Annie Sloan Chalk Paint

I had been reading a lot about Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.  It's not cheap ($40 a quart) and they don't offer a ton of colors but it has some real advantages - it requires no preparation, it doesn't smell, and a little goes a long way.  When I checked their list of "stockists" I found that I could buy it not far from here - at Luxury for Less in Ponte Vedra Beach.

To prove the "no preparation" part to myself, it tested it on a 20 year-old Target stool that I had been wanting to paint black.  The stool originally had a hard, shiny finish but damned if two coats of the paint didn't cover it completely.  I loved that I didn't have to sand or strip before I painted - you just get out the paint brush and start painting.

The paint is designed to be used with Annie Sloan Soft Wax (not cheap either!) - you let the paint cure for about 24 hours and then wax the finish.  I love the wax too!  It is so soft and unlike some other expensive wax, it doesn't stink.  In fact I went quite crazy waxing every piece of furniture in sight.

So.....I have these railings on my stairs that I've hated for 20 years - they just scream '80s.  The hard, shiny finish clashes with my rug and the furniture on the landing.  I did some research on what I'd have to do to stain them a better color and it turned out to be more work than I'd consider - strip, bleach, restain, refinish...no.  Then I thought about having the railings removed and replaced with simple black wrought iron.  That would involve finding someone to remove them and probably repairing drywall and paint.  And, some day I might do that.

But, in the meantime, it occurred to me that this might be a perfect place for chalk paint.  For $40, what did I have to lose?  If I didn't like it, I could always go to the iron railing plan.

I checked the paint swatches and Annie Sloan Old White is the perfect complement to Benjamin Moore Linen White.

The before and after:

    
I'm so pleased with the results!  Even though it took three coats, I used less than a pint of the paint.  They're "curing" right now and tomorrow I'll follow up with a coat of wax.

Rainy Day

It was a good day to organize photographs - some going back to the '60s.

Den Bookcase

To match the new pillows, I changed some of the accessories on the small bookcase in my den.  I finally found a perfect home for some Japanese fishing floats I received for Christmas last year.  And I was able to add a vintage globe (ca 1947) and some glass insulators.  The glass insulators are all from Whitall Tatum, where my grandfather worked.

Den Pillows

I decided the pillows with black trim did nothing to complement the coral and white pillows and that they would look better with solid pillows in a deeper coral.  No problem to make them, right?  Wrong.  Coral is a very difficult color to match!  I looked at every fabric and sample at Calico Corners and Boca Bargoons and I found one special order that was close...name of the color was Persimmon.

Then I pulled out an old swatch I had clipped at Boca Bargoons a few years ago and I like the way it looked.  Fortunately they still had it as well as a deeper shade of the same aqua.  I whipped out that sewing machine and got to work.

I love the way this looks (and I discovered the pillows look better with narrower flanges) but many of the black accessories in the room looked too heavy.  That set off a re-accessorizing frenzy.  Fortunately, I got pretty lucky at Marshall's.  It also inspired me to perform an overdue tchotchke purge/reorganization!

Tulips

Suddenly available in Publix and not that expensive....I'm surprised at how much I enjoy having fresh flowers in the house!

Cooking Area Complete

Will from Creative Cabinet Refacing finished the cabinet work around the new range and microwave today...so nice to have that project done. The cabinet above the microwave has turned out to be a good place to store kitchen linens which leaves me with an empty drawer in the bottom cabinets. Hmm...how to reorganize that space?

Microwave Hung

Not surprisingly, the opening for my cooking appliances was not square. This has happened with blinds and new countertops too. So, one spacer at the side will need to be reworked. That should be done along with the doors over the microwave next week.

New Range

The new range was delivered today along with the microwave which the cabinet guy will install. So far, so good...tomorrow morning the electricians are coming to put in the circuit for the microwave.

This is what it looked like with the old range removed. If you look closely you can see remnants of the hideous wallpaper that was here when I moved in.

And the new range - perfectly level - too bad the electricians and cabinet people will probably have to move it again!

New Kitchen Project

I'm not a cook and my 25 year-old range is functioning just fine but availability of bisque appliances is making me jumpy. I contacted GE to see if they had any plans to discontinue bisque - they say they don't - but I can see the choices becoming fewer and fewer. And my friends with smooth top ranges love how easy it is to keep them clean. I've been thinking about replacing this for awhile but the lack of access to my attic had held me back because I will need an additional circuit. Well, an air conditioner crisis last summer necessitated adding access to the attic (and when I saw how easy it was to add it, I wonder why I waited so long!). My seventies-era range in all its glory:

This morning I had the cabinet guy come to talk about what to do about the spacer at the top. It's not a big deal at all and his company will install the microwave/fan when they rework the cabinet above the stove.

I visited two local appliance stores. The first was a disappointment - the salesman was nice but not that knowledgeable. The second place was great (and cheaper!).

The salesman there pointed out the differences between the microwave I thought I wanted and the less expensive ones and I actually liked the cheaper ones more. And everything can be delivered within two days!

He also gave me some good info about bisque appliances. They're still very popular in Florida though not in the rest of the country and he doesn't think they'll ever go away totally. I did consider stainless - bought a roll of dull silver wrapping paper and covered the stove with it to get an idea - but stainless just looks too "cool" in my cream kitchen:

Desks

I've found that as technology changes, what constitutes the "perfect" desk changes, too. Back in the Stone Age of technology this was my desk:

This picture was taken after I upgraded to a flat screen monitor - there was no room to even write a check on this desk with a CRT. The tower, printer, and assorted cables under the desk was really getting to me!

So Desk #1 became the kitchen table and was replaced by this one from Ballard Designs:

The desk had a compartment to hide the tower and all the "junk" was moved to a stool in the corner. This sort of worked for awhile. But the way the furniture needed to be arranged meant that there was no room for an end table next to the sofa and when I had company using the sofa bed, the coffee table had to be moved to the hall so that the whole place looked like a mess when I had overnight guests. And once I bought an iMac, I no longer needed the tower compartment. Desk #2 was given to a former co-worker along with its chair which really wasn't comfortable for long periods of time.

Scan Design isn't a place I normally shop but, in desperation, I went in there and found the perfect desk components - actually a return and a printer cabinet that fits under it. The cabinet has a top shelf that's perfect for hiding all the junk. And it allowed me to go back to my original furniture arrangement:

I know technology keeps changing but I can't envision ever needing to replace this!

New Pillows, Again

I knew I'd get tired of the orange Ikat pillows but they were a good way to learn how to make envelope-style pillow covers and I just might put them back in the fall. But, for now, I found some beautiful coral and white linen fabric at Ballard Designs. A couple of days ago, I pulled out the old sewing machine and ran up some new covers.

It Was Meant to Be....

The first time I saw this stool in the Ballard Design catalog I knew it was perfect for my kitchen. But the Jacksonville store didn't have one and when I checked Ballard's website they were backordered.

Today I decided I really had to do something about the 19 year-old Target stool that was in my kitchen. Off to the Ballard store to see if they had one in stock so I could at least look at it. None in stock, but they had this one in the clearance area marked down. I think it's perfect. And, I'm lucky to live in one of the few places that has a Ballard b&m store!

My Vintage Nancys

When I was 9 I was sick for a month and my mother's rule was that if you were too sick to go to school, you were too sick to watch tv. So each day my grandmother bought me a new Nancy Drew book. By the time I was better, I had read every Nancy Drew book written up to that time. I have no idea what happened to those books - they were probably passed on to my sister and then given away.

A few years ago, I was in a used bookstore and saw an old Nancy Drew. When I saw that old blue tweed cover, I had to have it! It was very interesting....when the books were originally written, the authors had no idea of the staying power of Nancy so they describe life as it was in 1930's America (in Nancy's Mysterious Letter there's an interesting passage, for example, that explains how air mail went to England - it involved the train, Newark Municipal Airport, and an airplane launched from a ship at sea!). One by one, I collected all 36 "original text" books - all the books were rewritten eventually to remove any references that would date them.

Part of that collection is in the picture above. The most valuable is a first edition of The Secret of the Wooden Lady also known as a "Smoking Ned" because Nancy's boyfriend has a cigarette in his hand in the frontispiece. There was such outrage that it was removed from subsequent editions.

Stuff in the Den

For years I didn't know what to do with this awkward corner in the den - it's not that deep so finding a piece of furniture that would work there was difficult. Then Storehouse Furniture (how I miss that store!) started selling these black iron shelves in different sizes and one fit in this corner perfectly.

At the top are two photographs - one of men fishing along the Matanzas River and another taken by a friend of my nephew's on a school trip to Africa. The burl bowl was purchased at a League of New Hampshire Craftsmen shop.

This shelf has an old ironstone platter, an antique wooden sewing box, and a vintage trophy filled with corks from wine bottles - memories of good times! The Brownie Starflash camera I found on eBay - it's exactly like my first camera except that mine was red. The mini huraches are a souvenir of Cuba given to me by a friend who knows of my fascination with pre-Castro Cuba. Another friend gave me the red and blue pins that were worn to show support for teams in a 1950s Cuban baseball league - I decided they'd make perfect shoe buckles for the huraches.

The "Southernmost Point in the US" miniature was given to me by my niece and nephew to remember a family vacation to the Florida Keys. The rowing picture was taken of my nephew's boat the day they won at the Stotesbury Cup - a first for his school. And there's a photograph of Stiltsville just because I like the idea of Stiltsville!

The three baby cups are mine, my father's, and my sister's - my mother never mentioned having one. The model of the French chair is one bought by my mother at a flea market in Normandy back in the 70s.

Before it was illegal to harvest cypress knees, they were made into lamps and sold to tourists as souvenirs of Florida. I have a thing for them and bought this on eBay for $12. I had it rewired and replaced the original shade (a horrible basket-like thing that makes them more valuable to collectors). The little Greek statue was a present from my grandparents after a trip to Greece in the 60s.

Bookcases

I've had built-in bookcases in two places that I've lived and had to leave them behind when I left. So when I moved to Florida 19 years ago, I decided to buy free-standing bookcases. At the time there was a store here called Naked Furniture - you selected unfinished furniture which they would finish and add moulding. I wanted pine but the saleslady convinced me to buy oak instead.

At some point, I painted the room white and decided the bookcase would look better if the back was white too. Since I didn't want the mess of paint in my den, I wallpapered the back.

When the den was painted brown, the oak just looked terrible and there was no getting around the fact that the bookcases had to be painted. I'd rather lick a snake that go through that again - remove and store 48 linear feet of books, the tv, dvd player, and wiring. Since I was going from oak to white, it required two coats of primer and one of paint. And I decided to do this in Florida in July using my porch as a workshop so I was sweaty and covered in paint for two weeks! I don't think the color is a perfect white but it's close enough - I'll never go through that again!

Pinboard

I love vintage WPA postcards of National Parks - some I've picked up on my travels and some have been sent to me by my niece who loves them too - and I wanted a way to display them. Pottery Barn had a wonderful linen covered pinboard but it couldn't be that hard to make....so, I bought a 3M foam board and covered it in white linen.

New Den Pillows

For a change, I decided to add a little color to the den so I made these pillows with some fabric from Calico Corners. This was my first time trying envelope-style pillows and I could not believe how easy it was! There's an added benefit because it makes it very easy to switch covers if I get tired of them. And I know that within six months, I'll find these garish...my name should be Monochrome Mary.

Gulp.....

My den slipcover has been on for slightly over a year and as much as I hated the idea, it needed to be laundered. Even though I've read in many message boards that Mitchell Gold slipcovers launder like a dream, it was still scary.

I tried one seat cushion first - pretreat spots with Oxyclean, wash in cold water, and air dry for several hours in air conditioned space. I was told by the salesperson when I bought the sofa to put the slipcover back on the cushion when it was slightly damp but I did it when it was damp. Then I let the slipcover finish drying on the sofa until it was totally dry. It worked like a charm!

I did not think the main slipcover that goes on the body of my sofa would fit in my washer so I had to find a laundromat with commercial size washers that wasn't yucky. I hit paydirt close to home at The Washboard - excellent laundromat. Air drying this part was more of a challenge and in the end, I spread it out so that it filled the guest bathroom.

Last night I put it back on - damp, of course, and let it dry til morning.

So good to know that it laundered beautifully, went back on easily, and no shrinkage!

The Desk

I was so happy to finally find a good spot for the painting my sister brought back from Italy! It's been in quite a few spots in my house but none were ever right. I think it's perfect on the top of the desk.

Bedroom After

I find the finished bedroom to be more restful. The picture over the bed is a print I bought from a street vendor in Florence years ago. The bedside lamp came from a local consignment shop. The trunk at the foot of the bed was my grandfather's - he used it to store his tools and was given to him by the daughter of a ship's captain. The pillow on the chair was one I bought in Steinmart years ago.