Let's Make Life Awesome
When I brought home the shell of a bed that I would eventually transform into Emma’s big girl bed, one thought popped into my mind: “Crap, this is going to take a lot of work.”
Okay, I guess it was two thoughts, because the second one was that I needed to make sure that it had not been painted at some point with lead based paint. I’ve never actually worked on a furniture piece that contained lead paint, but this one was such a mess that I had no idea what could be underneath….
Although I haven’t posted much on the blog over the past few weeks, I have been busy as a bee in the garage getting some great projects finished for the house. One of them has been Emma’s much anticipated (maybe just by me) emerald green big girl bed. Yes, I wanted an emerald green bed for her way before emerald was the color of the year – much like I wanted to name a daughter Emma 25 years before it became one of the most popular names in America. I figure I’m just really ahead of my time, but it takes me so long to actually get anything accomplished that it’s pretty mainstream by the time it comes about.
But I digress.
The new big girl bed is a beauty I found for a song on Craigslist. It needed tons and tons of work, but it’s now finished and worth every second I put into it. I’ll go into more details on it later, but after I stripped, sanded and replaced some of the trim work, I painted it my with favorite primer and latex paint.
The problem is that my favorite primer is oil-based. And my gloves got covered in primer because my spray gun leaked. So I took off my gloves to fix the gun. And now you know where this is going. I had white primer covering the palms of my hands, and since it wasn’t water based, it wasn’t coming off with soap and water.
Enter one of my new favorite discoveries – essential oils. My friend Myra (of My Blessed Life fame) got me interested in them when we roomed together at the Haven Conference this summer (she gave me Peppermint oil for a headache – and it worked), and I’ve recently started using them for a whole host of things. I had used Lemon oil before when I had super glue on my finger (just rubbed it on and the glue came off), so I thought I’d try it for the paint.
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