It's what I love to do!

I love to shop. I love to dig through flea markets, antique stores, junk shops, garage sales,...really any type of a sale. Auctions make my stomach flip in anticipation of all the fun stuff that I could find FOR CHEAP! I love to take those finds and fix, paint, and generally change them to update and make them useful and cute again. With my kids getting older I have a little more time to do these things and I have helped many friends with design projects over the years so the natural progression of this is to start doing projects to sell. So....Barn 4 Boutique is born. For now it's going to be just me doing an occasional project to sell on Craigslist but I will have this blog to journal my way. I will go back and journal past projects but here is my most recent....

Here is the finished product. A great little corner shelf that is my first attempt at several coats of paint and heavy distressing. But it really didn't start out that way.

Here is the cabinet when I bought it. I bought it for a friend but then we decided it was too small for her space sooooo......I decided it would look good red...

It was cute red but then I found a product called "chipping cream" and you paint it on and then paint another color over the top and it makes it easier to sand down and see the underneath color. So I tried it. I painted the piece black and HATED it! So much so that I didn't even take a picture! Then I decided it needed to be a fresh yellow so I painted yellow and then the yellow didn't stick because of the stupid chipping cream! So I ignored the piece in the garage for a couple of weeks and then finally decided that I didn't have anything to lose and just started sanding...A LOT...

After much sanding i decided I liked it and then put in beadboard wallpaper...yes...wallpaper on the backs of the shelves. It's the greatest stuff EVER and easy to work with...no saws and power tools needed and it looks great!

I glazed the whole piece with a brown glaze (including the wallpaper).

You have to be careful how much you sand and where because it can look "unrandom". I know that's not a word but you know what I mean.

All in all it's a great little piece and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!