70s chest of drawers

We've been on the lookout for a piece of furniture for our daughter's room for a little while, and we recently stumbled upon a huge second hand furniture store in Dunstable. It's a charity store raising funds for the British Heart Foundation, and it seems a great concept - they offer to collect any unwanted furniture free of charge, and they sell on anything that's of good enough quality. It's a great way to get your house cleared if you're moving and don't have the means to get furniture to the the tip yourself. Plus the charity makes money from the sales, and people like dear Husband and I, who much prefer older furniture, get the opportunity to kit out our house for a few pennies.

So we found this really cute chest of drawers, with the cone shaped legs that we seem to have a real fetish for at the moment, and it was reduced. Unable to resist a bargain, we paid for it, (and a pink neon strip light that we just *had* to have) and said we'd bring the car round to pick it up.


I'd completely forgotten that we had dear Daughter with us. Which meant we had the world's biggest buggy in the boot. Ooops. We managed to squeeze it all in by shifting dear Daughter to the front seat, unscrewing the legs on the chest, and I did a little yoga move to sit beside it on the back seat. Hoorah!

With a piece of furniture on our hands, we were invincible, so now was obviously the right time to do up the nursery. I went out to buy the paint and came home with a delicious turquoise, which turned out to be teal once it dried, and a tub of mustard yellow (which has yet to be designated a room). Dear Husband painted the wall behind the cot, and applied some cute vinyl stickers to the opposite wall, and hey, presto! We have the start of a really cute nursery!

Having painted our girl's room blue (albeit only one wall, and it is teal, which is better than just a shade of blue), we figured we could get away with some pink without it looking too twee. So I set out to find something to paint the chests with. I found a great little range from Dulux called 'made by me'. The name irritates me, but the colours were nice, and as it turns out, dead easy to apply and they have a really nice finish.

So I stripped off the drawer handles (how cute are they?!), cleaned out the drawers - they had some kitsch flowery drawer liners in them, as well as a fair bit of dust. And on lifting out the middle liner, came across some blueprints from 1982. (I'm saving these, I'm sure I can use them for some other project - Bonus!)

Not a fan of spending time on prep, I gave it a really quick sanding down, a clean with sugar spray, and primed it with some wood primer we had left over. I got a bit frustrated here, because the primer had dried out a little, so was a bit too thick really, but it did the job, and I refuse to buy anything I don't have to.

It already looks cute just in white...

The next day I gave the unit a coat of pink paint using a mini gloss roller, and thought a light grey on the drawer fronts would stop it from looking too twee. I'm so glad I did that, I think an all pink chest would have made me feel a bit nauseous.

I could have gotten away with just a single coat of paint, but I gave it a second the following day to make it look super crisp.

A quick polish of the handles, and it looks fab. I think it really sets off the teal of the wall nicely.

Very happy with this one.

Vintage record cabinet

Around a month before I was due to give birth, I stopped work, and immediately panicked about getting bored. A chap I'd met through a mutual friend had opened a cafe inside a vintage store in Crystal Palace, and was after some coffee brewers, so I offered to add some onto my order, and drop them into him sometime soon after. It was to be the last work related thing I did for a while! I took advantage to look around the store and promptly spent all the money he gave me for the brewers on this cute record cabinet.

We needed a side table to go next to our 70s-esque woollen felt sofa, and this would double up well to hide all the trail of paperwork I seem to leave everywhere I go. It was a bit scuffed, but in great condition otherwise, and someone had clearly loved storing their records in it at some point in its lifetime; it didn't really go with any of our furniture, but I had four weeks to figure out how to make it fit.

Or so I thought. Our daughter was born a few days later.

Fast forward 11 months, and I've finally found the time to do it up. I wasn't really too sure where to start, but I felt it needed an injection of colour, so I went to my local DIY store and browsed the spray paints.

A (really) quick rub down with some sandpaper, after removing the legs and the doors, followed by a quick blast of primer (sheesh! spray paint gets EVERYWHERE on a windy day) and it was ready for some colour.


The cabinet has this non-slip vinyl sheet glued to the top of it, and I wasn't feeling up to scraping that off, so that stayed black; the inside became bright orange, the outside a gunmetal grey and the doors and legs became taupe. (which everyone seems to call 'warm grey' at the moment....)

It looks awesome, and the little bit of orange that is still visible when the doors are shut is just the right amount of colour pop to brighten up the cabinet.

Once it was in place, I gave the handles a little polish with some brass cleaner, and it's better than new.

Not bad for a 2 day turnaround.