Bunny's Bling

My mother-in-law Bunny, is in an assisted living facility awaiting a hip replacement.  The public areas are beautifully decorated but they leave the residents rooms pretty simple so they can add their own touch.  Bunny had already changed out the bedding to a happier floral print, and added a few other bright accessories.  Her space is pretty cramped, and there has to be room to move around with a wheel chair, so she was using the bed table for all of her makeup which gave her no room for her kindle or snacks or anything else.   My sister-in-law Carmen found this school desk that she thought would work in the corner, the only problem was that it was really ugly.
  Sorry I didn't get any before pictures, but the base was orange and the top a cream dry brush over green (I mean really hideous!).  They had spray painted most of it and the over spray was all over the chrome legs.  My initial thought was to just paint the legs the same as the base of the desk and call it good, but my husband thought he could clean them up.  So I unscrewed the top, and he drilled out the pop rivets holding the base on the legs and we went to work on it.  I figured it was going to be a pretty simple project using some paint that I had on hand, but I always think it's going to be easy (silly me).  I started on the top priming the underside with a can of Kilz that I had picked up at a garage sale last year.  Well sometimes a bargain isn't a bargain.  This stuff must have froze at some point because two days later it still wasn't dry.  Hubby scraped and sanded off my mess and then I used some Zinzer primer I had bought which worked great, and then painted it with a color that I used on both Amarreis Rocker  and Reading to Olivia  The base was pretty rusted, so I sanded as much off as I could and had my husband pick up some gray spray paint to help seal it.  He came back with this stuff called "Hi-Build Fleet Coating".  Leave it to a man for over kill, oh well it says that it will protect against corrosion so there shouldn't be anymore problems with the rust.  He also picked up some stuff his brother, who used to paint cars, suggested called "Nevr Dull" to polish up the chrome.

This stuff is great!  It's like cotton permeated with some sort of polish that you just rip off a chunk and start polishing up your metal.  We've only used it on chrome so far, but it says it works on silver, gold, brass, copper, pewter, steel, and aluminum as well.  First he had to sand off all of the over spray,  then he tried some other ways to shine it up before his brother turned him on the the "Nevr-Dull", but in the end the legs turned out great.
Now Bunny deserves something more than just a grey and lilac colored desk, so I got into my stash of stencils and came up with a few simple ones for the base that I painted in the lilac.  It still needed a little more, so I found a hummingbird and butterfly stencil and did them in some Martha Stewart "Thundercloud".

Here is what it looked like before we brought it in to her.  Carmen found the great black and white desk set in the first picture that worked perfect for all of Bunny's Bling.  This took more time than I expected (probably about 40 hours combined between me and my husband), but Bunny is so worth it!

 

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