furniture peace

nope, not a typo, just a little play on words ;). Since this piece of furniture was the easiest many-part-miniature I ever made. Still had some challenges, but that's okay. I love those anyway and nothing crazy. (update: none of the comments had been published until just now (20th of August) because for some reason I don't get notifications in my e-mail anymore..😠, the mysteries around my blog continue haha!)

the observant visiter or this blog will notice that the right end corner of this photo is a bit off. It's where the mdf-corner this setup is in ends, as well as the wallpaper that's folded over it ;). Since there's still no Oldtique Store, but this is the set-up it it will be in, as in the wallpaper, a wooden floor and the chair will probably be there too.

I love that it's just a bunch of wood I had laying around - old paintstirrers, tonguespatula's, coffeestirrers, wood from an old
waterdamaged Roman blind, very thin mdf, veneer - that with some woodglue, paint and metal wires resulted in this cupboard that doesn't look nearly as cheap as it was materialwise, haha! I encountered a number of things that reminded me I'm not familiar with working with wood at all (or finishing it), but I learned a lot! 😊

  

filled with a selection of my 'antique' miniatures (the chickens and little pig are actually antiques by the way - that's how they were once sold on Etsy anyway - or maybe just old)

 

common stuff you find in a drawer. Although, pepermint might not be the most common ;)

the drawerpulls I made are after the ones I have on my nightstands and I thought would be perfect to replicate for this.

the small ones above their big counterpart

the round ornament with hole I used for the base I found last year at the fair at the stand of the lovely Elsner von Gronow. It has the small diameter I needed as well as the lovely structure I wanted it to have. A bit bigger than the one my nightstands have, to scale that is, haha, but it's the smallest ones I could find that met my needs and wishes for them.

I need to warn you if you think about visiting her webshop, this is not without risk.. You might end up with a crazy amount in your cart as I have in the past ;). I especially love her filligree stampings from France, they're quite a bit more pricey than other ornaments, but they are absolutely gorgeous!

for contrast below the pull still 'au naturel' and after I dressed it up with a rusty coat(ing). I used my trusty Rust All for that and gave it a little black wash finish for a natural and more realistic colourtone.

this is the last you saw in my previous post 'big in small'. If you like to see some of the photo's before that you can find those here.

next step was to apply paneling to the sides, because I love that on anything. It's such a simple way of adding a bit of character and to me a cupboard like this should definitely have that whether the real one has it or not (the webshop that had this cupboard on their website I used as my example only had front view - or that's the only image I saved, it's been years ;) - so I have no idea what the sides looked like).

with a little colour (far right) it starts to look really nice!

to prevent the drawers from falling out when opening, I made holes in the top of the drawer'construction' (for lack of a better word 😉) en glued the ends of toothpicks in them. I was searching a bit to determine where the holes should be to allow the drawers to close completely and being able to pull them out as far as possible at the same time. The first something I hadn't thought about initially with the first left hole above the right drawer way too much at the front as you can see ;).

the depth of the bottomshelves turned out to be too shallow with the baseboard I decided to add when I was at the point of doing the paneling. The paintstirrers I had for shelves were way too beautiful to replace them with a wider piece of wood, so I decided to extend the depth. Not perfect since I didn't have or could get the type of wood remotely resembling the kind of the shelves, but with the added colouring it works I think.

on the bottomleft the extensions are glued but there's a tiny gap that I filled with woodglue and tiny amounts of filingdust (middle). On the bottomright is after I treated the extensions with tea and linseedoil as I had the shelves. Because the colour was still very different because of the difference in the wood I used my dirty files to lessen the contrast. On the topright the result before the colouring of the extensions, but just to show it makes more sense now. At least I think

The reason I made 'slots' in the bottomframe is because I didn't want to ask my brother who had cut the shelves when I started this cupboard - or someone else - to cut out the corners of the hardwood (!) paintstirrers that are my bottomshelves and I'm not able to do that myself. I figured this is just how this cupboard was build. Well, it actually is, haha!

then after the final coat of pain I only needed to sprayvarnish. Sounded so simple. I had the cupboard ready for that for quite a long while when I was finally able to do that, when summer decided to turn tropcial for a couple of months. Because I live in an apartmentbuilding the fumes travel as it is. With everyone having all the doors and windows open, without any wind and because of the heat itself it would stay really long. Would not have been very nice ;). I have a gasmask I use for spraying, but I'm pretty sure my neighbours don't have that or if they did appreciate the need for it, haha! One weekend some time ago the temperatures finally dropped significantly and it would also be quite stormy, so I could finally do it. But then I messed up... (long story how). Needed to fix that first, but with what I needed to do only made things look much worse. After scraping and sanding that off I needed to fix the color. Which wasn't easy because it wasn't finding the right color, but finding the right combination of them to make it look as natural as possible. Pretty proud of what I was able to do.

but before I could spray again, hoping what would really be the final time, another long heatwave hit.. Last Friday it was finally the kind of weather that allowed me to do that again. So I did, but although it seemed fine before spraying (no matter in what angle I looked at it or with what light), after spraying a layer it showed the damage after all. Not visible without light falling on it fortunately, but with a bit of light it is quite noticable and I think still a bit of a shame. There's other things about this cupboard that didn't turn out not as nice as they were when I dry-fitted, but it's okay. It would have taken a lot of effort to correct and I'd possibly mess up a lot in the process because of what would be needed for that. So I see all of that as part of the learningprocess, just the visible kind :D.

the original and mine next to each other. As you can see I altered a few things to suit my taste and use.

 

*** ps: does anyone know why I lost ALL of the blogs I followed? I used to have a massive list of wonderful blogs I followed of all of you and many others and recently I discovered that when you go to my profile in the overview of which blogs I follow the ONLY one mentioned is Otterine's, the only non-Blogger blog..., so must be a Blogger-thing. I regrettably haven't been able to visit any blogs in a long time (or just one or two on a rare occassion), but I NEVER unfollowed any of you and would never do that either, so sorry if anyone saw it and thought that.. Weird stuff at times with Blogger. If anyone can shed a light on why this happened or if you experienced the same thing, please let me know in a comment, tnx! ***