More whining

When you "repurpose" furniture - take something old and give it a "face lift", "make-over", restore it, what ever you call it, the idea is to take something that isn't very nice - perhaps never were - and make it useful, beautiful, nice.

There are hundreds of crafty ladies out there, taking something old and making something new and nice from it. I think it's wonderful and amazing, really, that these women take something worn out, with chipped veneer, broken bits - or something boring and rather ugly, like pine furniture from 70's, when "rustic" made "baroque and not in a nice way".

I like most of the things done here: reuse, repurpose and upcycle

Like this one:

It's a real pity that who ever had the side board before, didn't take care of it, but in this case, the renewing has succeeded, and one can still enjoy the beautiful woodwork.

But when these ladies take something that has only the fault that it's old, or that it's wooden, and the lady in question wants to paint everything, and that means that she covers beautiful wood intarsia or grain with thick layer of paint - or even worse, practices all kinds of painting techniques, like fake wood grain or marble; cracking paint or "aging", "antiquing", "distressing" with different methods... 

Here are some of my favorite NO! moments.

Take a rather beautiful wooden coffee table, paint it cobolt blue and add fake - and not especially nicely done - wood graining in black in the middle. Yikes.

 This just makes me really, really sad. :-(

This one... well... she didn't ruin anything beautiful, but the outcome looks pretty awful, I think.

This makes me angry.

Sure, the veneer is chipped, rather badly in one place, but there are ways to fix that. The wood grain is really beautiful, and the color is wonderful.

Rocking chair - what bothers me with this is that when she ripped off the old upholstery, she didn't bother looking carefully how it was done, so her new upholstery doesn't look neat. Also, I hate the use of burlap. The paint job isn't that well made either.