Finding Out The History Of Your Thrift Purchase

Last year, Apartment Therapy featured a Union Jack dresser on their Craiglist Scavenger List. I saw it and knew I had to have it immediately. Heart pounding, I wrote to the seller and she responded to me very quickly. I cannot remember the rest of the story but we were quick to see it and we bought it on the spot. The lady, Meranda, who sold it to us is a lovely person and we have emailed each other a few times after that. She helped me with achieving the Wisteria-like finish to the Wingback chair I upholstered. I also found that she had moved to Seattle, which was sad. I think I would have liked to get to know her better as not many people I know personally enjoy painting furniture like she does. Meranda also is very generous with her knowledge and goes into great detail on how to achieve a certain look.  She has a blog but it does not seem to be active anymore. However, I still go back to it to refer to her painting techniques as they are very detailed and helpful.

I read other people's blogs too (about 120 of them, can you believe?) and there is a very talented lady, Marian from  Miss Mustard Seed whose blog I follow. She also lives in Maryland! One day, she painted this lovely Union Jack dresser and a part of me wanted it. Matt was firmly against it, he wanted to know, why do you need two? He's right of course, but I just love the impact of a Union Jack design in a room and I covet them all!

I read the comments of  Miss Mustard Seed's followers and one of them linked another post to it, talking about another British dresser. I looked closely and thought, hang on! It was MY British dresser they were talking about, but I did not recognise the website. I discovered Meranda had another blog dedicated to French provincial furniture. There was a link to how she painted my dresser and again, wonderful details of how she achieved the finish. It was so nice to be able to read about the whole process and to know that that dresser is sitting in my boys' room. I was about to put a layer of polycrylic  to protect the paint from the boys' rough handling but I did not know if she had used latex or oil paints. There was a warning on the label of the polycrylic - that it would yellow oil based paints. I couldn't email her anymore as I had lost her email and she had moved. Her blog was no longer active. Reading about the dresser helped me to discover that she used oil based paint and I am so glad I did not slap on the polycrylic now!