A surprise for mom!

A few posts back I mentioned that my mom has a shop on Etsy (here!)  Well she also does shows around the area a few times a year.  She's been talking about wanting a new display piece to put her bows on.  She's been looking for something like this:

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But recently decided to hold off on buying it until later when she really needs it.  Right about the same time that she found the triangle display above, I found something online that I just loved and immediately wanted to make it for her:

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I reused some of the paint from L.Soup's room, and got the mirror off Craigslist for $10.  So I'm doing fairly well in a price comparison for the two items.  And I think the refinished mirror has so much more character! 

I didn't have enough forethought to take a picture of the mirror all put together before I started, but here is the base (minus the one arm):

MESS... ugh.  Welcome to my basement

And here are the pieces after sanding:

I removed all the hardware: screws holding the mirror to the frame, bolts holding the mirror frame to the stand and the bolts holding the legs onto the stand.  I sat all the hardware to the side so they wouldn't get misplaced (with my multiple projects happening in the basement right now).

I used a fine sandpaper, because I didn't want any sanding lines to be noticeable once I was finished painting, and sanded all over the mirror frame, stand, and legs to rough up the wood a little so the paint would have a better time sticking.  I then went over everything with a paper towel to get all the sanding dust off.

And this is why you shouldn't do anything in your work clothes... Sand dust.

I had an assistant.

At this point I probably should have primered everything with a white base.  But because I'm stubborn and lazy I decided that the paint and primer in one that I had would be fine.  Well it took about 3, maybe 4 coats on each piece before I couldn't see darkness anymore through the very light yellow that I ended up using.  So much for lazy.  I moved back and forth between painting the pieces of this mirror and painting the box colors so that each individual piece has time to dry.  It worked out fairly well, there were times that I was sitting on the floor waiting for something, ANYTHING to be dry.

Obviously I'm not the best painter.

I had some other stuff going on, so I didn't get to do anything with this project for a few weeks.  But I finally got around to putting the chicken wire on and finishing it up.  I originally wanted to get the chicken wire tucked into where the mirror had been before, but I couldn't staple it in there, it wasn't wide enough.  So I settled for stapling the wire to the main back part, and I'm going to cover it with some fabric so the sharp edges don't cut anyone.  Also so it doesn't look ugly.

I went back and forth trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to finish it.  The yellow is very light, and I just wasn't sure when it was all apart if it was TOO light.  Do I want to paint the hardware so that it was a happier color than the dark brass?  Do I want to add "embellishment colors" on the wood? Do I want to paint the chicken wire?  Do I give it to mom as is and let her decide if she wants any changes?

I finally decided on this:

I left it plain and delivered it to mom today.  She LOVED it, and was happy that I didn't add any embellishments to the wood.  She thinks the bows will add enough color that it would have been too much to include it with the paint.  I left the hardware dark, and honestly it doesn't look bad.  I had one issue after painting, one side of the base arms comes off... and when I painted it (despite my best efforts) some paint got into the crevasses and I had a hard time getting the two pieces back together.  I had to sand down the paint inside of there and even after that the fit is a little off...  I think we are going to end up wood gluing those two pieces together anyway, so it won't be an issue.

This was my first refinishing project, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  I learned that I need to be more patient with things, but I get so excited when I'm working on something that I just want to GOGOGO, and I can't always operate at that speed.  I have some more things to work on, so I'm going to try to focus on being more patient next time around.  We'll see how that works.

Let me know what you think!