demolition

Once the stove was all clean and shiny it was time to get the brick behind it up to snuff. Or so I thought, until I was ready to roll and realized I had no paint. So that story will wait for another day. Not to be deterred, We decided to demo the existing tile instead. This way, i figured. we could knock up any dust we wanted without disturbing our new paint job. Brilliant!

"before"

Who would want to see these go?!

 So, I started by trying to wedge out what I thought was the half-round trim. If you know anything about my parents house, you should know that the people who lived there before them did the most shoddy handiwork possible. And, this was the case again. It wasn't half round separating the tile and wood floor, you see. No, it was chunks of a hand rail. The kind of hand rail that goes along a staircase.

 No matter. We dug the handrails out of what turned out to be a sizeable trench, then just used a hammer and chisel to pull up the tile. I had been warned that this could be very difficult, depending on how the tile was laid, but they came up very easily and only a couple of them broke in the process.

It was dusty, and we definitely should have been wearing respirators. Again. Burning lungs aside, the task was actually super easy.

As we were knocking out the tile around the woodstove my dad asked why didn't we just move it. Um. I thought it couldn't be moved because it weighs exactly 93741234.3 pounds. But, apparently it can be done! So it was moved on to a sheet of plywood just next to us. I really wish I had known that was possible before I polished it. Anyway!

As we pulled up the tile we realized that it had been laid on what I intelligently declared was tin foil, but was actually sheet metal. The thin-set was coming off the metal in chunks, and tile needs to be laid on a clean, flat surface, so we decided to pull that up as well.

This turned out to be a little adventure for us, but that story, too, is for another day. For now, I'll leave you with this glorious image of a hearth free of disgusto-barfo 70's tiles, and a picture of said disgusto-barfo tile  on its way to the garbage.You're welcome.

shiny and new

Remember the Christmas present I got for my parents? Ah, no you don't because I never wrote about it. Oops! Well, for Christmas I bought them a bunch of tile, some spacers, grout, and other fun stuff. Why, you ask? Because of the huge eyesore that remained after I painted their dining room. 

Yikes.

Their Christmas present was that I would replace that horrible tile with white subway porcelain tiles that look like marble. (They look like this, but they're not real marble). It was pretty obvious, though, that you couldn't replace the tile without addressing the area around it, too. So today was step one of delivering their Christmas gift: polishing the woodstove.

I'll admit, the woodstove has looked like that for so long I took it for granted that it would look that way. What else could it look like? I did some research online and found that it's actually pretty easy to get it looking back to new, effectivly erasing more than 20 years of rust and yuck.

I started by sweeping everything (including the brick) with a broom. Then Dave and I attacked the woodstove with some coarse steel wool, focusing on the rust spots. It immediately started to taint the air with a disgusting metallic taste, so if you're going to try this I'd recommend wearing one of those dorky mouth cover things.

We soldiered on while holding our breath, even though it looked like we were just pushing the rust around. We would periodically wipe our areas down with a damp rag to make sure we were actually doing something, and all told the sanding phase took about two hours. (There was a lot of rust and the stove has a lot of ridges).

After that, I wiped down the entire woodstove with mineral spirits to get it polish ready.

The polishing step was very straightforward - I put a small amount of polish on a rag, wiped it on, and kept it moving. It was pretty amazing how dramatic the effect was - I told you I forgot what it was supposed to look like!

The stove has a lot of detail in it, some of which I couldn't get with the rag. I used a Q-tip so some of the trickier spots, and even still there are still a few areas I didn't hit. Those areas look pretty obvious in the photos, but in real life you can't see them at all.

After the polish dried (45 minutes?) I wiped the entire thing down with a clean, damp rag to remove any excess polish that didn't soak in, and voila!

This project took near 3 hours and cost about $15. Not bad for such a dramatic before and after! Next, it's on to white washing the brick!

The chair: Part 5

I had researched a few techniques for how to paint over the gold paint and have it show through with a "distressed" look and my goal was to have something like this:

After poking around the internet seemed to favor Annie Sloan chalk paint... which sells for L18.19 per liter. Yikes. So I found a blogger or two who said they recreated the paint by buying standard house paint and mixing in Plaster of Paris. After seeing their success I tried it out myself by mixing 2 Cups Paint (matte),1/3 Cup Plaster of Paris, and 2 Tbsp Water.

I was nervous but I jumped right in. I mixed up my plaster and paint and slapped it on without being too careful to cover everything perfectly. I kind of hovered it over it as it dried then tried to wipe some off. Unfortunately for me it wasn't dry enough yet and I just smeared paint everywhere. Lame.

test chair leg, post paint application / pre sanding.

So I added some more paint on top of the mess I made to get an even coating and let it dry a bit longer. This time when I went to wipe some off it was totally dry. Oops! So I busted out some sand paper and went at it. I was nervous that I'd sand through the white paint and the gold paint, but it worked perfectly.

Thinking that I'd better work quickly before I figured out a new way to screw the paint up I finished the rest of the chair's base with this technique.

When this dried I flipped the chair over and did exactly the same thing to the top half: slap on some paint, let it dry, then sand it off on the areas that would normally get wear.

Once all the paint dried I tried to seal it all up by rubbing in some clear furniture wax. I read that this would make your paint more scratch resistant, so I was down because I hate using poly (it's annoying to apply and it stinks). The wax may not have been that much easier in the end because it took some serious elbow grease to get in all those nooks and crannys. (I don't have a picture for this step but it looks exactly the same as the picture above).

I have to say, I've moved the chair a few times since I applied the wax and... I don't think it helps at all. The paint scratches and transfers to other things (corners, other furniture) really easily if you bump it while moving. I don't particularly mind for the chair's sake (it make's the sanding more "authentic"!) but I don't love scratching off all the transferred paint with my fingernails. My manicures don't like it either. I'm still not going to poly it, though, because the chair has since found its resting place, so movement isn't really an issue anymore, and I still hate poly. So there.