The Beast is a Beauty

This is the new, but old, china cabinet that inspired me to sell the china cabinet formerly known as my favorite china cabinet in the whole world. My Frenchy Hutch, (seen here) was sold at the April sale at Restoration Emporium. I was lucky enough to meet the girl who bought it and I am confident that it went to a good and loving home, she was excited and so was I!

I found this beast/beauty when I went to pick up some other furniture from an older gentleman. He had tons of furniture and it was all being sold at great prices. It has five original, curved glass panels and amazing carved details. As lovely as it was, it also came complete with mouse doo and a plate of old, nasty fried chicken in the drawer. Seriously? Who does that! 

There was some major disinfecting that would need to take place here. I returned his plate of chicken, and loaded up my finds and promptly brought them home to sit in my garage for two months. Waiting for inspiration to strike. I had lots of ideas but none of them seemed quite right, sometimes you have to be willing to wait for the right idea. In the meantime, I decided to paint the whole thing with Annie Sloan Chalk paint in Old White. The base color is always a good place to start and I planned to add the accent color later when I made a decision.

I have always been a fan of the "big chippy" look, the look that can be achieved with Vaseline if you are spraying latex. It was just by messing around that I found a way to do this with chalk paint. I used a flexible putty knife and just lightly scraped off the paint in spots and then lightly sanded down the edges of the chipped areas. It was better than I had hoped and I decided to heavily distress it and leave it all Old White.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Although I love the look, I do realize that it is not for everyone. I had a client in my garage just after it was finished and she asked me what my plans were for it :-) I laughed and said that it was done, she looked shocked and said that it looked like the paint was peeling off.  Exactly.

I removed the back of the cabinet and sprayed it with adhesive spray and attached some alphabet script fabric. I have a weakness for script fabric, it is amazing to me that when the alphabet is written in script it looks fancy and not elementary. 

Here it is in my dining room as it is today, it is definitely a work in progress. But at least it is presentable and mostly clean. This is more of an accomplishment than you may know! Most of the time the dining room is the place my work junk lands before it is tagged and brought to the shop. So, clean is good!

So the Beast is a Beauty, to me.





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