Drawers

There's a mad place near here called Steptoe's Yard.  It must be pretty famous as I've had several far travelled customers ask me for directions (it's beside the St Cyrus Nature Reserve).

Steptoe sells a mixture of lovely antiques, awful tat and broken things, unusual reclamation pieces, crockery, furniture in good condition and furniture in a terrible state.  

There's no point 'nipping' to Steptoe's - you have to spend a good amount of time there to find the wee nuggets hidden away in a sea of 'stuff'.

I've bought quite a lot of things from here and given them all a new lease of life - piano stool, travelling trunk, footstool, bench etc.  This was my latest acquisition - a set of scruffy old drawers with two handles missing, water damage at the bottom and bird poo on the top. Lovely!

It's solidly built though and only cost £10.

After giving it a good clean and a light sanding I gave it two coats of red Annie Sloan paint. 

I bought some stencils with celtic designs from an excellent selection at Stencil Kingdom  to give it a bit of decoration.    

I attached the first stencil with repositionable spray adhesive and at this point learned a valuable lesson - always read the instruction on the tin properly!  I neglected to wait for the freshly sprayed glue to become tacky and as a result, when I removed the stencil it left a sticky mess on the drawer.  Grrrr!  

So I had to leave it a while, rub it down again and repaint it - lesson most definitely learned! A selection of red, pink and yellow acrylic paints were applied...

...and, once they were dry, the entire thing had to be waxed.  

I brushed wax onto the surfaces, left it to soak in for an hour or so, and then started rubbing it to a lovely sheen.  Kirsty helped with this bit as it's quite hard work.

The photo below shows what a difference a bit of vigorous rubbing makes!

All that remained was to screw on some new handles (ridiculously, the most expensive part of this whole process!)  and there you have it - a totally unique set of drawers!