Am sure every antique and vintage dolls house collector is faced with the dilemma from time to time, of what to do with heavily damaged and broken antique dolls house furniture? I have a very large box with all kinds of "spares" saved from broken miniatures but in reality, I cannot keep absolutely everything. Well, I had two extremely old dolls house chest of drawers, both badly damaged but still had such a charm to them...I just couldn't throw them away and I did'nt want them to end up in the ever growing "spares" box. They sat on my workbench for quite a while, staring back at me rather expectantly, as I pondered on what I could do with them. Then one day, I finally set to in bringing them back to life!
This was my favourite, a genuinely early 1900s miniature chest of drawers. Not only was it missing a drawer, it was also missing handles and there was some damage to the exterior. So, a new drawer was made, damage was made good with filler and lots of sanding ensued! Once I was happy with the repair work, I gave it the KT Miniatures aged white paint treatment.
I challenge anyone to figure out which drawer was the replacement! Three little handles were made out of tiny black beads and weeny pins. Then a coat of wax polish and lots of elbow grease in buffing to a nice shine. Finally, for a nice pleasing touch, I created replica antique paper scaled right down to line the inside of each drawer, just like I have in my real life sized antique chest of drawers!
I was chuffed to bits with the result! Then my next dilemma was what to do with it. I tried shoe horning it into each of my old dolls houses here, but there was simply no more room for yet another old chest of drawers in any of them. So reluctantly, I put this up for sale today, along with the other salvaged antique chest of drawers, which is even older.
Ok, this second chest of drawers is far from perfect, but if only you saw it before the makeover!! The only things it had going for it was its age...(late 1800s/Early 1900s, a remnant from the
Oxford Collection), all the drawers were present and in good condition, plus it had all the original blue beaded handles! But the damage to the main carcass was quite considerable, a huge chunk of wood was missing from the shelf divider in between the two long drawers. Plus the exterior was in a hideous condition, badly marked, stained and pitted.
I tried to build up the missing chunk of wood as much as I could, within the restraints that I had, filled and repaired the damaged exterior wood, then gave the main carcass the KT Miniatures aged white paint treatment.
As with the other chest of drawers, I created replica antique paper (this was different from the other paper and very pink!) scaled right down and lined inside all the drawers. Suddenly this wreck of a somewhat chunky chest of drawers, looked alive once more, even if there is still a slight indentation on the shelf divider!
Both these chest of drawers are now up for sale on the
A broken c1920s/1930s German chair was glued back together, the massive crack along the chair back was filled, then the whole chair given a pale green aged finish. Finally I painted some flowers using a tiny brush. This now sits in my antique toy shop and I love it! This old toy shop is my latest project in my own personal collection by the way....and I hope to bring you a blog posting all about this one day very soon.
I have also been busy listing more antique and vintage dolls house furniture and accessories to KT Miniatures website over the past couple of days and will continue to do so for the next couple of days. Why not take a look....
Celia
