Do you have any furniture pieces that you have transformed multiple times?
I certainly do. One example is my wooden trunk.
When I bought it at a garage sale (in high school) the surface was old, bare wood. I immediately painted it a deep red and then painted faces on it. I don’t have pictures of that iteration, but a few years later I went pretty bold:
I love this poem by Hafiz. It’s fun to do small, portable pieces like this because it seems like you can be a little bit more extreme in your choices.
When we moved to our new house, the trunk didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, so I decided to give it another makeover. Our current home has a lot of elements of the natural world: deep greens, wood, organic shapes, florals. Also, the sky. More specifically, the dark night sky. So, I ran with that idea:
I removed the padding on top of the bench and realized there was a reason I had covered it with foam and fabric all those years ago. The wood was badly damaged, so I added a thin layer of plywood to give it a new, smooth top. Next, I just used left over paints, looked up pictures of galaxies on the NASA website, and then came up with one of my own star formations.
Now, the trunk holds my spare fabric and serves as a printer stand in my office. Who knows if this is its final iteration, or if there are more changes in store for it…
design + surrender 