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:

This a a reproduction bar on wheels made in the 80s, that I was asked to cover with decoupage of my choice.

The couple who own it travel quite a bit and I chose to use that as an inspiration. I asked them which cities they had visited together and the area where they had stayed. Then I took street maps of the cities and designed them in three tones white (streets), grey (buildings) and blue (water). These maps I merged together in what (from a distance) looks like one large city with a river running through it. The cities in the map are: Paris, Bangkok, Athens, Berlin - Kreuzberg, Barcelona, Cape Town, Florence, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Rome, Bologna and Verona

For the bottom shelf of the bar I got inspiration from my sister who suggested that I should use the maps of the international airport terminals in the above mentioned countries. I made outlines of the terminals in black and white (in Photoshop)  and just positioned them in a sort Tetris pattern.

I painted the legs and wheels blue-grey to suit the interior style of the room that the bar would live in.

Detailed pictures of the process are found below in the gallery. I am not adding captions at the moment since I've found that it messes up the pictures if viewed on a mobile phone. So I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

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:
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.

Linnea:

This almost ruined Asian CD shelf, I found on the streets some months ago. I didn't do anything about it, because I didn't know if it was worth trying to save it?

But then I found some old Israelí children books from the 70´s and a lot of them were about making experiments, exploring new materials and so on. So I thought I would make an inspiring children's shelf, where they can have fun watching the pictures and maybe try something of it themselves.
Now it is finished......