Painting laminated furniture ..

I first started hand paining furniture many years ago when I moved from Sevenoaks. I was buying a house with a boyfriend who changed his mind and I found myself homeless with my furniture in store and had to stay with my parents in Horam.

 There was not much in the village but there was a secondhand furniture shop where I bought small items and painted them to pass the time and dull the pain of living back with my mum and dad.

 Inquisitive as to what I was doing the shop owner asked to see what I had done, and impressed offered me to have an area of the shop in which to sell my items.

 I moved to a farmhouse in Firle where I had outbuildings to store my furniture which I rag rolled and stencilled as was the fashion at that time

One of the regular customers to the shop in Horam was Roger Daltrey's wife, who bought a couple of my things. At the time I was teaching myself to do marbling and I was invited to Rogers house to look at the work he had been doing. He had marbled his bathroom which was quite beautiful. Sadly he was not there so I did not get to meet him.

I continued to do this for a number of years and also rented part of a shop in Forest Row.

Below is a photo of my television cabinet. It has taken me a while to do this as I have done it between other jobs. I thought I would show you the finished photo first .

I shall never know what induced me to buy this in the first place. I do not like modern furniture let alone fake wood. At the time it seemed like a good idea. I have pondered this for a while, really wanting to get rid of it, but I decided to give it a make over until I find something I fall in love with.

The first thing was to give it a sand over and wash it down with soapy water.

You can buy paint specially for painting laminated wood and I have used it in the past. It chips easily so I have just used self undercoating satin finish water based paint. I did not want to spend any money doing this so I used what I already had. If I was buying the paint I would have used oil based. I always use satin finish as you can touch up the inevitable scratch and re paint woodwork without having to Sand and undercoat. I concentrated on one area at a time and did three coats. 

I wanted to add some colour so I got samples of wallpaper from B&Q and stuck them in the backs of each area using pva glue. If this had been solid wood I would have hand painted the designs.

 I covered the top and bottom of each shelf with paper.

Sorry the photo is not very clear...it is so dark in here today with the rain...

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