Before and After: Hand painted French Style Cabinet

Good morning. I am (hopefully) going to have a great day as the plumber is here digging up a pipe and moving a gully that has been the bane of my existence since we pulled down our sheds back before Easter. When the sheds came down we were left with a sewer gully sitting in the middle of the garden (where the shed was had been). Not only is it a trip hazard but gullies are legally required to have a tap above them to charge them. So we needed to move the gully to next to the fence and put a tap above it. Sounds easy but when you need to hand dig a 4m long trench one metre deep in clay soil it's not so much fun. We also can't re-turf until it's all sorted. In the end I've hired the plumber to do it all. One time when I'm more than happy to outsource. Frees me up to paint pretty furniture :)

Speaking of pretty furniture I painted this cabinet recently. This is one for me. I haven't finished cutting the shelves yet - one of those things that you do for yourself and don't quite finish... But I will get to them soon. Famous last words :)

I thought you might like to see the process of creating an antiqued look. I bought the cupboard before we started renovating as i thought if our bathrooms were a good size it would be a beautiful cupboard to store towels etc in. As it turned out our bathrooms are relatively small and we have a walk in linen press so the cupboard wasn't needed. I decided to keep it anyway and use it in my studio.

I gave the cupboards a light sand, a good clean then two coats of a greenish grey Chalk Emulsion by Porter's Paints that I had custom mixed. Did you know that Porter's are fantastic at colour and will work with you to create what ever colour you want?

The below isn't the best photo but you can see how stark and unnatural the white looks. That's where the antiquing comes in.  Learning to glaze and use dark wax will transform your furniture painting.

For this project, I made my own dark glaze. You can find my glaze recipe here. If you are using chalk paint you will need to seal it first before glazing. Just like when you use dark wax. I seal the chalk emulsion with Annie Sloan Clear Wax then applied the glaze. I then lightly distressed my piece.

Here is the 99% finished piece. (missing the shelves and hardware still) but man, I love this piece. Nice to be keeping some of my own work for a change.

Have you used glaze?

Do you love my cupboard?

Fiona xx