My Vanity Project

Here's the story of how I turned this poor neglected garage sale find (above) into the gorgeous vanity set shown below...

The first thing I had to do was scrape and sand all three pieces.  Even though I used chalk paint on this set, I still had to remove any loose paint before I started.

The piece that needed the most work was the mirror.

Several sections of trim were missing on each side.  To fix this, I first created a mold of the remaining portion.  Then using that mold, I created new trim using a product called Kwikwood.  I cut, sanded and primed the missing trim pieces and glued them into place.

Once everything was dry, I chalk painted the entire mirror with two coats of white and then painted the rose medallions pink and green.  Once dry, I added a coat of clear wax to all the painted areas of the mirror.  The final step was antiquing the mirror with a dark wax.

The next piece I worked on was the stool.  As you can see in the "Before" picture, the top of the stool was raw wood.  The previous owner had created it to replace a rattan seat.  I removed the wood, painted it with white chalk paint and added this wreath of roses. 

The design is by Lynne Deptula.  I used regular acrylics to paint the roses and after they were finished, I lightly sanded them to distress.  The seat and rest of the stool was painted, waxed and  finished by antiquing with the dark wax, just as I did on the mirror. You'll notice that I did add a bit of the rose paint around each leg of the stool.

Finally I got to work on the vanity itself.  The top needed numerous coats of white chalk paint and lots of sanding to even out the areas that had chipped away.  The entire vanity was painted, waxed and antiqued the same way as the other pieces.

For the drawers, I removed the floral porcelain hardware and added simple wooden knobs painted and antiqued to match.  I didn't want the knobs to take away from the drawers, which I painted to match the seat.

The inside of the drawers were quite ugly...stained and battered.  

I usually put pretty wallpaper in drawers.  It's been so long since I've refinished a drawer that my wallpaper stash was not to be found! I must have gotten rid of what I had (See! Never throw anything out!) so instead I ModPodged poetry book pages to the bottoms.

I suppose I could have gotten a little more creative with my paper placement but after the futile wallpaper search, I was over these drawers!

Once all the pieces were done, I assembled them to see just how much of a swan the ugly ducking had become.  I must say, I'm pretty pleased with the result!  Take another look at the completed set

Interested in purchasing this vanity set?  It will be available at my next show

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