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Monday, March 11, 2013

A High Style Sideboard for a Kitchen

I picked this long dresser up from a friend of mine a while ago, almost exactly a year. Usually I have a quicker turn around with my pieces, but this one was a slow starter, not because it didn't have great potential, but because it was SO darn heavy. Once it was stored in my basement, I didn't want to haul it outside to sand until the time was right. I put it up on me "to be refinished" section of the inventory, and figured I'd get to it eventually. In October a client approached me about refinishing the piece custom for her. She was about to undertake a large kitchen renovation, and wanted additional counter space and storage for the new kitchen. I brought the long dresser up from the basement and we had a planning meeting to discuss paint color, drawer pulls, stain color on top etc. By February, the kitchen was almost done, and it was sideboard time.
          I painted the piece a creamy linen-white, then used a mahogany tinted wax to deepen the color and give the piece an old world feel. I added the burnished copper drawer pulls (which are identical to the ones in my kitchen), and sanded the pine top. I used a mixture of gunstock and cherry stain to get the medium red color of the top. We decided to do shelves, instead of the original bin drawers, behind the double doors. I used tongue and groove pine beadboard placed vertically, to give it a little rustic charm and interest. The back board had seen better days, so I replace it with a sheet of furniture grade plywood, cut to size. I stained the inside of this to match the shelves.
The transformation is pretty dramatic, and I have to say, for a piece that I waited almost a year to refinish, it's quite possibly my favorite piece I've ever done. That's always the way of these things.
I have one more custom project to complete today, and then I will be starting on some more pieces, including a solid oak with barn board coffee table set, and a sweet cottage dining set that will be available on craiglist by next week.
And the flea market starts up in TWO WEEKS, so I'll soon have all kinds of other treasures to show you as well.
 Happy Monday!














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