Dresser Facelift

 Every one in a while time I step into a secondhand furniture store, I fall in love with a hopeless looking stray.

I locked eyes on this guy, and knew he would be prefect for our guest room, with a little TLC.

Look, he's even winking at me...

Or maybe a rather lot of TLC...

According to the back of the dresser, this color is called "starfire."  That's...not the name I would have picked.

But look at the hardware!

So yes, pretty much everything about this dresser was in terrible shape, except the body of the dresser itself.  The drawers slid OK already, but a little application of beeswax helped them work even better.

Somehow, I missed pictures of the color transformation process, but it went a little something like this:

• sand, tack cloth
• primer
• sand, tack cloth
• paint
• sand, tack cloth
• paint

Then, it was time to turn my attention to the hardware.  I contacted the manufacturer to see if they had any replacement hardware to replace the 2 missing pulls, but was out of luck.  I was similarly out of luck with a hardware-location company, who said they could find something sort of like the pulls, but not an exact match.

Since we'd have to do something different anyway, I poked in at Anthropologie and found these:

Mother of pearl inlay

$14 per pull is OK when you're only buying 2...

Replacements acquired, it was time to focus on the rest of the hardware.  I scrubbed all the old hardware with a wire brush and some mild cleaning solution (bon ami and water), which got a lot of years of crud off, but left me with some not so pretty metal.

I was trying to match the metals of the new knobs by spray painting the existing ones bronze.  Sadly, no picture, but the bronze turned out a bit....glittery.  Not a good look for this project.  Oddly, the gold version was exactly the color I wanted, despite the terrifyingly shiny lid color.

Aaaaand, TA-DA.  Done.  Pretty as I knew he could be.

Color Coded Art Supply Holder

Like most kids, mine has a ton of art supplies.  Which is great - creativity, huzzah! But he has so many, without a little organization, trying to find the perfect color makes fun art time frustrating.

I was contemplating a pvc based storage system, when I realized I have all the materials for a zero cost, cute, easy storage caddy already.

Yep, tp/paper towel tubes cut short and the top of a kid sized shoe box.

I figured out how many tubes fit easily around the top of the lid, leaving some space in the middle for stamps/stickers/ephemera, and made a list of colors...

 mixed them in my old egg carton paint palette...

and slapped on the first coat of paint.

One coat was OK, but not quite as vibrant as I'd hoped.  I might go with a primer coat first, if I were doing this project again.

I let them dry for a little while - I used the Kiddo's craft paints, so the paint was dry (or mostly dry) in less than an hour.

The second coat was much better.

I glued the tubes to each other, and to the sides of the box top, to keep the tubes from flying around when the Kiddo grabs for a new color.  I mysteriously don't have any white glue laying around the house, so I went with the wood glue I do have in the garage.

I let the glue dry, and had the Kiddo help me sort his supplies into colors.

Ta Daaaa.