How’s your week going? Ours’ has been great! Feeling healthy and enjoying the sunshine over here. I can’t believe we are already into May!! How has that happened and how is my BABY turning 9 this week?? Time’s flying by!
As for furniture, here’s a beautiful hutch that I had to buy the minute I saw it. These don’t come around often. I loved the lines of the bottom section of the hutch and knew that I wanted to keep a lot of the wood and add a stark contrast with paint.
We deepened the original wood with an ebony stain and painted the other sections using Benjamin Moore’s color Simply White.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
Thanks for stopping by! I hope you had a great week and were able to enjoy spring break with your littles – if you have kids in school. :) We were still fighting off a nasty cold (probably flu) here at our house. I finally feel like myself today and I’m so excited to get caught back up on work and life. It’s been a long two weeks of sickness at the Trop’s!
If you stopped by last week, you saw Noreen’s Dining Room Makeover and today we’re moving on to her sitting room. Here it is before:
This little sitting room was tricky because of the size. Trying to figure out how to make it a usable space while trying to reuse Noreen’s furniture made it a design that had to be tweaked a couple different times. We started with benches against the wall and two chairs on the left with a round rug. It didn’t work at all so I asked Noreen if she would let me start from scratch without using any of her furniture. She so graciously let me go for it and here’s what the original design board looked like!
Sitting Room Design
I loved the idea of a comfy love seat and centering it to the window. Unfortunately, I’m not giving away all of the info about the chosen design elements simply because it takes a lot of time and research to come up with wall colors and find products, that’s why you should hire me to help you. :) I did want to give you some visuals for those who want to do the research yourselves.
I was able to find a less expensive love seat that I liked even more than the original design plan at our local Home Goods. Noreen also wanted to reuse a table she already owned which is a little smaller than I would have picked, but in person it didn’t seem out of scale with the room’s size. Decorating while watching your bottom line, isn’t about being cheap, it’s about considering options and making informed decisions. You don’t have to replace everything to make a space feel new again.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
I usually show you before and after of furniture makeovers on the blog, but today I thought I’d mix it up a bit and show you an interior design job. I’ve been working on this project with Noreen since November. Design takes time and I’ve so enjoyed working with Noreen during these past few months. She trusted me on some decisions she wasn’t sure about and also was willing to make adjustments that made a huge impact on the final look
Here’s the dining room before:
Unfortunately, I’m not giving away all of the info about the chosen designs simply because it takes a lot of time and research to come up with wall colors and find products, that’s why you should hire me to help you. :) I did want to step you through how it works and also give you some visuals for those who want to do the research yourselves.
When I looked at the dining room (the room with the rug), I loved the rug but knew it needed to be bigger to anchor the space. Noreen returned it and upgraded to the next size up.
Here’s the design board for her room:
Dining Room Design
As you walk into the room, your eyes wanted to go to the far wall, but it was lacking in wow factor. I wanted to make the room feel like it kept going so I went with a dark blue/gray/teal color and then changed the other three walls to a warm, brown friendly gray.
I so badly wanted Noreen to get a hutch for the large wall because I knew that would send this design out of the park! I took a risk and bought this hutch without Noreen knowing and practically begged her to buy it for the space. :) She did and I’m so glad!!
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
How was your week? It’s been great here! A bit crazy trying to keep up with everything, but that’s life for most of us, right?! I was able to work on my first ever commercial design job this week. It was so much different than home design but I really enjoyed it, too! They loved the designs and I’ll be doing three new rooms next!
Also, big new on the FunCycled front… at long last, we finally hired an assistant for me! Pam will be running the store with my mom and helping me with all back end customer service work.
Thanks to her, we have new store hours!!
This week’s furniture makeover has a cool story! We bought this from a barn sale that raises money for an orphanage in Haiti. When we bought it, I really couldn’t picture what to do with it. It sat in my storage unit for months and months and months. I asked John to prep a mid century hutch for the store and he thought I meant this one. I didn’t. When I came out to look at it, I said, that’s not the one I wanted! I can’t picture the design for that one yet. John smiled and said, “Well, it’s all prepped so time to make yourself figure out a design.” He was right, it was high time.
I had recently redone a buffet with similar lines, and I thought this piece could look great in the same finish.
We painted the box with Benjamin Moore’s color Urban Bronze, glazed it and finished with a semi-gloss clear coat. For the drawers, we lightly sanded then stained them a light gray. I love the stripe on the drawers to make it look even more retro! Then we added new hardware.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
How was your week? We had a great one, catching up on lots of furniture projects and wrapping up another kitchen job. We took a family day on Sunday. Went to church then drove to Hudson, NY for the day. It was so much fun walking the shops and seeing all the cool vintage finds. I even bought a mid century modern clock radio that still works… it was aqua, I just couldn’t resist. :)
One of the things keeping me busy this month is designing and making furniture pieces for the Vanguard Showhouse. Do you know what that is? The Vanguard asks different interior designers to redo rooms in a historic home. Then people can tour the house (for a fee) and the money raised goes to the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Since I always enjoy a design challenge, I happily said yes when they asked! Not to mention, I love love the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
The Vanguard-Albany Symphony, Inc. Designer Showhouse for 2017 will be located at 14 Pheasant Lane in Menands. The Showhouse will be open to the public starting on Tuesday, May 2, and will run through Sunday, May 21. It will be open to the public every day of each week, other than Mondays. You can purchase tickets ahead of time at Price Chopper. Here’s a sneak peek of our design board.
This year, I went with a Moroccan design for the guest bedroom I’m working on. There will be dark hues on the wall and bright pops of hot pink and yellow. The first thing I wanted to make sure we had, was a show stopping vanity in hot pink! We just finished painting it and it’s done in Benjamin Moore’s Fuchsia Berry, glazed and sprayed it with a protective clear coat. If you want to see how we paint furniture, check out our How to Paint Furniture post.
Ready for the afters? (The close ups are the most accurate color)
Such an amazing transformation, right?
This vanity isn’t available until June 1st because it has to be on display at the show, but you can purchase it ahead of time so I can mark it sold. Also, you should check out other new furniture for sale on our website here! If you’d like to purchase it, please use our Contact Us form or stop by our store at 272 River Street, Troy, NY. I also added quite a few other new pieces to the store!
White Campaign Dresser
Bird and Tree Dresser
Gray Mid Century Dresser
Petite Dresser
Custom Built Herringbone Table
Custom Built Farm Tables
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
If you missed Day One or Day Two of our experience on HGTV’s Flea Market Flip, just click on the days to see the full blog post about it.
Day 3, the last day of filming is the Sell Day. The timing of when the filming will occur varies but our filming days ended up being about a week apart. On the final day, we went to a different flea market from where we had purchased the items. The goal was to sell the finds that we repurposed at a higher price point. Whoever makes the most profit wins the show! I’ve sold furniture at markets before and it’s a hard sell. Mostly because furniture is so big and people are coming to find quick deals not to find large items that we’ve spent a lot of time repurposing and have to charge retail price for. We only had 4 hours to sell everything so the staff encouraged us to take whatever offer we get because it’s better to get a little than nothing. We filmed at the Long Island City Flea market.
It’s a really small market and not many people were there. Driving into the city that morning, my brother Jesse called me and asked if I was nervous. For some reason that day, I was. He told me not to be nervous because everything we were selling had a story and I am the girl with the story. He was so right, that is what set us apart and hearing that helped calmed me down. I told everyone that came to our booth about the history of each piece and what we did to transform it.
When we walk into the flea market everything was wrapped up so we unwrapped it and staged it in the booth. We priced each item and of course checked out what our competition was selling. Each team doesn’t know the other teams price point until the prices are already set. The cameras started rolling and people started to slowly trickle in. Not that many people were walking through the market but with film crews and Lara Spencer, we had the attention we needed to get those pieces sold. The bar went fairly quickly to a sweet young woman who just moved to the city to be a writer. We paid $10 for the parts and sold it for $450 for a $440 profit right off the bat!
The second piece that sold was was the coffee table and that was maybe an hour or so after we started. We paid $50 for the parts and sold it for $300. $250 more towards our grand total! Yay!
The last thing to sell was the desk made from the old trunk. I was surprised by that! I thought the bar would sell first, then the secretaries desk, then the coffee table. John thought the desk, then bar, then coffee table. We were both wrong! :) Right toward the end of the 4 hours a lady came by and wanted the desk but couldn’t pay much. As she was asking me if we would take less, I heard our opponents yelling “fire sale, fire sale” so I knew they were selling everything cheap. That’s why I took the low ball offer because at least she could get a fun piece of furniture and we would add a bit to our total. She was thrilled and I was thrilled and it was so fun!
We knew before they announced it that we had won just because they didn’t sell anything throughout the day and did the fire sale at the end of the day. The producers were really encouraging about our work and kind! It was our anniversary on the sale day and they bought us celebratory lemonades at the end of the day! That’s why our episode is called Happy Flipping Anniversary. WE WON HGTV’s FLEA MARKET FLIP! Sayyyyyy whatttt??? So exciting!
If you missed Day One or Day Two of the experience, just click on the days to see the full blog post about it.
It was such fun experience, I would love to do it again in a heartbeat!! Thank you to Lara Spencer for being approachable, for the producers for going out of their way to make us feel comfortable, and to the work day helpers that made it all doable in such a short time. You’re all awesome!!
Do you live in upstate NY? We can custom build furniture so you can have one of a kind flea market upcylced furniture in your home. Use our contact us form for more information. You can also purchase already finished furniture on our Shop page!
Thanks so much for stopping by!! Happy upcycling friends!
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address in to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog.
Please sign up today! Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and will also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
How was your week? We had a busy, busy work week trying to wrap up a huge kitchen job. Check out the before and after on our Facebook page – click here!
We also finished a lot of furniture projects which felt good! Over the weekend, John got his birthday wish to go to NYC for the day as a family. Here we are in Little Italy trying the best cannoli and gelato in town!
One of the many furniture projects that we finished last week was this mid century buffet makeover. Check out the before:
This was a custom order for Natasha. At first we were going to stain it, then she wanted to paint it, and we ended with a little of both! Win win!
We painted the box with Benjamin Moore’s color Urban Bronze, glazed it and finished with a semi-gloss clear coat. For the drawers, we lightly sanded then stained them a light gray. I love the combination of both and using the original hardware kept the vintage feel I wanted this piece to have.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
How was your week? My Johnny turned the big 40 this week. I asked him if he wanted a party… he said no. It’s true, that’s more my style. Then I asked him what would make this year special and he said just our family spending time together. That shows so much about John. He just loves seeing his family happy. He loves and gives to us all day long. Working hard on all the furniture projects, helping me cook almost every day, playing with the kids. He knows how to take my stress and help me move ahead and focus on life’s blessings. For this and so much more, I celebrate you this week John. I wouldn’t want to do this job or this life without you right by my side.
For this week’s furniture makeover, I wanted to show you a pretty traditional dresser set. It is part of a bedroom interior design project that I’ve been working on for our client Nadine. She wanted to reuse furniture she already owned in the designs since it was great quality furniture. I am always on board for that idea. To give you a sneak peak of her room design, here’s a quick look at all of the element that are going to be part of the room.
Master Bedroom Design by FunCycled
Benjamin Moore’s color of the year last year was Simply White! I’ve been using it for years as my favorite white because it’s not too bright but it also isn’t in the cream family. It’s just a perfect soft white so that’s what we were planning to use for this dresser set.
Here are the dressers before:
We filled the holes from all the hardware so we could install new hardware. Then painted it all with Benjamin Moore’s color Simply White and then put a satin protective clear coat over the top. If you want to see how we paint furniture, check out our How to Paint Furniture post.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
How was your week? Things were good here! Getting back into the groove of work and family balance felt good. Catching up with friends after work was great, too! Simplifying feels good friends! Keep striving for it!
This week’s furniture makeover takes a bedroom set that screams outdated and turns it into something that looks like it should be in a Pottery Barn catalog. Laurel emailed me these pictures of her bedroom set and asked me if I thought we could bring the pieces new life. Of course we can!!!
She reserved time on our schedule for the project and then we met to discuss the finish that she wanted. She brought a picture of a Pottery Barn dresser that she liked. She wanted slightly different colors, but with a finish that was a little less common than what we normally do. I’m always up for that challenge!
Here’s a picture of the dresser from Pottery Barn’s website:
This was a tricky finish… . We painted it Benjamin Moore’s color kendall charcoal first and then painted the second coat rever pewter. Here’s the tricky part – you have to hand sand it so that the second coat comes off and the first coat of paint stays on. It’s so hard to do that without going down to the wood everywhere. It took John two full days to sand this set – just the sanding part! Be ready to be very patient but I think you’ll see it was worth the payoff.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
Sometimes I’m asked to speak on how to be a successful entrepreneur. I’ve been thinking about that idea quite a bit lately. Being a successful entrepreneur has so many components and probably the most important would be that you’re passionate about what you do. I don’t think it’s possible to be a successful entrepreneur without that passion. In the same sense, I don’t think it’s possible to stay as a successful entrepreneur without harnessing that passion. It can easily consume too much time and make the really important things in life get pushed aside. I find the practice of simplifying and finding balance to be my biggest struggle. Learning to be present with my family instead of thinking about what needs to be done for work, trying not to talk only about work with my husband so our relationship feels like love and not a business partnership, and making friendships and other people priorities instead of the last thing I think about. Because in the end, the people in this life and the family that we love are really the definition of a successful person, right?
When we came home from vacation I was feeling really sad about coming home which was a feeling I haven’t felt before. I think it’s because I have been so busy and let my priorities get out of whack. A busy business is a blessing and I’m not complaining about that one bit! My own mind and self discipline is what I’ve slacked off on. Every business has to continually be stretched and is always changing.
We thought through this at length, prayed over it and asked for wisdom from other business owners. I’m so excited to tell you all that we are expanding the FunCycled team with my very own assistant. Pam is starting in April and I’m so excited!! Our store will be open more hours (Tuesday-Saturday) and I will have help with emails, quotes, marketing. The goal is to help bring that balance back to our family and keep customer service high. It will give me more time do design – what I’m truly passionate about. With that, I also want to say thank you to those who have been patient with my slower response times and our limited store hours in the past! To say we are ecstatic is an understatement! We are so thankful for all of the business you send our way, the positive word of mouth, and for sharing our blog, Facebook, and instagram posts. It’s means so much to us! Please keep it up!! :)
For this week’s furniture makeover, I wanted to share two different secretary desks that we recently redid. Both in black but with completely different style!
Here they are before:
We painted the tall secretary’s desk with Valspar’s Lincoln Cottage Black and we painted the shorter secretary’s desk with a black enamel.
There is a box at the top right of this page to enter your email address to receive notifications by email when I post something new on this blog. Please sign up today!
Happy FunCycling Friends,
Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. Last but not least, let us customize a furniture piece for you. We create custom furniture and will deliver for customers in upstate NY and also ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our furniture for sale page.
We just finished painting it and it’s done in Benjamin Moore’s Fuchsia Berry, glazed and sprayed it with a protective clear coat. If you want to see how we paint furniture, check out our 
We knew before they announced it that we had won just because they didn’t sell anything throughout the day and did the fire sale at the end of the day. The producers were really encouraging about our work and kind! It was our anniversary on the sale day and they bought us celebratory lemonades at the end of the day! That’s why our episode is called Happy Flipping Anniversary. WE WON HGTV’s FLEA MARKET FLIP! Sayyyyyy whatttt??? So exciting!
