Thrift Store Love

Another project!  I forgot to add these pics to my home improvement medley last time, so here they are now -- my $15 thrift store find turned into homespun gold. 

The Before.

A few weeks ago now, I found the perfect dresser for Grace's bedroom.  I didn't want to buy just anything to fill the space in her room, so for the last few months I'd been on the hunt for the PERFECT piece.  As per usual, St. Vincent de Paul's thrift store came through in the clutch!  Hahaha.  I have a slight love affair with this place.  Seriously.  And even though this dresser had some obvious flaws -- there were knobs missing; tape adhesive remnants were stuck to the top, front, and sides; scrapes and scuffs abounded; the wood smelled like a thrift store -- I could instantly see through to its potential.  It has GREAT lines {you can't really see it from a picture, but the middle drawers curve outward slightly and the drawers on the ends curve inward}; it's solid as a ROCK; and the drawers were all in good {sliding} shape.  I could almost envision the finished product as I gazed on it in it's rough form.  And for $15, there was no way I was going to find a bigger bang for my buck anywhere else!

Once home, I got right to work.  I roughly followed the tutorial found HERE on how to paint furniture.   Fortunately, I had just finished painting the wainscoting in the Dining Room, so I still had the paint can and paint brush out in the color I wanted to use on the dresser -- Benjamin Moore's "Simply White" in a semi-gloss finish.  Before painting, however, I decided I needed to actually prep this bad boy if I wanted it to last.  I took off all the hardware then busted out the power sander and went to work on the top and the sides.  I hand sanded the drawer fronts then went ahead and sprayed everything with the Zinsser Cover Stain primer that the tutorial recommended.  It took 2 cans to get it mostly coated.  After that dried, I followed up with 2 coats of paint over everything, and a third coat on the top and drawer fronts.  Once that was dry, I finished it off with 2 coats of Polycrylic over everything and a 3rd coat once again on the top and drawer fronts.  {I did LIGHTLY sand by hand with an extra fine grit in between the paint coats and Polycrylic coats.}

Once all the hard work was done, then came the fun.  I really wanted to reuse the existing hardware -- I loved the way it looked -- but several of the side knobs were missing and I couldn't find ANYTHING like them at Home Depot.  I was originally planning on keeping the silver/nickel look of the original pieces, but the knobs I wanted for replacing the side drawers didn't have enough in stock of that color.  So I went for the oil-rubbed bronze -- even though I had already mustered more elbow grease into cleaning up the center pulls to make them a little cleaner and shinier.  {Emphasis on "a little."}

{Left is before cleaning, Right is after.  I googled a bunch of remedies and the one that I had stuff on hand to make simply used lemon juice and salt.  Pretty simple and it did actually work.}

Getting the pulls to match the new side-knobs was easy peasy lemon squeezy after purchasing a can of metallic spray paint in an oil-rubbed bronze color.  An added bonus from this can of spray paint was that it saved me $150 when I took apart our front door knob handle after painting the door and simply spray painted away the aged brassy look it was sporting rather than forking over so much money to buy a new one.  

Ready to go!

After re-attaching all the hardware and reassembling the drawers for an after shot, I decided that it was probably best to let the paint "cure" for a few days to make sure it dried nice and hard and I thought it was probably a good idea to air out the smell a little longer as well.  Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I finally decided the smell wasn't going to go completely away on its own, so I went ahead and painted all the insides and outsides of each drawers and let those dry completely before adding some contact paper liners to the bottom of all the drawers.  And then, while all THAT was happening, I bought a jar of something called Odo-Ball at Home Depot that I stuck in the empty cavity of the dresser to hopefully absorb whatever else was in there.  And you know, I think it kind of worked.  By the time we hauled it all up to her room yesterday and put the freshly painted and papered drawers in, I wasn't catching anymore whiffs of Thrift Store.  And that's a good thing!  Hahaha.

The After --

 {Once it was all put together, I kind of love the darker knobs' contrast against the white dresser, so I'm glad things worked out the way they did!}

Thursday morning I just happened to stop by a different thrift store hoping to find some chairs to redo for our dining room table when I came across THIS piece of work in the framed art section.  It prompted the following text exchange between me and Scott:

ME: Crazy cool looking? Or just crazy crazy? It's all embroidered.  I thought grace might like it in her room.

SCOTT:  Kind of crazy and kind of cute.  Fits well with grace.

ME:  Haha. Totally grace.

In the end, I decided I just kind of loved it and went ahead and bought it.  And since it was 50% off day at the Goodwill, I only had to fork over $2.50 for this gem!  Haha.  The good thing is that Grace loves it, too.  When she got home from school that day, she immediately started hounding me asking if I had bought it or made it.  When I told her I had bought it for her room, I could tell she was tickled pink.  She couldn't stop raving over all the embroidered handiwork -- each flower just seemed cooler than the next to her.  Haha. 

I wasn't really sure where it would work in her room, but once we had brought the dresser up to its rightful home, it just BEGGED for the art to go atop it.  I finished the tableau off with a framed picture that Grace had drawn when she was about Jane's age of the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead from nursery rhyme fame, and a jewelry tree and mirror that both came from Target.  I have to say that finally having a real dresser in that room really completes it!  It is lovely.  And Grace is in love, too.  And we ALL know that's a good thing.  Hahaha.  Until next time, Enjoy!

The Finished Product.