My friends bought an apartment and this little cupboard was on one of the walls there. Then is was shabby, with peeling paint and a broken door knob.

I sanded it down and repainted it white and did decoupage on the inside using old entertainment newspapers from the 50's.

It turned out very cute:

Caroline:
This little white cupboard or bedside table was covered in thick white paint. I removed the paint with my heat gun without wearing enough protection. THAT was a bad idea!
The cupboard was probably last painted in the 60's and then it was very popular to put lead in paint. So after an hour of removing paint I had to spend 24 hours in bed with nausea and a head ache. I promise I will not do that again!

Then I started redoing it, using an old book of poetry in Hebrew by the Israeli poet Tchernichovsky who is apparently considered to be a great poet - although everyone I have asked disagree. Anyhow the pages looked nice. The inside I painted red to match the sewing table and the door and front of the drawer I kept plain with linseed oil and beeswax - just because I felt there was just a bit too much poetry going on.

I found red wheels and new knobs and that was that... sort of.

I will not tell you the whole story of getting the right varnish by using 4 different products, have one of them explode in my face and another melt 6 layers of old varnish and nearly destroying the poetry and finally finding a Danish floor varnish (Thank you Scandinavia!) that costs a fortune but is just so perfect. That story would be much too long.

I actually like this odd little cupboard.
I wasn't so sure about it at first, but the next piece of furniture I redo will be normal and classic - I feel like being more plain.

Click on a picture below to see gallery of before and after:

Caroline:

You might think I have died or gone to sleep since there have not been much progress with the renovation of furniture or on the blog. However that is not really the case. As I have said before it is very tedious to watch paint dry. And even though a chair might take 7 hours in actual work hours to REDO, if you count the amount of time I spend waiting for paint/glue to dry or trying to find an accessory it can in the end amount to many weeks.

On top of that we are having the longest winter, it never stops raining AND my cat just had kittens.

If you are frustrated - because I know that you are eagerly waiting for my next art piece :) - then believe me when I tell you that I am EXTREMELY frustrated. Here are some examples of what is going on.

Click on a picture below to see enter the gallery of ongoing projects and read about my problems:

Caroline
A very good friend of ours gave us this monster. I don't know what to call it because it is not a chest of drawers nor is it a set of cabinets. It is huge and massive. The carpenter was very enthusiastic about making it solid and matching up the grain in the pine wood. Solid means extraordinarily heavy. Therefore - the Monster.

I think most Swedes have an aversion to varnished yellow pine wood. In the 70's it was very popular to decorate the whole kitchen with pine wood (see picture below) - just writing about it gives me a panic attack. So due to this emotional distress I had to do something about it. I have other bigger plans for

Caroline:
The major problems I had with this cupboard are too numerous to mention. When I got the cupboard, the veneer was missing on one side, the doors were stuck and there were splashes of white paint. Just the "undoing" of the cupboard took 8 hours - there was a huge amount of sandpapering, "spackling" the side without veneer, sandpapering again and gluing other parts of the veneer. But later...don't get me started on watching paint dry!

The inside was done by decoupaging with pages from Sigmund Freud's book "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" - the book was found on the street.

I am quite pleased with it - please check out the picture gallery below and let me know what you think.