Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Side Project #2: Doll Bed refurbish.

This past weekend, my mother-in-law gave us a pair of bunk beds for the little one's dolls.  MiL and her sister bought these at a yard-sale a few years back.  I'm guessing based upon the fiberboard material (I think that's what that stuff is called, it's similar to the material basic clipboards are made.) and the pattern on the "mattresses" it's quite a bit older than a few years.  Here's the before pictures:






My first inclination was to paint them white and update the mattresses.  So, sticking to my go-to spray paint, I ran over to Lowe's and bought some Valspar Gloss White.  I liked the flower on the foot of the bed, but it too looked dated.  My next trip landed me at Wal-Mart, the bastion of low prices and even lower wages.  I bought some butterfly transfers to decorate the head-board and the foot-board; and bought 1yd of fabric...and some fabric/leather glue to fix the fabric to the mattresses.

I took the beds a part and I used an entire can of white primer on one bed to get a good base white.  (Skipping the priming would end up with using multiple cans of gloss-white to cover up the wood to get a good clean finished look.)  I just bought some basic Krylon white primer from Wal-Mart.  I didn't take any pictures of the painting.

I then took the mattress, didn't even bother removing the old material and covered it with the new fabric.  Essentially I cut it slightly larger than the mattress, folded the edges under like I was wrapping a present, and glued liberally.  Here are pictures of the old mattress and the new mattress:

 Picture above shows the top of the new one and the bottom of the old one, I mimicked folding the edges over and glued them down.  Bottom pic is bottom of new mattress and top of old.  Now, the thin wood on the new mattress had been broken in half sometime ago and repaired with some additional wood beam going up and down, that's not my handy work.

The humidity here was off the chain, so it took a while for the paint to dry, a few days to be exact.  I took the head and foot-board, transferred some butterflies onto them.  I then felt like the foot-board needed a little more (now maybe too much) so I took sharpies and drew a flower onto it for the butterfly to "flutter by to".  I thought about painting with acrylic paint, and may still do that, but painting large flat areas smoothly with a brush is not my best skill.  Here is the finished bed:






One bed down and one bed to go.  I'm out of white primer, and low on my gloss paint, so it'll be a bit before I finish, but I'll do the second bed the same way.  Enjoy!  Questions/comments/suggestions are welcome.

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Follies with Spray Primers