A few recent projects for the shop.

Well, our little shop is doing pretty well! So well, in fact, that we are scrambling to keep up with inventory. It's not an easy to thing to  "man" a shop AND produce the inventory. Especially when you've still got your kids at home  -- minus a few hours of preschool each week.  But somehow we are making it happen.

Anyway, we thought we'd share a few recent projects, like this industrial side table. We found the card file at a salvage shop and were about to order hairpin legs for it to make it into a table when a friend called and said she had some stuff to give us.  (Thanks, Monika!!) One of those things was a falling apart vintage side table with hairpin legs.  How's that for fortuitous?  The legs easily came off the old piece and we cut the a new base out of plywood so we had something to attach both the card file and legs to.  This one sold quickly.  Industrial is still hot.

We're also doing a lot of custom work.  We recently got two of these broken antique chairs (both broken in the exact same place from years of right-handed folks pulling them out from a table.  The wood was literally split and pieces were missing.  They'd been tacked back together with nails, but eventually that didn't hold it together either.  Because the client asked us to paint them to match a set of her existing black chairs, we were able to screw the wood together using a counter-sink drill bit and then fill with wood filler.

Nothing a little paint can't cover.

The two chairs we were asked to match were painted with in glossy black, and we have to say that we are surprised by how this glossy paint looks on an old marred antique chair.  We love it.  If you look closely at the painted chair, you can barely see the fix.   A guest would never know it was repaired.

We're normally against painting antiques, but when a piece is that broken, it's a good way to salvage a quality, real wood piece of furniture. Because otherwise it sits dusty and unused in the basement for 10 years -- like these did. :)

You wouldn't believe the support we're getting from our community.  Folks love that we repurpose and upcycle, so when they have furniture to get rid of, they often give it to us.  Complete strangers!

Take this solid wood two-drawer chest, for example.  A customer dropped by to browse and when he saw the kind of work we do, he showed up a few minutes later with a carload of furniture which he gave to us for free.  It included this office-y looking piece. 

We transformed it into this with the help from a stencil:

We hadn't purchased the new pulls (vintage-y looking clear glass numbers) when we took this photo, but you get the picture.

We're feeling particularly proud of this piece because it was pretty painstaking and involved but so worth the effort!
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