Am I seeing double, or is that a Mirror?

Ladies and gentleman, I present.......{drumroll please} the third installment of the ongoing saga of MIRROR TRANSFORMATIONS!

 For you those of you who don't follow my blog on a regular basis (aherm, that would be most of you I suspect), I have been making efforts to do something about the surplus of dresser mirrors that are currently hogging up my garage/workshop space.  I have completed two other transformations:  A beautiful coral one (here), and a trendy shade of blue (here).

For the third one, I decided to go with a darker colour.  Why you ask?  Because Im lazy, I tell you!  Those bright colours took lots of coats of paint, and that equates to lots of work for me!  So for this one I used my Dulux Diamond paint in deep charcoal.  Super adhering, super-duper coverage in only two coats.  Crowd cheers!  (oh, and if you are wondering what is reflecting in the mirror, that is our custom made floor to ceiling headboard, to read about click (here)

Because dark colours don't let the light in, I found the raised detailing up the top was getting lost.  So I decided to whip up a lighter shade of gray by adding some white paint to my charcoal, and I highlighted some of the detailing to pull the eye up to that region.

This is a flat paint, so in order to inject some sheen I wiped on a coat of home made wipe on poly (for instructions, click here). It did the trick perfectly!

As usual, I forgot to snap a before pic, but she is the second one from the front in this of this cluster-o-brown!

Also, if anyone else is currently trying to paint through a stash of dresser mirrors, Id love to hear about it!

Happy painting everyone!

Mirror...Part Deux

Happy Sunday everyone!  What a beautiful day it was here today. FINALLY!  I just thought I would do a quick post tonight to feature my second mirror makeover.   

 As I was talking about in this post here, I have about nine dresser mirrors at the moment and have decided to paint up some of the nicer ones and make some room in the garage for Mr. Chuckles. For this mirror, I primed with Zinsser Bullseye in the spray can.  I then used a Valspar spray paint to paint the mirror this nice shade of blue.  It took quite a few coats to get full coverage.

 I considered distressing or glazing the mirror, but I actually kind of like it bright and bold as it is, so its going to stay that way!

After I put it all back together, I realized the mirror itself has a large blemish where part of the backing has been scraped.   *#$@^ Dang! 

If anyone knows of any easy tricks for repairing this type of damage, Id love to hear!

That's all from me!  Enjoy your Sunday. :)

Coral Hollywood Regency Dresser

Coral strikes again!  Kapow!! I have only been brave enough to try coral once before (here)and I loved it!!!  Look all those exclamation marks!  Its obvious I love it!  Apparently coral was the colour of 2012.  So what if Im a year behind. Meh. No biggie

This beauty is a vintage Kroeller dresser and was in ship-shape condition.  I used a white primer as I have learned the hard way that coral gets paltry coverage. The lady at the paint store gave a good analogy when she likened it to the coating on a candy apple.

After priming 2 coats, I painted about 3 or 4 coats of the coral.  It took quite a lot of coats. I also sealed with two coats of satin wipe-on-poly. I distressed all over the front and sides, but opted to leave the top undistressed.  I mixed things up a bit by sometimes distressing through to the wood, and other times going through just to the white primer. 

I also discovered by happy accident, that distressing super lightly actually revealed a burnt yellow colour.  So all up, there about four different layers of colours on this girl.

  

I modpodged some leftover coral and white contemporary paper I had from a previous project.  I love modpodging paper onto drawers, adds such a bit o’ fun!! 

This paper is a medium thickness, and goes on fairly well.  I have used it before (here) and really loved how it looked with the coral.  I distressed it lightly to take the 'newness' out of it and help blend better with the rest of the piece.

I like chunky hardware, and these ones were super cool. But they were so dark and dirty and dingy looking.  I thought about spraypainting gold, but didn’t want them to be perfectly solid.  I tried rubbing Brasso over them, but it didn’t work that well, and it really stunk. Im not sure that its related, but I noticed that Miss Do-As-I-Please passed out for about a ½ hour after one good wiff of the stuff. Hmmm, better than catnip?

In the end I tried a trick that worked before (here)by sanding them.  It kind of works like a buffer, and it shined em up good.  I sealed them with a spray-on acrylic clear coat to help prevent future tarnishing.

***UPDATE

I wasnt quite happy with the hardware, I wanted it a bit bolder, so I decided to add the little backer plates for some extra ooomph!  I gave them a blast of gold spray paint as they were not responding to my sanding technique, and then I actually sanded off some of the gold paint randomly to make them look aged.

What do you think?  Plates on, or plates off?

Mirrors Mirrors, Everywhere I Look I See Mirrors!!

Mirrors.  I seem to accumulate an abundance of them - much to Mr. Chuckles disdain.   I can't blame myself here as it seems that every time I pick up a dresser, people are thrusting them at me. 'Oh, don't forget the mirrors!' they chortle while hoisting them onto the dresser already challenging the shocks of the Mazda 3. Sometimes two or three are flung my way in one transaction.  Who am I to turn down freebies?  It goes against my nature. Free things make me sing from rooftops in the rain, despite the fact that when I get them home and see them in the harsh light of day, I realize I have no where to store them and that they are quite, well, ugly.

And Ill be honest, I find refinishing mirrors to be a pain in the rumpus.  Being an anal retentive type, Im not happy to just paint them as is, no no, that would be too easy.  I need to unscrew, unpluck every nailgun nail, or screw from the back and take the whole thing apart.  My cat 'Miss Do As I Please' on the other hand enjoys this immensely and loves parading around on top of the glass to see how many pawprint-signatures she can leave.  She has a big fan club.

But alas, the other day, with my growing collection threatening the integrity of my garagedoor latch, Mr. Chuckles put his foot down and said 'Its the Mirrors or me!'.  So I conceded and agreed to post the uglier ones for free online, and paint up the nicer ones.

I was in the process of painting out a 9-drawer dresser coral (here), so I figured Id make it easy on myself and paint one of the mirrors (I have 10 in total) coral at the same time.

I have to say, I love how it turned out and am now feeling something akin to excitement about painting the other ones!  Go figure.

Now I just need to figure out how to take a good photo of them without snapping myself in the reflection.

 Am I the only one with nest of mirrors lurking in her garage? Are there more of 'us' out there or am I the only mirror-hoarder in blogland?