Painting happens at Room32 boutique!

Room32 is an interior design and houseplant shop right in the heart of Helsinki’s Freda district. However, the shop is not just an ordinary boutique but an experience you have to see in person. When you step through our door, you hear birds singing and can feel like you’re in a fairy tale world.

Although our store isn’t huge, exploring all the special and exciting products can surprisingly take quite a bit of time. So if you want something a bit different and eye-catching for your home, it’s definitely worth visiting our shop. Our selection includes decorative items, earrings, houseplants, dishes, pots, and much more. If you live farther away and can’t visit in person, be sure to check out our online store.

Our product range also includes the excellent Frenchic Paint paints, which we also use ourselves to paint products for sale in our store.

Grab our tips here for painting harlequin squares:

A fun grid painted on the top of an old pine drawer unit. The diamond pattern is a trendy choice. It’s fun and at the same time classically elegant. You can make it a traditional two-tone or, if you like mixing more colors or shades, you can paint each diamond in a different color.

Prepare your tools and choose the shades

And best of all, it’s quite easy, just requires a bit more time and planning. Prepare quality tape, a ruler, a measuring tape, a pencil, as well as paint shades and brushes as your tools.

Prepare the furniture for painting

Before starting to paint, it is important to properly handle the preparation work. Frenchic Paint's own furniture cleaner Sugar Soap is perfect for washing the surface to be painted, as it cleans dirt and grease. After washing, it is also good to sand the surface, and a good rule of thumb is: the shinier and smoother the surface, the more it needs sanding so that the new paint adheres and stays better. Remember to clean the surface from sanding dust after sanding.

Once the preparation work was done, we started customizing a small dresser by painting the top completely white with the Cream Dream shade.

Measure and tape

After this, we measured and gently drew the outlines of the diamond pattern on the top with a pencil. It’s best to choose the lightest shade as the base; it works well as a primer for the other colors and is, of course, the easiest to cover. After drawing, we taped the squares to be painted and then painted the black squares with the Blackjack shade.

At this point, be careful to paint the right squares with the right shade—so you don’t accidentally place two of the same color next to each other. You can mark the squares in advance with a pencil or a small amount of paint to indicate the correct shade, so you don’t have to fix it later.

Let the squares dry thoroughly

It’s best to remove the tape as soon as possible after painting so the paint doesn’t chip off with the tape once dry. Before taping the next squares, remember to let the paint dry completely; if you tape over paint that is still drying, there’s a risk the paint will peel off when removing the tape, and you’ll have to touch up the pattern again..Although the paint dries quite quickly, the most time-consuming part of making this pattern is waiting for the grid to dry.

While the squares on the tabletop dried, we painted the drawers white with the Cream Dream shade, the frame black with Blackjack, and the dresser legs and knobs with the lovely terracotta orange, McFee shade. In this project, all the shades happen to be from the Al Fresco series, but we could just as well have painted some of the squares with shades from the Lazy Range series. 

At least these were needed for this project:

• Black paint, Blackjack, from the Al Fresco series
• Orange paint, McFee, from the Al Fresco series
• White Cream Dream, from the Al Fresco series
• Tape
• Pencil
• Brush
• Sugar Soap, furniture cleaner
• Sanding sponge

At Room32, we renew old furniture by painting them with Frenchic Paint, and the finished pieces are always added to our selection for sale. We are also happy to advise on paint selection and surface preparation. We are constantly looking for new furniture to upcycle, so our selection changes quite often. So far, we have had small tables, chairs, a china cabinet, and small shelves for sale.

Welcome to shop at our store and follow our DIY projects on Instagram!

Best regards,

@room32helsinki, Pia

Frendrikinkatu 27, Helsinki