MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL

I've gotten really bad at not taking any before pictures of the projects we have been doing lately.  I guess we are just so excited to jump right in and get our hands dirty, that the thought of taking a picture never crosses our minds, until we stand back and admire our handy work later.  Such was the case with a $15.00 large, very heavy mirror we picked up at the church sale.

In it's "before" life, the wood frame around the mirror was a dark brown, almost black finish.  We knew we had to lighten the finish on it to bring new life to it.  Cori, who peruses the blogs for inspiration, came across one of her favorite bloggers, who was describing a new technique she came up with for painting and distressing, and we couldn't wait to give it a try ourselves.

First we had to visit our "second home" the orange team at Home Depot and the paint department, where we purchased some Light French Gray paint, and a quart of Ralph Lauren finishing glaze that we had the paint guy tint with espresso bean brown.  Armed with our new supplies we headed to our work garage where the rest of the supplies that we needed were waiting for us.

First we gave it a coat of a soft white, then when that was dry, dry brushed on some robin egg blue and a bit of the french gray.  When that was dry, we went to town with coarse sandpaper to give it a nice distressed, old world feel to it.  We topped it off with a glaze of the espresso bean brown and absolutely loved the way it turned out.  The final picture doesn't even begin to do it justice, but managed to snap a quick picture before it was quickly carted off to the store to sell.

I think this weekend, we'll try finishing up a few pieces we have had sitting idle in the garage in order to make room for a few large pieces we have been wanting to work on, but with the weather not being too conducive to large scale painting, we are having to bide our time until it warms up a bit more.

In trucking news, Craig and Roy delivered their load of meat to the company yard in Bloomington, CA where they then got another USF load out of Fontana, CA into Spokane, WA.  They delivered that yesterday morning early, and immediately headed to the Wenatchee, WA area to pick up apples at three different locations. 

 As of 7pm last night, they were at their last stop, and after scaling out on site, found they were well over 36,000 pounds on the trailer tandems, with no extra wiggle room to adjust the axles.  Craig said they were okay gross weight, at 79,200 but that the first place, they had loaded the apples a bit differently, which pushed the rest of their two loads back past the 48 foot mark inside the trailer.  As he was talking to me, their last stop was taking all the pallets out of the trailer, and reloading the entire load back in to make sure they were legal before leaving the complex and heading to the yard in Bloomington to drop the trailer.