Mary from Orphans With Makeup freshened up this 80s pine dresser and upcycled her old window frames with Simplicity!

Hello,

It’s Mary from Orphans With Makeup and today I am sharing two projects. A dresser and a recycled window art project to compliment the dresser.

Here is how the dresser looked when my client brought it to me for refinishing. A reproduction, probably from the 80’s made from solid pine wood.

This style is often referred to as “Diamond Points” because of the shape of the carved panels. This rustic style is French-Canadian and was commonly found and built for farmhouses right here in Quebec in the 1700’s made out of white pine and usually found with a paint finish and forged hardware.

As I mentioned, this piece is not an original, but a reproduction. An original diamond-point piece of furniture with its original painted finish would be worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So if you are lucky enough to come across one, hang on to it as they are harder and harder to find.

My client went back and forth about deciding whether to distress or not, but finally settled on just a little bit of distressing and I am so glad as I find it really brings out the uniqueness to this piece. Since it is made out of pine and pine being a soft wood, there were lots of dings and dents on the piece and a bit of distressing helps to take your focus away from it. Below was the sample I showed my client. I think the distressed drawer is much more appealing.

I don’t usually encounter problems with bleed-through or yellowing with pine furniture, but when I painted the sample drawer, there was a lot of yellowing so it had to first be primed. I first attempted to prime with Kilz Latex but it did not cover. As much as I don’t like to work with oil paints, the only alternative was to prime it with two coats of Kilz Original, followed by two coats of “Simplicity”. This seemed to solve the problem. The dresser was sealed with clear wax.

The interior was also freshened up with “Lazy Linen”.

I spray-painted the two hinges with Rustoleum Oil-Bronzed spray to imitate forged iron.

The other project I am sharing is recycling some of these old rustic windows into art by framing them with a black and white photographic print of a picture I took a little while back of wild horses found in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Here is my stack of old windows. I took 4 of the small ones to create a small wall gallery. Since the windows had lots of chipping paint, I first applied two coats of Tough Coat to contain the chipping and after that dried, I painted two coats of “Simplicity”.

I had two of the black and white prints printed in reverse. I then cut the prints to fit in the window frame and simply sprayed the back of the prints with spray glue and glued them to the fronts of the window to create this fun rustic gallery wall. I removed the window pulls and sprayed them black to match the hinges of the dresser. The pulls were originally on the bottom of the window, but I decided to turn the windows upside down. I love how this little touch gives a bit of an industrial look to it.