Sometimes, You Just Need New Drawers

Drawers.
I’m talking about the wooden kind.

I’ve come full circle, friends. The ‘rents were getting rid of a piece of furniture recently and wondered if I would want it. (Free? Yes please!) But this particular piece and I have been together before.

You see, I once again have the same dresser in my bedroom that was once in my nursery 34+ years ago. 

Here is (almost) what I started with. (I forgot to take a picture before I got started. When I was a baby it was a wooden, stained dresser. I don’t remember it being in my room after I was eight…. It must have gone into the attic? However, once I was married, it reappeared: my mom painted it white and added blue knobs.

When my daughter was little, she peeled the majority of the paint off the bottom drawer. (Her mother (ahem, me) disassembled a coffee table at the doctor’s office at about the same age. (Apparently we like to keep busy!)

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The first order of business was to get off the white paint. I guess the dresser didn’t want to be white because the paint came off (for the most part) without using sandpaper. 

I mixed some chalk paints together to make a very pale blue color. 

It took about 3ish coats of paint to get the coverage I wanted. (Note: I used a creamy white chalk paint from Aldi and a blue chalk paint by Valspar. I wasn’t as impressed with the Aldi paint. It didn’t seem as durable as what I am used to with the other chalk paints I have used.)

Around this time I had been eyeing a roll of craft paper at Hobby Lobby. It had gone on clearance for $1.50 and I had almost bought it a couple times, but didn’t have a particular project in mind, so kept talking myself out of it. Once I painted the dresser I realized the paper would make a fun drawer liner! I measured and cut the paper. I put a little dot of hot glue in all the corners to keep the paper held down. (Life’s short, when in doubt, a glue gun solves a lot of life’s problems! [wink])

I am pretty tickled with the fun paper. It makes me smile every time I open one of the drawers. 

Once I got the paper on, I needed to decide about knobs. Dem suckers can make a project get expensive fast. (I needed 10 for this dresser.) I brainstormed and remembered I had some suede-like cording. It had been tied around a blanket I got for Christmas. (If you are a person that likes blankets, I highly recommend getting a queen-size blanket-it’s like being wrapped in luxury, my friend! Ha! Props to Mr. Pear Tree Home for that idea.)

I decided to use some screws and the cording as drawer pulls. (This is not a large dresser and you can also pull the drawers out from the sides/bottom, so these are mainly decorative.) 

To make this easier, I snipped a little notch in the chord before twisting the screw through. That made things go a LOT faster. I didn’t use a drill, just scissors and a screw driver. I like how it ended up. Laid back, casual yet fun, a tad edgy, and always ready for something yummy to eat…. (oh wait…this was about the dresser…not me!)

I think it doesn’t look too bad considering the entire makeover cost $1.50. 

I’ll be back soon to show you how I’m using the dresser in my bedroom (it’s not for clothes). Now I’m off to find a snack to eat. That sentence above made me hungry! What’s your favorite snack? I’m an apple and peanut butter kind of gal, myself.