A New Booth Space

There's a very popular vintage shopping area in Kansas City, it's in an old area of town full of huge, shabby, brick warehouses. Many of the warehouses have been redone and turned into vintage stores. It's become quite a destination when all the stores (around 13 right now) are open on the First Friday Weekends. I've been considering making a move into the area for a while now and finally when a new store advertised they were opening, I got on board. I'm thrilled but scared about being in this area. I guess I'm most worried about being able to keep up with putting items into the store and wonder if my items measure up and will actually sell.

The people who run the store and the other vendors are SO nice; that's a plus! We just had our first "First Friday Sale" and it went well, but I was surprised at how much work was actually involved in preparing for the event! Luckily, I was able to hire a few young men to help with the move and a friend came along to help me arrange my items.

So in this post, I want to share a few projects I've been working on and some pictures of my new space.

Here's one project that I tackled for the store. Take a look at what I started with... a falling apart cabinet. There is one drawer and one door. I bought this at an auction for a quarter. Yep, you read that right; a quarter. Nobody else wanted to take it on. LOL The veneer was in horrible shape, I had little choice except to scrape it off. After that I painted it a green, and used vintage maps to cover the missing veneer. Here's the finished cabinet at home in my booth.

I had a lot of complements on this piece but unfortunately it didn't sell. Maybe at the next sale.

Here's another remake. A neighbor gave me this love seat. I really didn't know if I could do a thing with it. First off, It was absolutely filthy. So, the first order of business was to mix up a disinfectant and clean it up. I knew then that I wanted to paint the wood white and distress it. Then I had a couple of ideas for those cushions. I finally settled upon using two vintage seed sacks that I had been saving for about a year. You can see the result in the pictures. I really worried about how sellable this would be since it was so different. But somebody bought it for their lake house right away. That was quite a relief.

Here's a few pictures I took around the booth. The building I'm in was a bag warehouse. My booth is in one of the historic executive offices.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look around. Oh, the name of the store is Le Fou Flea. It means "the crazy flea". Cute huh?

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Have a Seat....

Well, before school was out last year, a fellow teacher asked me if I would recover some dining room chairs for her. Knowing that chairs are very simple, I said yes. Well I was in for a surprise. I'd never seen dining room chairs put together like this. My teacher friend told me that they were hand made and had been in her family for years.

Notice that instead of just having a padded board for the bottom these have frames and springs. They were really worn and somebody had stuffed some plastic bags under the springs just to keep the springs from popping through.

Have any of you ever seen chairs assembled like this?

So anyway, to make this work I had to take this apart, there were too many springs that were broken. Then I used webbing on the bottom of each chair. Then a layer of muslin, then foam, then more muslin, then batting, finally the decorative fabric that the customer had selected.

I'm pleased with the way the chairs turned out, and I hope my customer is too. Oh, I normally don't do custom work, I usually just do the work that pleases me and put it in my booth hoping that a customer will like it and take it home. But, being a teacher, and I had this summer pretty free, I decided to take a few custom jobs. I'm finishing up the last one now. Yes, there is one more after these chairs.

Here's the before.

Here's the after; a total of 4 chairs.

Auction Day

One of my favorite pass-times is to go to auctions. I've been going to auctions for YEARS; long before I started upcycling furniture for resale. But this is one of the ways that I pick up furniture to upcycle for my booth.

So yesterday morning, I set out for a farm auction in a neighboring town. The weather was beautiful for a July day in Kansas. The morning was cloudy, which was actually good because it kept the temperatures cool. The setting for the auction was quite lovely. Like I said, this was on a farm. So there were lots of open land, an older house surrounded with large trees, and many barns. In the afternoon the clouds disappeared and the sun came out so those big trees provided lots of shade and there was a cool breeze that kept the day very pleasant.

There was all kinds of primitive farm stuff for sale.... much of it, I couldn't even tell you what it was used for. No, I didn't buy any items that I couldn't identify.

There has been quite a few Amish families moving to areas close by in recent years. They too like auctions. So there were lots of Amish people there. I really enjoyed seeing all their buggies pulled by horses parked amongst the trucks.

I know the Amish don't want their pictures to be taken, but I was SO tempted. It was such fun to see the boys and men in their straw hats and the women and girls in their stiff bonnets and dresses. At one point the little girls were all playing behind a red barn on the farm, it was truly a Kodak moment but I respected their beliefs and didn't snap a picture.

Most of the items had been pulled out of the barns for sale so I bought some wooden boxes, old doorknobs, tools, and some VERY DIRTY furniture. I've never purchased furniture before that I actually had to clean off and strip the fabric off of prior to storing in my basement. But this I did. Just look at that dirt!!! Yuck!

I bought a shabby little cabinet with the veneer peeling and a sewing cabinet that I really didn't want... but I couldn't resist since both pieces were sold as a unit for fifty cents. Yep, you got that right, 50 CENTS. I'm going to try to upcycle them, and if they don't turn out I'm certainly not out much money. No pictures of those right now. I'll save it for another post as I do have some ideas of what to do with them.

I'm always misplacing my screwdrivers as I'm working on my projects, they had boxes of them at the sale. So I was able to buy one box of screwdrivers. Some look to be very old, and we all know how I love old (vintage). :)

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Yes, that big knife thing came in the box of screwdriver. Maybe it will be handy at some point.

Now that I have about an extra 50 screwdrivers I may be able to find one when I need it!

Overall it was a great day for an auction. I'm looking forward to working on some of my new projects. I'm counting down the days until I can move into the new booth space.

Junk Lovers Trip to Canton TX

All junkers love a good flea market! Lucky me, I have several junk loving friends... and of course I'm a junk lover myself! So, after talking about a girls trip to Canton, Texas for the First Monday sale, we finally made it a reality. Boy did we have fun!!! Unfortunately we chose a day that the temperature was 102 but we made the best of it.

The trade days is HUGE! We spent from morning to night seeing as much as we could but I know we still missed parts of it.

Here's a picture of me sifting through some junk. This lady had great bits and pieces.

Treasures everywhere you look!

The following day we headed a little farther north to McKinney, TX to enjoy their charming historic downtown.

It was a very fun trip with some long-time friends. Aren't those the best??? We're already planning our next trip together.

Some pretty flowers

Today I'm just going to share a few photos that I took around my yard. The flowers have been so pretty but with the hot winds we've been having the past several days they may not last. The lavender has been especially pretty this year.

Here are a few other shots around the backyard.

I've been working on some projects that I'll share soon.

The cursed table...

Have you ever had a furniture flip that seemed to be cursed? What I mean is that it seems that anything you try with the piece goes wrong? That's the way this table seemed to be.

First, I bought this table and chairs in an online auction. I had to drive about 4 hours to get the darn thing. I only did that because the auction house was in the general vicinity where my sister and mom live. It was a great excuse to go visit my relatives. My sister said that I could redo the table in her garage and then she'd help me get it into my booth space. Ok, sounds like a great plan, right?

The pick up went beautifully. My sis couldn't believe that I could get so much furniture piled onto my truck. (The table and chairs were not the only pieces I purchased.) I seem to know the truck's capacity and I bought only what I figured I could haul in one load.

Here's the table and chairs in their "before" state.

The table is a vintage piece but the chairs are newer. I have no idea why they were packaged together, but I decided the table needed chairs, and these were the only chairs that I had so I painted them to match.

Ok, so why was this a "cursed" flip? Well, when I got the table I thought I'd just paint the entire thing. It ended up that I didn't like that, so after putting a primer and two coats of paint on the table top I decided to strip it all off. Then I stained and used polycrylic on the table top. Well, it has been raining in our area for days. The day I was applying the polycrylic was a rainy day. That means HIGH humidity. The polycrylic wasn't drying. I mean, after 16 hours of dry time, it was still tacky. I mentioned this to my dad and he suggested that I set a fan to blow on the table to help with the drying. Now, why didn't I think of that???? That did the trick. The polycrylic FINALLY hardened, I could sand between coats, and I was able to get 4 coats on the top of the table. Oh, another issue while redoing this table was the bugs sticking in the wet paint and the mouse that was terrorizing me by running all over the garage. It did seem like the table was cursed!

Finally, the table is finished, the chairs too and the entire set is in my booth at La Bottega in Parkville MO. I'm back home after my family visit and all is well. I'm breathing a sign of relief after this furniture redo. AHHHH....

French Themed Vanity

It's sure been a while since I've made a post on my blog. Life has just been very busy and I haven't been creatively motivated lately. I'm a high school teacher, so this time of year is hectic. But soon I'll be out of school for a few weeks and I'm ready to get creative again.

In this post I want to show you a project I made for the Fleeting Flea, a vintage flea market.

I started with this waterfall vanity that I'm guessing was from the 1940s.

It was a tough decision on how to change it up, there were some very deep scratches. So I began with sanding, then used Annie Sloan, pure white and graphite paint. I had just gotten some new transfer medium so I printed off some french type of graphics. I was going for a Frenchy-glam theme.

Here's the finished product.

I really like the hardware on the vanity.

Well,even though I fixed up the vanity for the flea market, it didn't sell at the market. We were having an awful spring, and the entire time we had the flea market it was snowy and cold. And, yep, we were outside in a tent. I think that greatly impacted our sales. In fact, I packed up and went home one day early to try to beat a huge spring snowstorm. So... the vanity went to my booth space. Today it sold!!! Horray! The chair that I made to go with it is still available at the store though.