AUTUMN BOOTH

So, I love being able to buy and refinish antiques and unique furniture, but there is no way that I can keep it all. With The Cottage Shoppe, located inside The Unique Boutique I am able to find treasures and give them loving new homes. I get to shop ALL the time, yet I don't feel bad about it because it's literally my job.

As you can see I take my shopping job VERY seriously. I am a little overstocked right now, but everything is tucked in nice and cozy.

 Get ready for a little bit of a picture overload. I can't help it. We spent hours rearranging and tidying up. It's surprisingly difficult to find a spot for this much stuff!

This is the corner I'm most proud of. Mom, who helped me a ton yesterday, suggested we move both hutches together. It looks so good to have all of the country stuff together.

I just love these little guys. I almost kept them, but my shelves are already overflowing with knick knacks!

                          

Mom helped me stage this lovely little hutch. Country red, rooster-y, farm-y stuff really isn't my style, but it's growing on me a bit.

Oh my goodness, that's a lot of stuff!

Oh, and among all of the madness of moving things, I took the time to sit down and knot some bundles of cinnamon together. In Florida, we don't actually get a Fall, but I can pretend. I can at least make everything smell like cinnamon and pumpkin pie! 

This little coffee table is so cute with it's little lyre design. It's been here since Spring. It's just screaming "Take me home!" 

I'm pretty proud of this little table. I traced and then hand painted the design taken from The Graphics Fairy.

Here is the vanity in all of its glory. I couldn't help but sneak into the shot like a fool. Despite showing how goofy I am, I love this big round mirror. 

My helpful dad helped us screw the mirror back on. We girls can do anything, but he just got a new drill and wanted to take it for a test drive. I can't complain.

 

I went a little rustic and darker for some of my kitchen items, but I still have to make room for my rosy delicate teacups and vases.

Here is what you see as soon as you walk into my booth. It's pretty packed, but I love how it turned out. We had to rush home to make it in time to get settled in to watch the final episode of Breaking Bad last night. A busy day with a good ending.

CREEPY CRAWLIES

Have you ever seen a Craigslist posting that made you jump out of your chair? Yeah me too. But this one was certainly too good to be true. My dream haul became a nightmare. Now, this happened in July. I'm just now able to even talk about it without getting upset. 

Look at that headboard! I got a whole bedroom set for $300. A bed, dresser, vanity, nightstand and a chair. It was all a little rough. The sweet (or so I thought) old lady who sold it to me said it had a little water damage. And that's what it looked like. So I was thrilled to take on the challenge of patching this stuff up and making it look nice. 

Wow, just look at that detail. I wish I had taken more before pictures, but I got right to work. All of this stuff looked pretty hearty. Big heavy antique furniture. But why was it so light?

Because it was hollowed out by termites. Now, I knew that these guys could do some serious damage to a house, but I never even thought about them eating furniture. I always figured that people use their furniture and they would notice something like this. 

Being the optimist I am, I began ripping away at the hollow spots, hoping to fill them...yeah right. And then I saw something. Peeking up at me was a little white booger thing. A LIVE termite. Holy crap. I sped out to HD and grabbed the concentrated termite killer (the kind that can treat a football field).

So I did what any furniture Macgyver does and I rummaged through the kitchen to find a meat injector thingy. Then filled it with poison. Then injected all the holes.

Oh boy. By this point I decided to call Terry, the mean Craigslist lady ( you'll find out later why she's so mean) and I warned her, like any human would, that she has LIVE termites in her rental house where she's trying to sell all of her mother's furniture. And that she should not sell any more, unless she tells people about it. And she said how she didn't know and that she was sure I could fix the furniture.

 

Than I decided to tackle the chair. And that was the stuff of nightmares. It WAS so pretty. Until I got a hold of it. I saw tears in the fabric. I decided to pull it up. And it pulled up way too easy for comfort.

 

Oh and I chipped away the legs only to find that they had been hollowed out. 

Hey! Guess what? Termites can eat fabric. Let me rephrase that. HOLY CRAP! This is the stuff nightmares are made of. When I pulled up the fabric, live, squirming, gooey, disgusting, maggot looking, termites tumbled out of the cotton.
 

 

They even had a little hangout full of termite poop ball-ies.

I gave up on the dresser when I dug so much that the side collapsed and I kicked it over. The vanity. I had to save SOMETHING. This had no signs of termite funkies...until I saw the back leg had some holes.

But I could patch that up, give it a cute paint job and sell it in no time flat right? Wrong. I couldn't. I went to bed after an exhausting day and hours of research on how to get rid of termites and decided that I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I sold someone a piece of furniture that I wasn't 100% sure was termite free.

So I called Terry back, crying and told her that I couldn't do anything with the furniture and that I had to throw it all away. She danced around the issue. Told me she had to go. I wanted her to see it. See how bad it really was. So I said that my curb isn't big enough for all this stuff. And asked if I could put it on the empty lot across from her house to await trash pickup. She said no, that I couldn't do that, but if I wanted to bring it back to her house and help her put it back in the house that she wanted it back. I asked if I could have at least some of my money back. "We'll see if we can work something out." Then she told me she had to go and asked if I could wait a few days, she's too busy for all this nonsense.

Uh-huh. She was getting her furniture back on my time. So we drove it back to her home. She wasn't there. But her neighbor was. And she said that all of her stuff was eat up with termites, and that her old house on that lot had to be demolished. Needless to say I was furious and threw the termite food in front of her gate. Well, she never returned any of my calls after that.

It's been some time now, but it still hurts, to get screwed over so royally by someone who seemed so sweet. So, be careful on Craigslist! I like to think the best in people, but there are some Terrys in the world and all you can do is cross your fingers that Karma kicks her in her slack wearing old butt!

YOU'RE SO VAIN

So at the butt crack of dawn this morning, my sweet boyfriend called on his way to work and told me that there was a table and chairs on the side of the road. I love me a good trash find, so I threw on some clothes and shook Ol' Ma awake and we headed out on a trash pick. But it had already been picked. There was nothing. Well poo. 

 

But I was left with the unshakable feeling that I needed to make something ugly fabulous today! So this is what I found. An art deco chippy, water damaged little vanity. With way to much drawer liner...everywhere. Like out of the drawers. On the top. On the back. Why?! There not even that nice to line the drawers, let alone the top!Anywho, it has a mirror, which is still sitting in the truck. It's round and oh so art deco. I haven't gotten the whole "before" picture thing down yet.

It's a bit rough but look at those quirky zig-zags. Fabulous. And it's already white-ish. Kind of a cream. So I decided to just sand the heck out of it and hope for the best. I saw a glimpse of green underneath, so it had to look pretty good all shabbied up.

Oh boy, that's some water damage. A little more shabby than chic currently.

The weird long knob thing covered up where there were previous hole for a pull rather than a knob. Hmmm, I guess that's one way to get around properly filling the holes. But seeing as I didn't want to paint this little guy, I decided to hunt for knobs that would cover up the holes, without a tacky gold thing sticking out like a sore thumb.

Tah dah! I know, bad lighting. But it always seems that I wrap up a project just as the sun goes down and I end up depending on incandescent lights to show off my handy work.
 

I'm on the fence a little still about these knobs, but they cover the holes so nicely and give it a bit more character...like it needed any more!
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Just pretend you only see the vanity and not the twenty other projects going on around it! I waxed it all over to give it a smooth finish and it darkened up the exposed wood nicely. This little guy will be going to my booth shortly and I hope someone just adores it! 

THE COLLECTORS

I live in a house of collectors. But the most impressive collection by far has to be my mothers Pyrex collection. Having begun the collection in January, these vintage beauties have come from thrift stores, flea markets and even eBay every now and then. 

The blue is Mom's favorite, and I talked her into mixing in some pink and yellow. It took very little effort to get her on board.

These colors look so nice together. 

Some people baby their collections and leave them to gather dust, but not us. These beauties are perfect for serving macaroons....

Even macaroni. This was at Easter, when we got to show off all of the lovely pastel Pyrex.

We had been passing the pink daisy dish at one of our favorite thrift stores for months, then we took the plunge and started buying every pretty Pyrex in sight!

I found this swirly beauty at the flea market in Okeechobee. There typically isn't much, but this was a diamond in the rough.

 I think the red of the fresh tomatoes looks so lovely against the aqua dish. Makes me want to cook up a feast so we can whip out the pretty dishes again!

THE SECRETARY GETS A MAKEOVER

I've got a flea market problem. If I go one weekend without making a trip to the flea, I feel like I've missed something great. Some treasure walked away in the hands of someone else for a steal. There is some logic to that though. Had I skipped the flea market on this fateful Saturday, I would have missed this beauty!

I'm sure you're thinking "Beauty? That's a funky, dated, faux Asian inspired piece of pressed wood junk!" 

But like everyone else at the flea market that day, you would be mistaken. 

Look at those handles! They look pretty Eastlake-y to me. 

 

From the glare on the ultra high gloss paint, you can see....tiger oak?! I knew instantly that I had to strip it. Like some kind of compulsion I started digging in the garage to see if I had any stripper.

Stripping these details would be challenging, but I found half a can of the aerosol stripper. Perfect. Unless of course the wind catches it just as you spray and you get covered in a burning inferno of stripper. Not good. So I decided to go in a less painful route and mixed denatured alcohol and paint thinner 50/50. It rubbed the paint right off! And I didn't run the risk of getting burned up with stripper! Awesome. 

Look at her now! I just rubbed some Howard's Feed N Wax over it to deepen the color and protect it. Some of the black paint lingered, and I'm sire I could have cleaned it up more, but I love it! It looks aged and dingy, a piece with real character. 

I bought it Saturday and by Monday night it looked like this. I'm pretty pleased with the results. What do you think? 

LAMP REVAMP

I love the look of antique marble lamps, but in my thrift store hunts I haven't been able to find one. I began looking for one online, but can you imagine the shipping costs on a heavy marble lamp?! Plus I've been spoiled by thrift store and flea market prices. Speaking of the flea market, I already have a lamp!

Oh wow. It's worse than I thought. But look at the shape. Can you imagine it carved out of marble or alabaster rather than plaster coated in chippy green paint? Me too. So I got to work on turning this flea market funky, into a glorious faux marble lamp. 

I've been asked on many occasions what type of paint I use for small projects, furniture, anything. The truth is I don't have much of a preference other than it's usually cheap. I scour the oops paint section of many stores and have built up quite the supply. This one happened to be a $2 oops paint from HD. Works just as well as any other. 

So I coated the lamp with 2 coats of pure white and got even coverage. I was careful to not have brush marks, as this would kill the illusion of marble. 

I whipped out some cheap craft store paint in black and white and mixed together a few shades that looked about right. Acrylic craft paint is fine for small projects like this, just make sure you don't use gloss over flat, it will make the areas you painted stick out like a sore thumb.

I grabbed up my thinnest paint brushes so I could make the marble veins as realistic as possible. 

Just a little patience and I threw some sporadic grey lines on it. Blended it with some of the white to make it fade out. I didn't have any marble for reference, so I did a bit of research and found reference images online.

Even though the lines were right something was missing. What was it? Shine! It was still really flat.

I used the last of my wax, but I couldn't wait to make this look right. So I found some Howard's Feed-N-Wax and wiped it on. I think it turned out quite lovely. Now I just have to find the right shade. Maybe that's easier said than done.