Jewelry Armoire Revamp

A good year ago, my sister in law had an old jewelry armoire that she no longer wanted. I told her I would take it. It was a good quality, sturdy, mostly hard wood piece of furniture. The only problem was that it was a bit blah for me. Here is my Little Dude modelling the armoire for you (in his PJs of course):

Here it is with all the compartments open:

 It has some nice detail to it, and is very well built:

 It made some good storage for vehicles I guess. . . that's a plus!

It was just a little too traditional for me, so I decided to paint it! Now, a year later, I finally got around to it. 

My 1st venture into furniture painting was almost a year ago with my son's dresser revamp:

Check out the original post here.

It worked out great so I figured I would try another painting project. First, I got to disassembling the armoire. I unscrewed all the hinges from the side compartments and the top, as well as removed all drawer pulls throughout. The next step was to rub the whole thing down with a liquid deglosser. I used this when I refinished my son's dresser and it seemed to work out well:

Deglosser is an easy and inexpensive way to prep treated wood for painting. I just put a nice glob of the stuff on the wooden surfaces, and rubbed them down well with a rag. It was a stinky process; I made sure the kids weren't around, and that there was plenty of ventilation. Next up was the priming/painting part. I had 3/4s of a gallon of Behr premium paint + primer in bright white (satin finish) laying around from an old project to use. I had planned on going white anyway. This part definitely took the longest. I managed to get 2 coats in the first day, and I did a 3rd the next day.

I must admit that I did have a little help. . . some very cute help:

Once everything was nice, white, and totally dry, I decided to add an accent color. I can't for the life of me find the paint swatch I grabbed with the name on it. The paint can doesn't give the name either, but it was a nice deep bluish green in Valspar Ultra-Premium satin finish. I painted the bottom legs and along several beveled edges throughout the whole armoire:

I love the contrast between the bright white and the teal color! I decided it was still a little blah for my tastes so I busted out some stencils:

Tapestry stencils by Martha Stewart

I got an awesome Martha Stewart laser cut stencil pack from Michaels. The largest ones are $16.99 but I used a 50% off coupon which made them rather cheap for stencils. I meant to buy spray adhesive for stencils too, but my local Michaels was sold out so I had to make do with some painter's tape:

I used a cheapo foam brush to blot the design on in 3 thin coats. I ended up with several smudges, so I took a fine tipped brush and white paint to clean them up after the teal dried completely. It looks just fine, though the spray adhesive would probably have been helpful with this issue.

The other detail I did was to re-paint the hardware. The drawer pulls were a dirtied gold color which was not too bad, but the hooks on the inside of the side compartments were bright gold. I'm not a fan of gold so I decided to go with oil rubbed bronze (ORB). I went ahead and painted the drawer pulls too since they were a little lighter than the ORB. You can see the finished pulls in the photo above, and the hooks here:

Way Better!

I used spray primer and spray ORB paint. I used 1 coat of primer, and 2 coats of the ORB for all the hardware pieces:

I let everything sit for a couple of days so that the paint could cure, then I reassembled everything.

Here is the final result:

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Close up of mirror detail:

1 more angle:

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I am in love with the final product!

It is so much more interesting than the original, which is exactly what I was going for. In all, I estimate that I put about 6 ours worth of my time into the project and about $20 worth of supplies since I used a bunch of paint that I had lying around, and 50% off coupons for the rest. Not too shabby really.