Old & Rusty Bed Redo

I've talked about this bed a little before. I found it, half way buried under a fallen down 100+ year old 1 room house that was surrounded by locust trees on my grandpa's farm. Never heard of a locust tree? They're nasty. Unlike most trees, these suckers have thorns, and not just little thorns. We're talking 2-4 inch thorns.

The original plan was to put it in my flower bed, and plant a bunch of daisies around it.  Then, a couple of months ago, I got to looking at my bedroom.  I decided that we needed a darker headboard & footboard - the one we were using were was a plain, antique metal one from the house my grandma grew up in.  I was going to paint it, when I thought of the rusted old scrolly frame sitting in the backyard.

With my mom's helped, we used wire brushes and sandpaper to get off as much rust as we possibly could.  Dad helped get the little medallions off, and cut off the screws that were sticking out from where the knobs and a couple of medallions were missing.  I used some spray primer and some spray pain in Krylon's Rubbed Oiled Bronze (satin finish) on the whole frame.  The medallions were spray painted with Krylon's Celery green (glossy finish), then I used some charcoal colored glaze from this kit, that I had found on sale at Wal-Mart years ago, to dull the color and make them look kind of old.

I had to unmake my bed so you could see all the goodness - my gorgeous pillows cover up pretty much everything except the top medallion.  My dad is going to get busy and make me some risers so the prettiness can be seen when the bed is made.

I love our "new" bed.  It's not perfect - we bent some of the iron back as best as we could, but couldn't get it perfect.  The headboard and footboard don't really fit our queen size bed (they're too big for a full bed, but just a couple of inches too small for a queen), but they work.  It has my blood (locust thorns) and sweat (it was over 100 degrees out when we decided to de-rust it), and it's a piece of my family history.  And, it only cost me about $6 for the Rubbed Oiled Bronze spray paint, since I already had the primer and green spray paint on hand!

Oh!  If you're wondering about the canopy behind the bed, it's the cathedral length veil I wore the the hubs and I got hitched!

Linking up to some of these parties, and here, and here.