Hope Chest makeover

The Hope Chest (which you can see in the picture above behind my little baldie) was my Grandma Millie's, then my mom's, and now it's mine. I'll pass it down to Lilia when she's older. Right now, it is in our living room and holds our blankets and board games.

My mom always wanted to do something with it, but couldn't ever decide what. I've been thinking about it since I got it a few years ago, and finally decided to just jump in and do it. Midway through the makeover process, I changed direction, but I *love* the end result.

First, I sanded it lightly, which was considerably easy to do. I just took a strip of sandpaper and went over the entire surface while Nic & I were watching "Income Property" on HGTV. Then I used Behr Ultra Paint & Primer that we bought in the Oops! section at Home Depot for ONE DOLLAR!

I don't know how you screw up white, but someone didn't like it, and their loss is my gain. I still can't believe I got this baby for $1.

Anywho.

So I painted the bottom portion white, with the idea that I would buy some foam and sew up a cushion with some blue fabric I bought to make Mona a dog bed.

 

Pretty, right? The top is pretty scuffed up, from age and from Brooke always jumping on the top to look out the window and scratching it. So, I thought to myself, hmm. I don't want to sew up a nice cushion because Brooke uses the chest as her lookout for chipmunks in the yard (that is a whole other post for another day). While thinking about what to do with the top, I played around with some blue paint during Lilia's nap and painted a capital 'S' on the front.

 

I didn't like it. 

So I started distressing it with some sandpaper, which is really fun. And then, I was going through some paint and stain the sellers left in the garage when we bought the house, and I found a beautiful gel stain. Perfect! So I applied it, and wiped it off. Repeat. I liked it so much, I decided to paint part of the top white (leaving the edges the original stain) and distress that as well. I didn't need to do much with the sandpaper on the top since there are tons of scratches and gouges from Brooke and time, so I just added some stain, and wiped it off. 

--click the picture to see it larger--

Brooke got muddy pawprints on the top this morning, so I'm going to have to clean it up and stain it again before I can finish it off with a coat of satin polyurethane. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.

Next on the agenda: Redoing the desk I got from my dad. Look how many layers of paint there are:

 

Green, red, black, blue, and white. The blue and white are mine, and by far the hardest layers to get off. Nic was using his sander (that he uses for sanding down his sculptures) on it, and he could only get it down to the red layer. Hopefully over the weekend we'll be able to problem solve or just give in and buy an orbital sander :) Stay tuned!