The Finishing Touches

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art, create, life, paint, project, refurnish

My dresser had been stripped, primed and painted, but needed some finishing touches before I could call it complete. After I painted the dresser purple and black, I wanted to get some Very Cool Drawer Pulls because the original ones were Very Ugly.  But first, I wanted to change the drawer contact paper.

I’m not a fan of contact paper but I really didn’t like the current contact paper that was in the drawers.  Petite rose buds just didn’t work with the cool black and purple exterior.  Even though no one would know it was there, I wanted something different, something a little classy.  I found what I was looking for at the local hardware store – white contact paper with a black swirly design.

Ugly Contact Paper

Ooohh, so pretty!

I hate contact paper and realized that I would need at least one beer to properly install it in my four drawers.  I took careful measurements but applying it was still a nightmare.  Two beers later and lots of swearing my work was complete.   The bottom drawer has a few more bubbles and wrinkles than the upper drawers, but I can live with them.  The drawers looked great, but still needed hardware.

I thought black drawer pulls would look awesome on my dresser, especially cup pulls.  However, I discovered that the Very Ugly drawer pulls had a Very Inconvenient drill hole width of 4 inches. I began a search for Cool Black Cup Pulls, but discovered that the average width of both cup pulls and drawer pulls was about 3 inches.  The  3.5 inch selection was somewhat limited and a 4 inch selection was very rare, if found at all.  I thought about plugging the existing holes and drilling new ones with a 3 inch width, but I really didn’t want to be bothered.  I don’t have a drill (yet) and the thought of going through all that trouble for cup pulls that didn’t really knock my socks off didn’t interest me.  Don’t get me wrong, in my search for the perfect cup pulls, I found some lovely ones, but nothing that I felt was right for my dresser.

In the end, I thought I would just get some ornate drawer pulls and simply ‘double up’ on them by having four per drawer instead of the customary two.  I again had black pulls in mind and found the online selection of drawer pulls to be a little overwhelming.  There are so many choices and I began to think of other future projects just to incorporate the use of some of them that I really liked, but weren’t right for my dresser.  Finally, I found what I was looking for at hobbylobby.com.  Wicked Cool pewter Octopi was the perfect choice for my dresser, but they were a little expensive at $7.00 each and I would need 16 of them.  Even if I bought 8, the price was still over my budget and I would have to find 8 different pulls to go with them.   Reluctantly, I passed on them and continued my search.

The Octopi wouldn’t leave me alone, though, as I kept coming back to them.  In the end, even though they were expensive, I decided to treat myself to 8 of them, but only if I found another cool design to complement them.  What goes with octopi, black and purple, though?   I already decided that the octopi would be on the out most side of the dresser drawers so something smaller could work.  I looked at black knobs, multi colored knobs, crystal knobs until I finally found the perfect knob:  a glass skull head.

Crazy, I know.  But I knew the skulls and octopi would look wicked cool against the purple drawer.  Unfortunately, the skulls were $5.00 each and I would need 8 of them.  My perfect drawer hardware had quickly became the most expensive part of the dresser.  I knew I couldn’t justify spending $100 on drawer pulls, no matter how cool they were.  I decided to revisit the hunt for the perfect drawer pulls in a few days and tried to put the octopi and skulls out of my mind.

A few days later, I returned to hobbylobby.com and saw a joyous sight:  Drawer pulls were on sale!  I did some quick math and realized that I could get the octopi and the skulls for $3 each!!  That was well within my budget and I quickly ordered them.  They arrived today.

As soon as I unwrapped them, I went to work.  For an agonizing minute I thought the octopi screws were too big for the existing holes in my drawers, but they fit with a little encouragement.  The skull next to the octopus, on a purple background looked as awesome as I had hoped.  The only thing I need to fix when I get the right tool is the inside screw length.  The skull screw, especially, is a little long inside the drawer.  For now, I’ll just have to be careful not to snag my clothes.

Skull and Octopus

Perfect Combo!

Careful with the long screw

So there you have it!  My flea market find $40 dresser with the ugly drawer handles has been transformed to an awesome purple and black dresser with bad ass drawer pulls.  I absolutely love it.

Before

Ugly Drawer Pulls

My New Dresser!

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Stripped, Primed and Painted

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create, dresser, life, paint, project, refurnish, reuse

After buying 3Ms Safest Stripper, I carefully read the directions and applied it on the dresser, paying special attention to the grooves.  As the label said, the product didn’t have a strong odor and was safe to use indoors.  The cats were not interested in it at all (which was a small miracle!)

I left the product on longer than I should have because it dried out (don’t let that happen, otherwise somewhere a puppy dies).  Despite this, the product worked pretty well.  The outside sides were easier to strip but the panels were almost as hard to strip as the grooves.  Stripping it completely took a lot more time that I had planned and some elbow grease to boot.  I’m sure if I was more patient and used the Stripper as it should have been used (in small sections without letting it dry), it would have been an easier job for me.  But I’m a little stubborn and there was something strangely therapeutic about chipping off paint from a piece of furniture.

When my dresser was completely stripped, it was time to buy the paint.  I decided to go with royal purple with black trim.  As the project was a completely indoor project with cats, I didn’t want to use spray paint or have any noxious fumes.  We headed to Lowe’s and I told the Paint Guy what I needed and he pointed me to Valspar furniture paint.  I was a little hesitant about the color choices until he told me that I could probably use any Valspar color I wanted.  So for the next thirty minutes I tortured Husband into helping me decide between Blackest Night or Noir and Purple Majesty or Huckleberry.  I finally made my color decisions and Paint Guy complemented me on my ‘bold’ choices.  He also recommended using a primer base coat so the colors were uniformed.

When I got home, I started painting the primer on the drawers and dresser.  The primer dried very quickly (less than an hour) so I was able to paint the drawers, but waited on painting the dresser itself.

The drawer fronts was painted purple as were the top and side panels of the dresser.  The sides of each drawer was painted black.  It looked fierce!

The next day I started painting the dresser purple.  It was relatively easy because I didn’t have to be too mindful of lines and grooves because if I made a mistake, I knew I could paint over it with the black paint.  I ended up painting three coats of purple to get the royal purple color I wanted.

The trim was a little harder and needed a steady hand, which meant no beer whilst painting.  Husband thought I was crazy because I wanted the outside trim, the grooves and the inside panel grooves to be black.  I felt like a surgeon with my precision painting, especially on the inside panel grooves.  But the attention to detail paid off.  Two coats later and a couple of ‘tidy ups’, I have a bad ass purple and black dresser.  And praise Jesus my cats are still white!

Now to find the perfect drawer pulls and for the final finishing touches.

To be continued . . .

Deceptive Drawers

Tags

art, create, DIY, life, paint, project, refurnish, reuse

I started the stripping stage of my dresser, and began with the dresser drawers.  The old paint came off very easily in long strips without need for a commercial stripper. It reminded me unfrosting a cake.  Stripping the drawers was fast work and when I was done, I moved on to the top of the dresser.

The top required a little more elbow grease and a cold beer, but wasn’t too difficult,  I was lured into believing the sides of the dresser would be just as easy.  Maybe, I thought, I could skip a commercial stripper altogether, except for the trim and the front of the dresser, which had the most trim.

Boy was I wrong.

The sides were a nightmare.  The paint wouldn’t even flake no matter how much I scrapped and swore.  I had to break down and get a commercial stripper in order to complete the job.

I had a major concern about using a stripper.  I knew I could only work on my dresser after work and the weather forecast was calling for rain.  We don’t have a garage and working on it outside wasn’t an option because of the rain.  I had to do everything inside and needed to find a stripper that didn’t have toxic fumes that would harm my family.

Luckily, 3M makes a product called Safest Stripper.  It is a paste stripper that can be used indoor and does not have a strong odor.  It also promised to work quickly.  I picked up a bottle at the local hardware store and couldn’t wait to try it.

In the meantime, I decided on purple.

To be continued . . .