Maple's Laboratory: Painting Kanani's Shave Ice Stand

Yo, Maple here.

Hopefully you've been following our posts and you know that I, Magnificent Maple, am crafting my very own laboratory for "Poisons and Criminal Investigations." My inspirations are Flavia de Luce and Sherlock Holmes.

The first step to create my lab was purchasing McKenna's Loft Bed Set. I did a couple posts on that set already (more to come). When we showed you the bed I told you that we were going to paint it a different color.

In order to pick a color for the bed, I decided to paint Kanani's Shave Ice Stand as an experiment. I plan to incorporate the stand into my laboratory, while still being able to use it as a food stand if we wanted to.

(Is it painting or repainting? 

I mean, someone already painted it when it was made in China...)

We had a low-gloss painter's Indian Red Oxide acrylic lying around that looked intriguing, so I swathed it on the stand while no one was watching me.

After each coat dried, I added another. I ended up with lots of coats of paint. a) I wanted to hide the pink as much as possible and b) I wanted it to look like something you'd find in an old lab; a piece of furniture that has probably been repainted/painted many times.

Here is the initial product:

There are still spots left to paint on it, including the interior of the back. But I ran out of paint in my attempt to make it look the way I wanted it to. More paint is on backorder. :-( But hopefully it will come soon.

As for the loft bed, we plan on painting it the same color. We tried a couple different paints on it already - but none of them looked as awesome as this does. And this paint adhered well to both "wood" and plastic.

Also, if you didn't notice - I cut off the (pink!) flowers from the roof of the Stand and while that does help its appearance move towards being a laboratory work-space, the tiki "grass" roof is still out in the open.

Our plan is take decorative metal sheets and bend or hammer them to the shape of the roof. Then it will be a metal exhaust hood over the lab counter, instead of a tiki roof. But at the same time, we can remove the metal hood at anytime and turn it back into a tiki stand. We will keep you informed on how that part of the project goes. ;-)

Mo' pics, painted counter with bright flash:

Painted parts with less bright flash:

Any questions? Feel free to ask!


Stay tuned for more posts soon, including the Activity Two pics.


(Those pics will probably be up Thursday night or Friday.)