You may recall, that a few weeks ago in October, I started working on a sideboard. While the weather was still good, I stripped the bases (twice!) and sanded them.

Once the work on each base is complete, I will connect them together and then top off the entire piece with a single solid piece of wood.  Most likely, a piece of oak.

After some busy weekends, I finally had the chance to work on it again.

First, you should know, it was a whopping 19 degrees this morning.  So, when I say “In the workshop” what I really mean is “In the kitchen” because the garage was waaaay too cold.

So, I put down a giant drop cloth on the kitchen floor and put the individual pieces on furniture movers (flat palates with wheels), sometimes called Mover’s Dollys, and wheeled the bases into the kitchen.

You may recall that this was my inspiration:

With that in mind, I decided to use Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint in the color known as “Typewriter”.  It is one of my favorite colors of black to use and it has all the personality that only milk paint can bring to an antique piece of furniture.

Each base was painted and then sealed with hemp oil.  When working with the color Typewriter, I find that sealing the paint with hemp oil works best because it brings out the richness and depth of color.  If I use anything else, the paint can look chalky.  Nothing wrong with that per se, but I am looking for a color with more depth.

So after three cups of coffee and multiple applications of paint here is a photo of the base now. If you look closely, you can see the paint still drying. You can also see the Movers Dolly that the base is sitting on. When I applied hemp oil, all the good lighting was gone so I wasn’t able to take any photos.

Although there isn’t any wood top yet, I set an old potato basket on the top to give you an idea how it will look.

So, there you have it.  Stay tuned as I connect the two bases together and attach the wood top. I will write another blog post with more pictures and hopefully have a final “after” reveal of the entire piece.