The Adored Abode

Hello! Welcome friends! This is the momentous first post on this little ol’ blog. Momentous for myself at least. I took a big leap outside of my comfort zone and started The Adored Abode as a way of sharing my home design, decor, and styling ideas. I am so very excited to begin this journey of blogging and following passion of creating a well-loved home.

On to the first post!

About two years ago my husband and I moved into our first house. We moved from a 1 bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom house and did not have much in terms of furniture, so our house, although modest in size, felt enormous. I was looking forward to finding the right pieces of furniture to go with the items we already had to make our home feel like ours. One of the first areas I focused on was our kitchen/dining/living area. I say area because our house is truly an open concept and there are no walls that separate these three rooms.

I had my heart set on finding a hutch for our dining room, but given that there was not a whole lot of room between the wall where the hutch in question would go and our dining table this option would not work unless I found a very narrow hutch. I made it my mission to find a something that would fit the space within a reasonable budget. I had seen many pictures of bar carts floating around Pinterest and knew that one could work well for our space. One weekend a sweet friend and I were antiquing in the West Bottoms in Kansas City and I came across a bar cart that had seen better days. It was fairly rusty, but for only $20 I thought I would take the plunge and see if I could refinish it. I wish I had a before picture to really show you how gross it was. Think shelves that were covered in years of grime and wheels refused to swivel.

Once I brought it home we removed the wheels and cleaned them with an old rag and a lot of elbow grease. We also sprayed the swivel parts of the wheels with WD40, which worked like a charm. Now it was on to the painting. We wiped the whole cart down with a wet rag. I then applied two coats of spray paint primer to ensure I covered all of the rust and to prevent additional rusting. Once the primer was dry I applied two coats of teal spray paint for the top coat.

We loved the result (don’t mind the old Instagram picture I had to use)! This cart was exactly what we needed for the space. It provided us with a little bit of additional storage for our many glasses we seemed to have accumulated.

A year later I decided the bar cart needed a change. Mainly I was tired of the bright teal that did not seem to go with anything else in our house. I wanted to go in a more neutral direction this time so I chose an antique silver hammered metal spray paint. Spoiler: this product did not work well for me. I found it to be very runny. I am chalking this up to user error and a bad spray painting technique, but I really wish I had picked a plain silver metallic rather than a hammered metal as I think this was the main issue. The final result was not what I had hoped for and I found myself needing to buy multiple cans of this spray paint to get an evenly finished coating. It looked fine from a distance, but up close it was very patchy and showed drip marks all over even though I tried to spray evenly and from a far enough distance away.

What do you know… A few months ago I decided it was time for the bar cart to change again. Largely, this was due to me being unhappy with the finish I got from the silver round of painting I completed. I realized I didn’t even take a proper before picture of the silver bar cart in use because I was too anxious to get started on the spray painting for a third time. So here is a picture I snapped pre-spray painting. The silver looked fine enough, just not exactly the look I was wanting (you can kind of see the splotchy finish on the top in this picture).

This time I decided to go gold. Luckily, I knew if I changed my mind down the road I could always repaint it. This is when people start thinking I’m crazy, but I’m alright with that.

I used the same spray painting technique as the second time around. Low and behold it worked beautifully this time (just as it had the first time)! Plus, I only needed one can of paint, not four like I did with the hammered metallic spray paint.

The new goldie in all her beauty:

I love the end result! It is exactly the look I was hoping to achieve.

I think bar carts are a great piece of furniture because they are very versatile! They do not have to be used just to store bar items. The possibilities are endless.

I would love to hear your thoughts! Have you used a bar cart in your home?