Ms. Janice's backporch bed

I have recently been doing some projects for my Mom's friend Mrs. Janice for her backyard and I thought I would share some of my work. She has a wonderful back deck with lots of shade and she decided to give her furniture a face lift. So I have been working hard sanding and painting patio furniture. This one though is one of my favorites from her backyard though.
It is an old metal baby bed with the front removed to make it like a couch. I forgot to take a picture before I began sanding but this is in process. As you can see it was blue when I started (and whatever blue it was it was on there GOOD!!!)

You can kind of see how the paint is rough from weather and age....some of the roughness was actually the metal dented and banged up over the years.

After much work and LOTS of elbow grease you can see the paint is coming off and I am happy with the result.

My helper keeps touching my work and getting sanding guck on him.....Boo he says as he pokes his head through the bars.....

As I got to working lower on the bed I decided it would work much better if I could work on it as two pieces so I removed the spring part.

Once I removed the springs I could move the sides around to get to some hard to reach spots.

All done sanding I began the fun part...painting....Mrs. Janice decided to do all the furniture in a rusty brown color (the same as a fan she already has hanging out there)

Here you can see the color better....looks good...

In my excitement to begin painting I didn't think everything through and the feet are sitting in the grass...I will have to move it in the morning to finish but otherwise the base coat is done.

Once I finish painting this color I will spray Hammered metal paint on it for a texture and it will have some really cute red, white and blue pillows and a mattress that my Mom covered. I will post more pictures of the finished project next week.

Projects

Projects, projects, projects......I have quite a few projects that need to be done around our house and today I started on two of them for the kids.

Repurpose and reuse...a theory of my mothers that I also live by.

My first project I am tackling is Lauren's old toddler bed. This is a bed I am quite fond of since I came up with the design and most of the measurements and my Dad and I made it for Lauren. Now it is almost time for Austin to be ready for a big boy bed so I am going to convert it from a cute girl bed to a boy bed.

Here is the bed as it looked like for Lauren. My mom painted the cute little flowers along the side and the heart wreath at the end.

Here is a view of the side.

The hard part is going to be getting this bed ready to repaint. When you do a project you never think...how hard will this be to redo when I am tired of it. When I originally painted this I sealed it with a wax with a stain in it. You can't just paint over wax so now I get the fun job of stripping the wax off. Hopefully not to hard.....

Here I have brushed the stripper on and now I have to wait for it to work. It is starting to bubble already.

So while I wait I will start on the next project, a bookcase for Lauren's room. Once again repurpose, repaint and reuse. The funny thing is..this was actually my bookcase when I lived at home. Now if you know my Mom this is not a strange thing to have furniture I left behind. The strange thing.....it is the same color as when I left it..that is almost unheard of in her house. If you leave it she's going to make it into something else, repaint it, not leave it the same.

Speaking of my mom and making things, check out her etsy site Cowgurls Blessing she has really cute stuff for sale that she has made.

Here is the bookcase I am painting for Lauren, is is starting out blue denim. That WILL NOT match Lauren's pink and green room so I am going to put KILZ on this so I can start over.

Okay, all grey with Kilz.....now it needs to dry so I can figure out what color I am going to paint it and what to do with it next.

Time to go back to the bed...the stripper seems to work pretty well...I think I will try to put it on a little thicker on the other side.

No more flowers.....

So after the stripper I ran the sander over it and I think it's going to be ready to repaint. So now I just have to finish the other side and the headboard and figure out what I'm going to paint on it.....I have Mom helping with that part.

I'll keep you posted on how I'm coming with these.