A New Life for an old Hope Chest

Remember this chest I picked up at the thrift store a couple weeks ago for $15? I actually don't know what it was used for in it's previous lives, but I asume it was someone's hope chest at some point. It looks like it was buried in a garage for a while. Look at all those stains... I didn't even get pictures of the worst of it. I don't even think it was water damage - it kind of looked like an oil of some kind. I figured that I would have to just paint or decoupage it to disguise all of that.

So I started sanding the chest to prep it for painting. I didn't have a specific plan yet, but I figured something would come to me. As I sanded off the old varnish (by hand) I realized that many of the stains were disappearing. I don't have a place in my home for pine furniture, but I was really happy with the grain of the wood and thought it would be a shame to cover it after all that sanding...

I decided to look into varnishes. Varnishing furniture is typically not a process I enjoy, mostly because of the smell but also because I work better with water based paint than oil. At the store I came across a stain called "red mahogony" that happened to match the majority of the furniture in my house. I thought, "well, I'll just give it a shot... try it out somewhere on the bottom and we'lll see..." I also picked up a can of kona brown spray paint just in case.

I couldn't believe how great the stain looked once I got it on and I knew I was onto something. I gave it a couple coats of varnish and a couple coats of polyurethane. Added some hardware in the form of some handles on either side to ease moving it.

And then I upholstered the lid. I'd never upholstered anything in my life and the sum total of what I knew about the job was that you need to pull the fabric tight, you should use batting to soften the look of the foam corners underneath, that I would have to buy a heavy duty staple gun and that my parents had done it to our dining room chairs long ago so it couldn't be that hard.

Here it is...

I probably could have found a fabric that had more "wow" factor of matched my couch pillows better, but I didn't want to buy new fabric and of the upholstery fabrics I had in my stash, this was my favorite.

Yes, that's one of my sons toys in the background. Usually I'm pretty diligent about "staging" my photos, but no one's perfect.

Getting around the hinges was the trickiest part. I think I might remove a couple staples and rework this part... I could have removed the hinges and upholstered it and then put them back on top of the fabric, but I didn't want to see them when it was done.

I just love the way the wood turned out. And I thought the warping of the lid was pretty well disguised unless you go looking for it...

But now the big question is where should I put it? Here in front of my couches as an ottoman?

Or here, under the window, next to my favorite piece of furniture ever and one that it happens to now match perfectly?

Here's a good shot of the fabric - it has a great viney texture on it.

I wish I could tell you that it will hold all of my most treasured quilts, but it's already full of my sons toys. A nice way to disguise them, I think.

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