How to Decorate With Painted & Wood Furniture
Certain decorating styles lend themselves to featuring painted and wooden furniture—among them country cottage and shabby chic. These types of furnishings offer several advantages. They are typically inexpensive, because you can often buy the furniture and accessories at flea markets, secondhand stores and estate sales. Additionally, they go in any room in the house. Finally, painted furniture adds vibrant color to your living space. Does this Spark an idea?
Things You'll Need
- Pie safe Sofa bench Seat cushions Coffee table Bookcases Director’s chairs
Instructions
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Consider choosing a country cottage decorating motif for your space. This style features painted and wooden furniture predominantly. Additionally, this style also encourages you to mix and match both color and style.
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Look for an old wooden pie safe. These painted wood pieces of furniture hark back to an earlier day when refrigeration was just a future fantasy. While it’s unlikely that you’ll be storing any pies in it now, it makes a great place to store dishes in the kitchen or dining area, sewing supplies in the sewing room, or a small TV plus videos in the living room or den.
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Buy a wooden bench with a back and convert it to a couch for your back screened-in porch. Add a small twin mattress or outdoor seat cushions to it plus some throw pillows. Bring out a colorful quilt to throw over the back.
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Purchase a large painted coffee table. If you get one with bottom shelves, you’ll give yourself a place to store books and magazines. Also, if the table is not too fancy, you definitely won’t mind putting your feet up on it.
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Buy a couple of wooden bookcases. Paint them bright colors if they’re not already. Of course, they’ll look great with old books shelved in them. However, they also work to store extra blankets, dishes or games and craft accessories.
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Paint the unusual pieces that you find. One of the nicest aspects of this type of decorating is that you can buy furniture that’s a little beat up. If it’s not too beat up, it qualifies as shabby chic. If it really needs an overhaul, a new coat of bright paint might just do the trick. Additionally, if you paint it yourself, you have the chance to paint pretty stencils, quotes and pictures on the piece to jazz it up.
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Remember that it’s OK to mix up furniture pieces and styles. For example, if you fall in love with an old farmhouse kitchen table, but a couple of the chairs are missing, that’s OK. Just buy a couple more and paint them to match the table and the other chairs. If you’re really brave, you can even leave them the way they are.
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Take advantage of small pieces like director’s chairs. These painted wood and canvas furniture pieces add whimsical interest to your screened-in porch or your living room. You can even use fabric paint to stencil your name on them for fun.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit chair image by jae young from Fotolia.com
