Moonlighting

Hi Internet, sorry I've been away. I'm exhausted. The last couple of months it seems like there's something to do every minute of every day. I know I've had evenings of laying around or chatting online, but they seem pretty few and far between.

In my opening post I mentioned "my tiny business." I call it tiny because it's not even big enough to be a small business. I'm a dealer. Antiques, decorative stuff, nothing serious, and even though Mrs. Blandings hates it, painted furniture. (It's ok Mrs. B., I'm not fond of a lot of things I see at our mall either!)

So I've been making a push. I got moved into my workshop space and I've been trying to get things started, finished, tagged and over to the mall. I had a sale in July which got rid of a lot of things I was already tired of, and the first couple weeks of this month sales have been pretty good. Lesson learned: if you decide that blue Blenko carafe has been there too long and you'd like to bring it home to use yourself, go immediately and take it out of stock. I didn't do that (it was there for months) and boom, showed up on my sold list.

I made a number of paint discoveries, both good and bad. The clearance priced Pratt & Lambert in Designer White looks bad on a piece of furniture, but mixed half with water makes a great wash. Conversely, the flat grey Benjamin Moore from the mis-tint shelf looks pretty dull on it's own, but great sanded down to a black undercoat, with that white wash over the top of it. Ace hardware is now a Benjamin Moore dealer, if you can find anyone to mix a color for you.

The shaker dropleaf that got the coat of the bad white paint is currently in use as my workbench. I dont know what it's previous owner put on it, but I suspect it's marine varnish. Normally sanding solves the old finish problem, but this bad boy is going to take a chemical stripper, and probably lots of it.

A chinese chippendale side table got painted a sage green, and I decided it wasnt quite right. I tried to steel wool off all the paint, and found that level of distress was pretty darn good looking. So I'll get the rest of it scrubbed down this week, follow up with a wash of stain to tone down the areas of raw wood, and call it done. Perfect with a pair of small asian seated figures I picked up at a sale last week. My luck selling asian things has been hit and miss, but I like it so much, so I expect there will always be a bit of that in my space.

And now, off to bed, it's going to be a busy week.