house clean.  Also, the elegance that dark floors bring to a space far exceeds the extra amount of work that may come with having darker wood floors.  Agreed?

I've been going between the Dark Walnut stain and the Jacobean stain.  I think that the two colors will look very different depending on the room, as the room pictured above gets a lot of natural light, whereas the bedrooms in the back of the house don't get a lot of natural light at all.  So, I have to be very careful that the color stain that I choose will work in both places.  

I came across a blog post by Ashley and Greg from 7th House on the Left where they were refinishing their floors and debating between these two colors plus one more as well.  Reading about their experience has been very helpful, and we are planning on getting a sample laid on the floors before we choose the color too, so hopefully that will help us decide.  

What do you think about the two colors? I know that they are very similar, especially when you compare the digital swatches, but the actual paper-copy swatches make the two colors look kinda different, with the Dark Walnut appearing slightly redder than the Jacobean.  

Eh, maybe you can't see the difference...this is a terrible picture, and it's hard to see the difference even with some light editing.  Maybe I should try to get a fan deck of the stain colors - that may help out with determining the color that we want to choose.  Anyone know where I can get one of those? I should just start collecting all of the paint and stain brand fan decks. OMG, I would be in heaven....

Anyways...

Do any of you have experience with the Dark Walnut or Jacobean stains? What's your favorite non-red tinted floor stain color?  Have you used Minwax on your floors? What other brands did you use for floors? Can you tell I have a million questions?!