Our wonderful customer Gill Wilkinson is a very talented and qualified Interior Designer, a certified Home Staging and Property Styling professional and House Doctor® Consultant. Gill trained with House Doctor® Ann Maurice of Channel 5 television. The Fettling Fairies can wholeheartedly recommend Gill for Home Staging, having taken her professional advice personally.
(Click HERE for Gill's website GMW Interiors).
We were excited when Gill asked us to refinish a wine rack for Gill's own home because we knew it was going to be an interesting and different project. She told us she had bought a very utilitarian wine rack about 15 years ago and had painted it black. She then got her joiner to make an MDF frame for it, which she gave a dark heavy wood-effect stain finish. As she was completely refreshing her dining room, she wanted the wine rack to complement the new decor. Gill asked us to paint the rack section gold and the frame in a colour that was in her chosen wallpaper.
We collected the wine rack from Gill's home and once we had it in our workshops, we removed the back and extracted the metal rack from the frame. We found it necessary to sand the original finish right back to obtain a smooth surface ready for spray painting. Preparing the metal rack presented a similar challenge due to the number of wooden sections in its core.
One of our paint suppliers mixed the topcoat paint for the frame; we found it was not quite close enough to what Gill had requested so we 'adjusted' it in a few ways and showed Gill the alternatives for her to choose from. We called the selected colour 'Melanzana Nera' (black aubergine).
Everything was professionally spray painted. We gave the frame, rack and back one coat of shellac based primer. The frame and back then received a coat of dark tones undercoat while the rack received a coat of mid tones undercoat. We then painted the rack with three coats of water-based antique gold paint. This was quite challenging as each of the 96 rack dividers has four sides - along with all the metalwork! We gave the frame and back two coats of water-based acrylic satin in Melanzana Nera.
We hand painted gold detail to the outer frame then sent Gill some photos for approval. We found we hadn't quite understood Gill's specification for the detailing gold, so we sanded this back and gave the outer frame two further coats of Melanzana Nera. (We don't always get it right first time!!) We then hand painted the gold detail. Finally, we applied a coat of water-based matt varnish to the outer frame. When Gill told us the decoration of her dining room was complete, we returned the wine rack to her. We were pleased to see photos of it restocked with wine bottles.
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