Flea Market Highboy....My Favorite Project To Date!

I love our local flea market. It's a true feeling of summer when I go to the flea market on a Sunday morning. It's an outdoor market with tons of vendors who offer a variety of different wares. I'm not the best at haggling, but I'm getting better. The Hubby says I'm not a very good negotiator so I've been working on my negotiation skills a lot. I mean really why can't they just say there rock bottom price to begin with and save me the hassle? :-) Sometimes I go to the flea market and find so much I have to send the Hubby home to unload and come back to pick us up. Other times I don't find anything I want to buy.

This weekend was the send Hubby home with a carload and wait for him to come and pick up Hunter and I. I've had a lot of luck with one vendor in particular and this weekend she was back. As soon as I saw her tent I knew it was going to be a good day and I was right! I saw she had a gorgeous high boy dresser with the long spindly legs I love and I knew I couldn't leave with out it. Of course it needed some work, but that's half the fun!

Here are the before pictures......

Love, love, love all the details!!! The curvy legs, the inset veneers and the original hardware always make me happy!

Plus I thought the inside was unexpected and in great shape.

I'm a huge sucker for a curvy, long leg on a dresser!

Having the original hardware is a big deal to me because it means I don't have to scramble around trying to figure out what hardware to use that will go with the period of the piece. I love these drawer pulls!!! Why don't they make them like this anymore?

I'm also a sucker for these curvy spots at the bottom. They give the piece such character! You can see from all the pictures, there were some issues with this piece of furniture, but that's what makes this fun! I love taking something that needs some love and making it purty!!

When I got the piece home I had no idea what I was going to do to it. I thought I'd paint the whole thing, but when I looked at the top it was in good shape so I thought it was wrong to paint it. I sanded the top down by hand with a sanding block and because the piece was so old there wasn't much on it to sand off. There were a couple of small spots that needed a bit of stainable wood filler, but that was no problemo!

For the rest of the dresser I wasn't sure what to do. I knew I had to work fast because I was going to be busy for awhile working on some other projects so this had to be done right away or it wasn't happening for a few weeks. I had received a sample pot from my Annie Sloan stockist in Duck Egg. It wasn't my favorite color so I had to figure out how to change it and make it my own. Not sure I could ever recreate this color, but I took the small pot of Duck Egg, put in about 1/4 of a sample pot of Ochre, a bit of Coco, A bit of Provence, a bit of Graphite and topped it off with a bit of Old White. I didn't measure anything, just winged it and OH HOW I WISH I WOULD HAVE MEASURED!!! I love this color!! It's a gray, blue with a hint of green. I'm sure I could do it again, no??? :-)

Here it is with the top stained in Ebony and the rest done in let's call it Melody Sea Green :-)

I have to point out that this is with ONE coat of paint!!! What other paint do you know that could cover this amazingly in one coat??? With no priming or sanding??

Once I got the piece painted I knew I wanted to REALLY distress the heck out of it. So I got my sanding block and went to town. I wanted all the incredible details of this piece to stand out. I also wanted it to look it's age and well......SWOON because I am so in love with this piece of furniture!

OK, here it is......

Now you will notice something different in this picture....it's staged and the above one isn't. We hurriedly put the piece out to take a picture because it was sunny (we were supposed to have more thunder storms today). Then the Hubby says, "Don't you usually put stuff on top?" Well you don't want to know what I said to him after he said that! It was 90 degrees with about 80% humidity and after moving this thing in the heat the last thing I wanted to do was run around grabbing stuff to stage this, but I knew he was right so I did :-)

Here it is 'staged'.....better???!