The Dresser that didn't make it Upstairs

When we moved from our 800ish sq ft, semi-detached house in Reading to our 2,000 sq ft Colonial (not including the finished basement) in Maryland we had enough furniture to use in one bedroom, the smaller of the two receptions and the dining room. Since then we've been thrifting our way to a properly furnished house but there are still several issues we have to deal with. One is clothes storage. In Reading we had no built in closets so we hung our clothes on poles we'd fastened across the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast, and anything folded went into a single, two-drawer dresser (the one now in the guest room) and our cheap, melamine bed-side tables..

Now we have a walk-in closet (such luxury) but are still sharing a dresser, so when I saw this for sale on Craigslist for $100 I thought it would be perfect as a dresser for David, with some extra storage in the bottom drawer for bed linens/blankets.

At this point I had a brain-freeze and completely miscalculated how big the dresser was in relation to our Hyundai but the sellers, bless them, bundled the thing into the back of their SUV and followed me home with it (it was only a couple of miles).

It's a nice chest of drawers - about 4 1/2 ft high by 4 ft wide, has a distressed finish and the previous owners had replaced the original wood knobs with these ornate pulls.

The only real issue is with some of the drawer slides and I've ordered new parts to fix those.

The black however, was not going to work in our pale coloured bedroom. I played around with paint chips at Home Depot and found a pale green that looked really lovely against a really white-white so I bought a quart of each in the flat finish to try out the homemade chalk paint again.

I painted the body of the dresser white -

  and the drawers green -

The cracks and "woodworm" holes of the original finish show up nicely with the chalk paint. I sanded the edges a little and then finished it with two coats of Minwax paste.

I gave the pulls two coats of the green, lightly dry-brushed on a little of the white and sealed it with spray polycrylic. I'm not wildly excited about how they look but I'll live with it for a little while until I'm inspired to try something else.

Now that I've got it done, however, it's living downstairs because it is a beast of a thing and frickin' HEAVY! With David's bad shoulder and my arthritis there's no way we can get it up the stairs by ourselves. I'm inclined to offer a home cooked meal as incentive for a couple of the single guys at work to come and lug it up for us.

Wendy

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