This sideboard was given to me by a friend as he was cleaning out some storage and didn't ned it. It's a nice vintage solid oak chest of drawers made by the Otter Creek company of Vermont. I ignored it for about a month as I worked on other more exciting things, but I finally got to it yesterday. Now clearly the oak (solid oak top sides and drawer fronts!!?) is the star of the show, and it would have been a sin to paint it. I was worried that only refinishing all the wood, however, would make it into a big boring brown box. I decided to think outside said box and looked to moth nature for inspiration. We've got huge maple trees all over the property and their juuuuuust starting to drop their leaves. I set dozens out across the top, side, and drawer fronts and arranged them until I was pleased with the effect.
Next I traced each leaf in pencil on the freshly sanded oak. I hand painted each one in three shades of yellow, then a top coat of oil based gold. I then sanded the top coat back so give the leaves a shimmery distressed gold leaf effect. I stained the entire piece, and then sealed it. The piece never had drawer pulls and I decided against adding them to keep the clean sleek lines. I felt like it was squatting too low to the ground so I also raised it up and added salvaged antique casters. I'm thrilled with how it turned out, it practically glows!
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Deciding which leaves to use and where to place them. There are 27 leaves on the sideboard, each one is unique. |
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First coat of paint on the leaves. I decided after the first coat that there were too many on the top and it was crowded, so i sanded about half of them off. |
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