Dress Me Up (Part 1)

Remember this?

 
I wanted to do a face lift for this. Bought a huge bag of crystal parts from Hock Siong & Co at dirt cheap prices and organza fabric. My mum's the master seamstress, so I did the ground work to piece the crystals together.

Yes, I even put them in sequence how it should hang from each pane.

Unfortunately, my head seamstress is pretty busy these days at work, so the operation has been halted till she feels like doing it. Well, the plan is to sew these crystals along the edge of the lamp shade and to cover the shades with a sewn organza outer piece with pleats.

I'll keep you posted once we start on it again!

Take a Second Look

Ever since my mum passed me a newspaper cut out from The Straits Times on 2nd hand furniture shops, one of my favourite hang out places to look see look see is Hock Siong & Co. Their furniture is relatively in good condition and most of them are old furniture from Hotels. So the quality is there too. 

http://www.facebook.com/hocksiongco

They do re-painting, however they don't do re-upholstery. Good thing is, they have contacts which they usually recommend to customers and their staff are really helpful. Also,with $300 spent, they'll do delivery to your door step. 

I've already went there more than 5 times in a span of 2 months. My initial idea was to find antique French/ Victorian furniture and re-upholster it. I ended up getting overly excited and bought other stuff too. I mean, the quality's not bad for the price paid, add a little sanding, painting, polishing & cleaning, the piece looks new again. Why not?

Check out my great hauls...

We bought 3 of these. I was so busy then shopping for suitable fabric prints and upholsterers.

Somehow I fell in love with this dirty looking 3-seater. It has a matching single seater, but after much "thinking", it was sold to someone else. :(  I wanted something Victorian for our bedroom, so this fits right into the theme. 

This will be my project - to re-upholster myself! My mum snorted & laughed. She said she'll laugh harder when I finally send this piece to the upholsterer... after my disastrous attempt.... We'll see about that.

Stay tuned for my DIY upholstery post!  

Bought 2 of these and 2 other shorter ones.

The best part is, I got all of these for about $1000. Don't forget to include costs for fabrics, re-painting & upholstery. 

Most of the hauls you see above, they all need some form of face uplift. I'll keep you posted when I've started on of each one of them. I reckon the hardest one will be the 3-seater. Wish me luck!

Wallpaper Alternative

There's the craze about Wallpapers now. I chose two types for two rooms and decided to try this Wallpaper paint for the remaining room & hall.  Actually, the savings is quite a lot. It's more than 70% savings from the cost of the Wallpaper.

The Wallpaper paint comes in a full set of Primer, Top Coat and Kit set. 

Honestly, I feel that the kit set is a waste of money. It's just a jumbo ice-cream stick for stirring the paint, a plastic scraper and a nylon paint brush. You can easily substitute the stirrer with any long scrap wooden stick. As for the plastic scraper, a hard plastic sheet can easily do the trick and for the nylon brush, just make sure to get a short, stiff one. 

I included some safety gear and other tools that are used to prepare the wall.

Yes, there's an idiot's guide how to DIY that comes with the kit. It's surprisingly easy.

Step 1: Apply 2 coats of Primer & allow to dry for 2hrs
Step 2: Apply top coat using criss-crossed strokes
Step 3: After 15min, use spatula to smooth over semi-dried coat (be gentle on this, on my first try I ended up with scratch marks OR best, just omit this part)

One coat of primer is good enough unless your previous wall colour is an intense colour, you'll need two coats of primer to cover that. For mine, I used just one coat. After drying for 2hrs, I continued with the top coat.

Walla! My completed project.

I find that one coat of Top Coat is good enough. 1 coat of primer + 1 coat of top coat give a very good contrast and texture. It's my first project and I wanted a perfect wall, so I did two coats of top coat. 

The second coat made the colour more intense and covered up most of the contrast. I was a little disappointed, however lucky for me, this room is very bright and the sunlight brought out the shine from the metallic parts of the paint.

If I knew that this paint will give such an effect and cost just a fraction, I would not have chosen Wallpaper. You can save quite a lot. It took me a day to do this by myself. Well, my other half is especially anal about doing a good job "preparing" the wall. So that the paint will stay and last longer... yes, yes, I got it. So, much of my time is devoted in "preparation".

I'm happy with the end result. :))