Fancy a dip?

This old pine desk was the very first piece of furniture I bought.

I was sixteen and it was IR£25. I can still remember my Dad bringing me to buy it in a now long gone bric-a-brac shop in Ranelagh, having withdrawn the money from my savings account. Miss Doyle, my art teacher at the time, was teaching us to restore a piece of furniture in our art class. It was a very useful lesson! We were taught to scrape it down with curved broken glass a very laborious but effective way of stripping back, and then painting or waxing to finish off.  so I restored many years ago and since then it has been my desk through school and college, my hall table in my last cottage and now it is my downstairs desk at home. I have recently been feeling it needed a spruce up. It has had a bout of woodworm over the years and there are stains of twenty odd years of cups of tea and glasses of wine sitting on it. So on a sunny saturday I took it outside and scraped it back and applied many coats of woodworm treatment to be sure I am rid of the blighters. There was lot of damage on the top, so I filled all the channels with filler.

I then applied a couple of coats of the palest grey just on the table top. This style of treating furniture is very popular at the moment, where we can appreciate bare wood but at the same time use paint to introduce colour or when practical for covering up stains or repairs.

I finished off by sanding the legs and bringing them back with a good polish of beeswax and the table has been revived. I used a hard wearing acrylic matt paint from colourtrend in Daytona Grey. And here is the desk back doing it’s job:

As I mentioned, it reminds me of the dipping trend thats going on at the moment, which I am planning to do to a bentwood chair inherited from my granny that I am currently scraping back.

Here are some images to inspire….

dipped ash stool from toast

gorgeous dipped storage baskets

cute dipped bentwoods at Hally’s Café in London

Maybe you have an old bit of furniture to breathe new life into? enjoy!