Sunroom Progress: Chunky Dresser Makeover

Awhile back, as some of you may recall, I bought a big chunky dresser for $45 at the thrift store (not on the same Friday night that I bought everything else that's now in my house, but at the same store). Said dresser is unbelievably heavy and still has a stamp on the back dating it to 1974. I'd had some hopes that it might work in our den for a TV stand, but it is, it turns out, far too ginormously long for that. 

So it ended up in the special room in our house where we keep all the things we don't know what else to do with: the sunroom! Only this time we sort of did know what we were going to do with it. We knew, at least, that we were going to paint it and then....put stuff in it. I think maybe craft supplies? Extra dishes? Maybe we'll get really crazy and keep extra dishes and craft supplies in there, because it's just that big. Did people have more clothes in 1974? Maybe it's just that they had smaller closets, so they had to keep more clothes in their dressers? 

Incidentally, Dave does not like calling this dresser a dresser. He really wanted an alternative name, since we won't be using it as a dresser for clothes. I introduced him to "credenza" and he was all over that, but I don't think it is a credenza, even if one defines the term really generously. Although Wikipedia seems as confused as Dave about the definition of credenza. It says that a credenza is "a piece of furniture comprising a central cupboard flanked by symmetrical quadrant glass display cabinets, usually made of burnished and polished wood and decorated with marquetry" ....and then shows two example pictures that aren't anything like that. So I guess Dave can call our dresser a credenza if he wants to.

It started out looking like this:

I've been itching to use some turquoise or aqua somewhere in the house, and the sunroom, with all the light it gets and with its terra cotta tiles, seemed like the ideal location. I spent quite a bit of time online researching the prettiest colors Benjamin Moore has to offer on the aqua to turquoise spectrum, wrote down the names of several top contenders, then got to the store and....couldn't find a single one. I should have written down numbers, too, it turns out. I could have asked for help, but the store was pretty busy, so I just looked at the samples and picked one out right there on the spot. I ended up with Florida Keys Blue. 

It's a little more aqua and less blue in real life than I expected (although in the pictures it looks bluer than in my sunroom. I think. It's hard to tell. Light is a funny thing), but the great thing about Benjamin Moore is that even when colors don't look how I expect them to, I'm still all, "OMG--it's the prettiest color I've ever seen!" Benjamin Moore does not pay me. But they should. 

I agonized for quite some time over how to paint this. I got the paint in semi gloss to leave my options open. Ultimately I decide on mixing plaster of paris in to chalk paint it up, largely because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to sand and prime it first. Also because I knew if I wound up distressing it (which I hadn't decided about yet), I'd want the dark finish to show through rather than bare, sanded wood. I use this recipe from I Heart Naptime. This time I added in a little more plaster of paris, just as an experiment as I've seen other formulas that use a lot more. I didn't notice much difference over other times when I've used it. 

I did two coats of paint (Dave liked it after one coat, with some of the dark stain showing. I kind of did, too. But not enough to stop painting). Then I sanded the edges to distress it, then put a coat of wax on it. 

I only briefly considered swapping out the hardware. I thought it would be hard and/or expensive to find something substantial enough to look right on there, so I just repainted the old hardware with Rustoleum satin nickel metallic spray paint instead. This kept the whole cost, for the dresser plus paint, down around $70 (and we still have plenty of Florida Keys Blue and satin nickel spray paint left over). 

That rainbow striped vase? That I did get on clear-out-the-whole-thrift-store-Friday. 

I think the bottom picture gives the best representation of the real color.

I'm excited about getting a usable sunroom! There have been a couple of other changes in there, too, so I'll have a sunroom update post sometime in the fairly near future. 

Linking with:

Give Me the Goods Monday

Tutorials, Tips, and Tidbits at Stone Gable

Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths

Friday Link Party at Craftionary

Inspiration Gallery

Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday

Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday

Tatertots and Jello Weekend Wrap-Up

I Heart Naptime's Sundae Scoop

Monday Funday

By Stephanie Lynn's Sunday Showcase Party

Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories A to Z

Get Your DIY On

Progress in Ari's Room: a Bedside Table Made Over

My goal is to finish Ari's tween room before he's a teenager. Or, preferably, by the beginning of April, because we have a big project in mind for Dave's spring break. We'll see how things go, though, as always.

But! There has been definite progress since I first posted about the current state of and future plans for Ari's room. Like remember the half painted trim that my poor kid had been living with for months?

All finished!

I also came up with the most amazing idea for something for the wall EVER. It is a surprise, and I have no idea if we can actually do it or if it will work at all the way I want it to, but if we can and it does, it's going to be FABULOUS. Teaser!

But more on that another time.

Ari had three pieces of furniture in his room that needed some love. All of them are that old orangey wood (maple?) and pretty juvenile looking. And Ari's ELEVEN. And a half.

This little nightstand was the least ambitious project, so of course we started with it:

There it is, over by the bed.

Here it is, after we moved it downstairs to start working on it (only we'd already taken the drawer out by then, so I wanted to post that one up there so you got the whole idea):

Those scalloped edges were, I felt, incompatible with the look we were going for, so I asked Dave if he could take them off. Fairly straightforward for the front, because it was a separate piece that would break right off. But the sides were different:

Dave was not confident. "You know I'm not actually a carpenter, right?" he said. But MY confidence in Dave is boundless, so I convinced him to give it a try (and, hey, the $7.95 thrift store price is still written in marker on the back, so it's not like he'd be destroying a priceless antique if he messed it up). He got to work with the jigsaw and came back with this:

Not a carpenter, my foot! Look at those nice clean lines! (I am, incidentally, endlessly impressed by Dave's ability to figure out how to do all the stuff I want him to do. He didn't grow up learning how to do any of it; he's taught it all to himself).

Now that the power tools were safely put away, it was my turn. I had originally been thinking I'd paint this all slick and modern, in a dark gray semi-gloss, with no distressing. But then I discovered the knobs I wanted to use at Hobby Lobby and decided that distressed chalk paint would be a better match.

I picked out Valspar's High Speed Steel for the paint (and I did get it in semi-gloss, since I plan to use in on the other furniture, too, and I'm pretty sure I want the semi-gloss for the dresser) and then broke out the plaster of paris to make some of it into chalk paint.

I did two coats, lightly distressed it with a medium grit sandpaper sponge (I'm sort of terrified of overdoing it with distressing, so so far all of my distressing is "light"). Then I did a coat of polyurethane on it (instead of wax. Because I hate waxing. And because I thought the poly would be more durable). Finally, I put the adorable knob on. And here it is:

Since I didn't sand it first, the wood that shows through where I distressed it is the old orangey finish. I think it looks good with the red knob, though.

Linking with:

Paint It Project Link Party at Crafty Scrappy Happy
Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday
Sunday Showcase Party at Under the Table and Dreaming
Stone Gable's Tutorials, Tips, and Tidbits
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
TwelveOEight's Pretty Things Link Party
Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories AtoZ
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths
Somewhat Simple
Craftionery's Friday Link Party
Inspiration Gallery
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Tatertots&Jello's Weekend Wrap Up Party

Ringing in the New Year With a Fancy Bookcase for the Nursery

(I had sort of hoped to either have a baby before 2012 ended, for tax deduction purposes, or to have the first baby in my city/state/country of 2013, in hopes of getting free stuff. But, as you can see, I am still here. Historically, my babies show up remarkably close to their due dates).

So check out how I'm trying to be a less lazy blogger! I added a gadget with "popular posts" to the sidebar awhile back, but then the problem was it automatically picked the first picture from each post, which was usually some "before" shot of an empty living room or something. I thought that this probably did not make people want to click on the posts. And maybe there is some way to fix it so it won't use the first picture, but I don't know what it is.

So I went through and put better pictures at the top of all the posts that are there right now, BUT I don't want to give away the big reveal in the first picture, because what fun is that? Right? Right?! So, at least for this post, look what I did! I made a visually pleasing picture that merely supplies a tantalizing hint of what is to come. I am so terribly clever.

And, with that unnecessarily long prelude out of the way, I am going to write an unnecessarily long post about the relatively simple project of lining an old bookcase with fabric to make it look prettier.

This bookcase's first role in our family was in Ari's nursery. I'm pretty sure I got it at a garage sale in or around Boston. I don't remember what it looked like to start with, but we painted it white (or repainted it white) back then. Then it moved around our house for years, getting dingier and dingier. This is what it looked like until a couple of weeks ago:

I don't know why I didn't take a picture of the whole thing. I think there was a big trunk in front of it. Anyway, as you can see, not in terrific shape, paint-wise.

So the first order of business was just to get a fresh coat of paint on it, and I decided to go with the same gray, chalk-paintified, that I used on the dresser with the whale pulls: Behr's Burnished Metal from Lowes. Dave put two coats of paint on it and then made his first try at applying finishing wax. This part did not go well. Hint: do not apply finishing wax (especially the first time you try it) at night. Because then maybe you will use too much wax, and then you will think you did a good enough job buffing it, but when you take a look at it later, in daylight, you'll see a whole bunch of nasty yellow wax residue, and it will be way too late to get it off with a rag at that point.

Yes. What happened next was that Dave broke out the power sander and sanded off all the wax and much of the paint. Fortunately there was enough of the gray paint still left on there that one more coat did the trick once the sanding was finished. I repainted it, and then I let Dave do the wax again, because you have to get right back up on that horse, right? And this time he totally nailed it.

We now had a lovely gray bookcase, but we weren't willing to stop there. ANY nursery can have a gray bookcase, but it takes a really special nursery to have a gray bookcase with squids.

Back before Christmas, I discovered Spoonflower while poking around looking for fabulous ocean animal fabric. If you are new to Spoonflower as I was, here, as best as I can gather, is what it's all about: Spoonflower has pretty much any kind of fabric you could possibly want. I guess they have designers who make some of it, or you can design your own fabric and they'll make it for you, and then other people can buy your design, too. It's really cool. And really expensive. The cheapest basic cotton starts at 18.50/yard. It's pretty unapproachable for a bigger project (sorry dining room curtains: no squids for you!), but I only needed a yard for the bookcase, and they had really cool squid fabric, so I splurged a bit and bought it.
The fabric took a long time to get here (2 weeks-ish?), but it looked great when it did.

At first I thought I'd buy some spray starch and attach the fabric to the back of the bookcase that way. But the back was nailed in pretty permanently, so we didn't want to take it off so that we could wrap the fabric around it. And we couldn't just cut the fabric to fit the back or it would fray (plus I was pretty sure measuring it and putting it in there would be fraught with error). In the end, the easiest/safest plan seemed to be cutting a piece of cardboard to fit against the back of the bookcase and covering it with the fabric.

We very carefully measured and remeasured the back of the bookcase and then cut the cardboard (notice our cardboard is a Lowe's box which reads, "Never stop improving." So motivational).

Then we put the cardboard in the back of the shelf to test out the fit, since it would not be easy to make adjustments after the fabric was on there (you'll see in this picture that I changed the order of things to preserve the flow of the story. At this point, shelf had been painted, waxed, and de-waxed with the sander, but the repainting hadn't happened yet).

We laid the fabric out on the cardboard and cut it, leaving anywhere between an inch and a half and three inches or so all around (mostly the three inches was just so we didn't need to cut the top and bottom; it was pretty close, so we left it as it).

For the front side of the fabric backer, we quickly applied spray adhesive (which I already had on hand; apparently spray adhesive holds up much better in a cold/hot garage for years than spray paint does) and then put the fabric down on top, smoothing as we went. We actually sprayed and adhered a small strip at the  bottom first, to hold it in place and keep it even while we did the rest. I used that metal meter stick there to smooth out any wrinkles. There is not much time for all of this. Work quickly!

Try not to fret if it's not perfect; it won't really show when you're finished! Remember my mantra: "I was not really a perfectionist about this part."

Next Dave tied some of the extra fabric around his head and plugged in the hot glue gun. Have I mentioned that this glue gun is the best $3 I've ever spent?

We flipped the cardboard over and put dots of glue all along one side, then wrapped the edge of the fabric around, pulling it tight as we went, and attached it to the back of the cardboard.

I didn't worry overmuch about what the folds looked like in the back, since no one's ever going to see them. I just made sure nothing was poking out past the edges.

Here's what the cardboard looked like, all finished.

We put the cardboard in the bookcase, and it fit like a glove!

And all finished, in its spot between the nursery windows, with the shelves back in!

Now I just have to make myself cover up some of the awesome squiddiness with books and whatnot, because otherwise there is not much point in its being a shelf.

Linking with:
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Somewhat Simple
Happy Hour at Design, Dining, and Diapers
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Lovely Crafty Weekend at Lovely Crafty Home
Tater Tots and Jello's Weekend Wrap-up Party
Funky Junk Interiors
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase Party
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths

Nursery: progress at last!

So let's see....we've crossed putting in hardwood floors of the list. I think we've pretty much decided the bathroom tile will have to wait, too. (I guess I should say more about that, since I kept insisting it was SO IMPORTANT. Thing is, the master bath is right over the unheated garage. And it's a huge room with one lone heat vent in it. And we've come to discover, as nights have gotten colder, that it's a very, very cold room. And the small part that already has tile? OMG. SO COLD at night on bare feet. We need to rethink this. And maybe hold off until we can save up for some under the tile heating? We're exploring our options).

But even with this reduced to do list, progress on the nursery has been very slow indeed. Much slower than my pregnancy, it seems, which is a terrible combination. We have less than 8 weeks (or so)! I mean, not that the baby will really notice whether or not his nursery is finished, at least not until he's old enough to focus on things more than 8 inches from his face. But still. I notice.

So we took advantage of having grandparents around to make a childless trip to Ikea (which, really, I have to say, is the only way I can handle a trip to Ikea without snapping at everyone. Crowds make me grumpy. And Ikea always has crowds. And no rides, unlike Disney World, so really, what's the point of dealing with the crowds? Unless you need a room divider for your nursery or something like that. Anyway. More on the Ikea trip and its spoils later.

Even before the Ikea trip, we painted the dresser! The dresser that was Dave's Dad's, then Dave's, then all of our other kids' at some point or another. Even though it has all that beautiful family history and is a pretty cool little retro piece of furniture, I have to admit I was getting kind of tired of it. It had been in EVERY kid's room, after all, and it had looked exactly the same since we first refinished it before Ari was born.

It looked like this:

It had this black and white speckled finish on it originally, that Dave's grandmother did back when Dave's dad was a kid. We painted it white (presumably we sanded it, too, though I don't remember the details) and put cute little animal knobs on it (where there had been black handles). And then it sat around getting dingier for 12 long years.

The other day I mixed up some chalk paint (I can't stop!) and we got to work. My original plan was for the whole thing to be the same gray color. We used Behr's "burnished metal," and I was very pleased with it, particularly given that I spent 5 minutes at Lowe's picking it out instead of obsessing with online pictures and paint chips for forever like I usually do. I wanted a very light, close-ish to white, gray. Once the gray started going on, though, I decided I wanted something a little more exciting. Like how's about painting the drawers and door a different color? So daring.

I went back to my never ending supply of paint samples from the library/dining room and pulled out Benjamin Moore's James River Gray, which is the color one darker than Nantucket Fog on the same card. We'd decided it was too dark for the rooms downstairs, but I love it on the dresser. LOVE it.

Then a coat of wax and the new whale knobs (which have been sitting in a box, patiently waiting to be used, for quite awhile now).

I'm so happy with how it turned out! I am officially re in love with our little piece of family history dresser. Now we just have to do...all the other things.

Here it is!

Linking with: Transformation Thursday @Shabby Creek Cottage, Vintage Thingie Thursday @ Colorado Lady, Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday, The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday, Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

DIY Chalk Paint: A First Attempt

Update: Psst....another chalk painting attempt, with a more exciting project here

A post about chalk paint is sort of a rite of passage if you want to blog about your house, right? At least that is the impression I got from reading 80 gazillion blog posts about chalk paint in preparation for this project.

But, truthfully, I had not even heard of chalk paint (or at least I hadn't paid any attention to it; I'm sure I must have come across some of those posts at some point in the past) until a month or two ago, when my friend Kristi started talking about it. And then painted her bathroom cabinet with some she made herself. And it looked really great. And I have a lot of furniture around here what needs painting. So I could ignore it no more.

One can buy Annie Sloan's chalk paint, and, word is, it's awesome. It's also around $37 a quart and comes in a limited range of colors. So there are lots and lots of tutorials all over the internet for making your own knock off chalk paint. You can make it either with non-sanded grout or with plaster of paris. I opted for the latter and used this tutorial from I Heart Naptime as my guide.

The test object: our Norden table from Ikea that we use as a chess table in the library:

Why chalk paint? I actually wasn't planning to go with chalk paint for this at first. It seemed like such a tiny, simple little project that I wasn't sure it was worth it. But then I figured that a tiny, hard to mess up project was actually the perfect place to experiment. And the big advantage of chalk paint is supposed to be that you don't need to sand or prime first. Since it was bare wood, I doubted I'd be able to get away without primer otherwise, so it wouldn't really be any more work.

Last night Dave was brewing beer with a friend all evening, and two of three kids were off at a sleepover, so I had nothing to do but deal with that table. Sorry for the lack of pictures of the first part of the process. It was dark; I hate the flash....what can I say?

I recreated the scene the next morning, though. Well, a little bit:

I bought the plaster of paris and finishing wax at Home Depot yesterday. And for the paint, I used one of the reject samples from the dining room/library paint selection. Not the one pictured; I accidentally threw it away before I could either take a picture of it or note the color. I hope no one is super in love with the color, because I have no idea what it's called. It's flat paint, by the way. I found remarkably little information on what kind of paint to use. What I did find said anything will work okay and end up with a flat finish regardless.

The I Heart Naptime recipe calls for 4 tablespoons plaster of paris, 2 tablespoons of water, and 2 cups of paint. The paint samples are just under one cup (7.75 oz), so I halved the amounts of water and plaster of paris. Which made for a very tiny amount to work with. I mixed the water (cold water. Some things I read said to use warm or hot water, but Kristi told me she found the hot water harder to work with. I didn't have any trouble with cold) and the plaster of paris in an old yogurt container until all the lumps were gone. Then I poured the mixture together with the paint and mixed some more.

Then I started painting. And all went smoothly. The paint was really easy to work with. I am trying to thinking of something remarkable or at least slightly....unusual to say about it, but it was just kind of like...painting. I let it dry for less time than I was supposed to--maybe an hour and a half--then put the second coat on. Here's what it looked like the next morning:

It has a little bit....uhh, chalkier finish than regular paint. You can, in fact, at least according to all the blog posts I read, actually write on it with chalk. To take the edge off the chalkiness, most people finish it with wax. I was no exception. The Minwax I bought was kind of a pain to work with--very hard, didn't want to come out of the container, and extremely stinky. Word is there are better, softer waxes one can buy online.

I also began to understand why most chalk painted furniture gets distressed, as I managed to chip the paint in two places before I got the wax on. Apparently, it's a little hard NOT to distress chalk paint. I'm curious how it will hold up to kid chess use.

Here it is after the wax; I don't think the change is that dramatic, either in pictures or in person. I might have been too skimpy with the wax. But, you understand, I hated the wax.

Note that the dogs have shredded all the paper and cardboard I put under the legs to catch drips.

And here it is back in its place, with all its stuff on it again:

So I'm happy with how it turned out. The painting was trouble-free. I like the color and how it is unobtrusive against the wall but not exactly the same color, and how I put that paint sample to good use. I hate to waste $2.99 if I don't have to.

Next up in Adventures in Chalk Painting: the dresser for the nursery. And our headboard. I bought a light gray to use for both of those.
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