Each Peach Pear Plum

Each Peach Pear Plum

I like to tell my daughters that this little white house in the English countryside on the first page of my favorite childhood book is where I live. Daddy built this house for Mommy. Greta, Fiona & Reid have rooms upstairs.

“And whose cows are those” asks a curious two year old.

“Those are mommy’s cows.”

Daddy has not built this house for me YET, but we did built our own home over a year ago. It has been an exciting process from design to construction to now, my favorite part, filling the interior with everything beautiful! Everything I think is beautiful. And that doesn’t mean things that you pick out on a shelf, but sometimes it means things that you change & create and fall in love with because you played a part in making that piece beautiful.

I love the idea of taking a used, old piece of furniture that was well-loved or maybe just stored in an attic for the past ten years, and breath new life into it. It took us eight months to build our home and in that time I mapped out every room in the house. Of course we couldn’t afford new furniture so I needed to get creative. I began hunting for furniture on Craigslist, yardsales and anything my mother-in-law would give me from her home! I had to beg my husband drive out to random people’s homes to pick up furniture. He thought I was crazy when he brought home the furniture and sometimes I thought I was crazy too. How was I going to change these ugly wood pieces into anything I would want to put into my new home.

I heard about chalk paint from a vendor that sells his furniture at my favorite store, Lucketts. The only thing I knew about the way he refurnished his work was that he used chalk paint. So, I started my research. I read everything I could on the process, I called vendors and asked alot of questions. I ordered the milk paint. I experimented on the first set of six chairs that I bought from Craigslist. I cried when I couldn’t make it work. I layered paints, I stained, I buffed, I sanded, I waxed. Until 2 days later I found the magic combination of Pearl, Cream, and stain that I actually bought to paint the cedar on the house.