This Week in Before & After

This weeks projects, all of these pieces and more will be in my booth at the Freemont Sunday Market this week.  I also can ship all over the country via several carriers for reasonable rates, if you see something you like let me know!

Before:  Goodies collected from thrifting and craigslist stalking, the most expensive item $19.99, the least FREE! It sometimes takes a while for me to re-imagine what each piece should look like so we often have random ugly furniture sitting around the house waiting for me to feel inspired. 

Trash or treasure?  I see lots of potential and I think I have a bag of knobs left over from another project that will be perfect for this dresser.

Ugly.

After:

Rich Pacific Northwest inspired green, painted over a black undercoat to deepen the color saturation, paraffin wax rubbed before the green coat and then distressed.  The green comes off where the wax was creating the distressed effect.

Electric Apple green with glaze, total transformation from a dated 80's piece of furniture that had outlived its use to a piece that I'm sure people will be fighting to take home from the market this weekend!

One of my favorite blues, aqua awsomeness.

The magazine rack is now grape and distressed and the chair I didn't get a before, but the great vintage needlepoint plaid on the seat looks great with the grey.

Vintage lamps, now eye candy for any room.  I like to use them without the shades and with a antique style low wattage edison bulb. 

I didn't get the before picture of this one because once what to do with it I was so excited to get started I forgot the camera.  Grey and Yellow, always a great combination but then I used vintage lace on the drawers to create the negative image of the lace, perfect!

Finally my favorite this week, the ugly monster sticker dresser with no knobs.  First a dark slate/navy blue and then I used vintage blueprints that I rescued from a dumpster a few years ago and applied them all over the dresser.  The blue prints are detailed and ornate with lots of technical notations and wonderful color, who would throw those away!  The detail of the blueprints is a great contrast to the simplicity of the vintage dresser.   Finally over sized orange knobs and a dark glaze.  I love it!  I'm taking it to the market this weekend but may spend the day talking people out of buying it so it can come back home with me!

How to say "I love you"

We are a say I love you family, we say it all the time, and mean it.  We say it when we leave the house, on the phone, at dinner, at bed time, at random moments, really all the time.  I'm sure that we make other people uncomfortable sometimes with all the "I love yous",  The first time I told the parents of our first foster kids  "I love you, your doing a good job", I could tell they believed me but wanted a way to escape from the moment.  That was a couple years ago and when I tell them that now it feels natural to all of us, like "of course you love me!" 

With all the love going around I noticed that Gelly has a bit of a crisis when it comes to these moments.  I know that he loves us, and will tell us he loves us on his own terms when he is feeling close or particularly happy, but tell him you love him and he's not sure what to do.  For him its a loaded statement with an element of risk.  He has had difficult experiences with love, loss and people who should have loved him hurting him, he has suffered.

A couple of days ago we were getting ready to drive to school and Hot Mama told him, "love you Gelly have a good day at school".  He responded like he usually does when this is uncomfortable for him, he pretends that he didn't hear it.  I guess this was not a real surprise because he had just talked to Mama S a day or so before when she called for Cardo Man's birthday.  He had a lot of anxiety approaching the birthday wondering if she would call and then deciding if he would talk to her when she did call. He actually hid in his room for a while when I was talking to her while he decided what to do.  My sense has always been that there is some feeling of loyalty that if he loves us he can't love her anymore.

We got in the car and were the only ones driving to school that day, a really rare thing to be just the two of us  in the van.  So I asked him. 

"Gelly, why when we tell you that we love you do you some times pretend that you don't hear us?"

"I not know what you talkin about."

Keep in mind that Gelly has a pretty serious verbal delay that makes some of these conversations difficult, He is 6 but communicates at a much lower level. I know that he is thinking beyond the level of a 6 year old,  sometimes the vocabulary to express really serious things just isn't there yet.

I said, "I know that you know what I am talking about and I just want to understand how it makes you feel. "

I explained that when I love someone it makes me feel happy to tell them I love them,  and when someone loves me it make me happy that they tell me.   "Have you ever thought about how it makes you feel?"

Silence from the back seat for about two minutes. 

"It makes me feel like I don't know who I am."

Wow.

I looked in the rear view mirror into the biggest brownest eyes and could see all the questions that bubble under the surface about who he is, why bad things happened to him, how he ended up with me with no say so in the matter after bouncing through 3 foster homes, his struggle to make sense of his own story.  How do you love me when I feel like so many other people didn't, If I love you back does that mean that I can't love Mama S.....How do I find my place?

My heart broke for him.
We stopped in the school parking lot and talked about who he was; from his birth to the struggles that Mama S had and the danger that put him in, going into foster care, coming to us, adoption and our life now.  We talked about the boy I see him as, kind, strong, a good brother, determined, and smart.  A person who deserves to be loved and a person who has one life that can have lots of different people in it, family by birth and family by adoption.  Not a person with lots of different parts of their life that must be kept separate.

A boy who deserves to be loved in a way that he can know who he is.

I was hard to let him go that day, I just wanted to take him back home and protect him from all of the reality of what has been his life.  I know he thinks deeply about his own origins but I may have underestimated how deeply. 

The conversation ended with me telling him I was really proud of him for talking about big feelings like that and that he should only tell people that he loves them if he really feels like he should.  I told him I really love him and will keep telling him I do, but that doesn't mean he needs to do anything other than know that I really, really mean it, forever. 

I drove home repeating my plea to the lord to get this right for him, to be the dad that he needs and that he will know we all love him so much.

That night at dinner the family was particularly noisy and in an attempt to just get the volume down a couple of notches I announced to the family, "do you know what would make me a really happy daddy?"  I was just going to suggest that we all be a little more quiet, but Gelly raised his hand lightning fast and said "I know!"  "I love you dad!"

Wow, again.

I love you to Gelly.

Before & After Projects For This Week

I have done quite a few projects in the last couple weeks and wanted to get all the before and afters up in one post.

 I have lots to tell about what is going on with the family and the kids too in the days to come.  We have had experiences with birth parents, switching some of the kids to home school, and Gelly coming up with some great questions about why our family has different colors.  So check back.


OK, here goes with the before & afters;

If your one of those people that freak out when in comes to painting original antiques, relax, its a reproduction with a cherry stain that has no personality.  A thrift store bargain at $12.00.

Green paint, antiqued glaze and now we've got something.  SOLD

Before,$3.99 thrift store find with lots of possibility but ruined finish and a little plain.

After, finish restored, birds on a wire added.  Simple and beautiful.  SOLD

Before, sometimes I get so excited to get going on a project that I forget to take the "before" picture!  I remembered part way through on this one, the sanding and part of the priming is done.

After:  I found this clown paper a couple of years ago and was waiting to use it.  It makes me laugh every time I look at it because the clowns look a little evil, well, even more evil than your usual clown.  Time out chair anyone?

This chair we'll just go right to the after because I forgot to take the before.  This lovely chair was a trash can find.  My heart skips a beat when I see legs like this sticking out of a rubbish bin and the kids know that no matter how late we are the 12 passenger van is pulling over for discarded furniture!  They are just enjoying the anonymity of our new neighborhood when it happens now.  My absolute favorite is when the homeowner sees that your taking their trash and invites you into the garage for some other "junk" they were getting rid of, no seriously its happenss enough times to me that now it seems normal.......my reality.  SOLD

Before, what can I say blagh.  Thrift store find that is yelling trailer park chic.  Don't under estimate the power of paint and paper.

After, complete transformation.  SOLD

Before, nice but very dated.

After, rich blue with black glaze for additional depth.  SOLD

And Finally,

Before, was this even attractive when it was new?

After, much better.  SOLD

Just to put these projects in the context of my life as a stay-at-home dad; during the couple of weeks that it took to make these pieces I changed more than 100 diapers, did roughly 40 loads of laundry and drove almost 400 miles to dance lessons......

Oh, yes I did!

Working from home, upcycle desk make-over

Working from home, not the work you do as a stay at home parent to make the home run, but the work you do from home to make make the money is not something that I have figured out exactly how to do efficiently yet. 

That might have something to do with the 9 kids.

This picture shows how work usually looks for me.  I'm refinishing a vintage magazine rack for market,  my little Jack-Jack a huge fascination with any small kitchen appliance, and any project I'm working on.  This means that for the last year I haven't made a smoothie, loaded the dishwasher or painted much with the use of both hands.  This isn't really new, Mooster was the same way and he is 10 now. 

Don't worry, I only use water based low/no VOC products :)

 A up-cycle re-finish project usually goes in a lot of starts and stops, with a lot of help (or interruptions) from the kids.

Here is a desk from beginning to end.

Beautiful lines, but destroyed finish and lots of kid carving in the top.

Patch the chips and gouges.

Sand the whole thing down.

Prime with a good stain blocker.

Paint on the kitchen island, not the best spot, but I can make dinner and supervise homework and chores from here.

Apply the paper.

I had to live with it for a few days to decide if it needed a dark glaze over the paint and paper, I decided it did.

Finished product at market!

Happy Birthday Cardo Man!

Our little Cardo Man turned 5 this last week and it seems like a big birthday for our little man. 5 seems like the age he has officially become a "big boy".   He has grown so much in the last 22 months we have been blessed to be is family.  When he came to us he came with warnings from his worker and the prior two foster families he had been placed with that he might be severely disabled and have a host of other problems. 

I think he is absolutely perfect.

He was scared and lost.

While it has sometimes not been easy and there are things that he will continue to struggle with for years to come as a result of some of the circumstances of his early life (impulse control....no jumping off the furniture, again today).  He amazes us with his resilience and just plain appetite for life and fun.  We are so, so lucky to be his family.

He has developed healthy attachments and trusts us now to be there for him, and you can see it in how he is growing.  His world is stable again and he is free to just be a little boy.  And there is nothing better than the spontaneous hugs and I love yous that he feels safe to give to us, that say you're  my mommy and daddy.

Pure joy.

We weren't there for his birth or his first three birthdays but I look at him now and think, how did we live each day before our Cardo Man?

Cardo Man and the awesome robot cake Hot Mama made for him.

I'm 5!

Seriously, could he be any cuter?

Buddies.

Back at Fremont Market!

About 8 years ago I started making a living, creating and selling art and home decor items, mostly from reclalimed, or reused items.  I started in the Fremont Sunday market in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle and since then have sold at many markets and art fairs, opened my own store and sold to many other stores & gallerys.  When we moved back to the Seattle area in September I was excited to come back as a vendor at the Fremont Market.   Creating art has been a great way to be at home with the kids, make money, do something creative, and involve the kids in the process of creating something from stuff that would be junk, and how to run a business.  Some of our best memories as a family have been of early morings heading out to a craft or art fair and the fun people we meet there. 

I have debated whether to start another blog to show and talk about the art I create, Capable Father has turned out to be really personal thoughts on what it is like to be a dad, to adopt, and grow a family that came from lots of different places. 

In the end I have decided to put it all together here, If you follow because the story of adoption and parenting resonates with you then I hope you like some of projects I will feature.  If you have met me at market and are interested the creative stuff then maybe you will be able to take a new look at large families, adoption and foster care.  Either way I hope you like it, it is impossible to seperate it all in real life becuase making and selling art is what makes it possible for our family to have a parent at home and for us that's necessary. 

I also love that every week my kids see that you can take things that were discarded by others and with a little love and time can make those things into something beautiful, a perfect message for my family.

Anyway here are some of the pics from this weekend, and a couple of before and afters.

Boo Boo was the market helper this week, great chance for some one on one time with my awsome girl who is on the verge of becoming more a young women than my little girl anymore.  She did a great job helping customers, helping set up and taking all the pictures this week.

Gorgous green!

Mid-century chairs with an update

This table went home to California with a customer

Love the pattern with the black, like framing art!

Some of the Jewelry I make from found objects.

The "you've got my number" desk.  I'll be posting pictures of the whole process I used to make this desk soon.

Birds on a wire, simple and beautiful.

Creepy clowns!  I told my kids this was our new time out chair!

"You've got my number" desk again.

Before....

After.

So there is a peek at what we did this weekend, I would say that it went well because we only took home 2 chairs and sold everything else!