Project: Dresser { Notes }

I thought I'd talk about the choices I made, the inspiration behind them and the tutorial I used that resulted in my favourite piece of furniture in my house (to date anyway).

The original plan for the alcoves on both sides of the dining room fireplace had been to put in shelves, because that's what normally goes in alcoves, right? I'm a big fan of different sized shelves, I like having books and curiosities displayed for all to see, possibly because it reminds me of those little magical book stores with all their nooks and crannies. I'd pinned some inspirational pictures as per normal:

{ Source: Flikr }

{ Source: Pinterest }

That plan had been in place several months now, I'd even talked over building them myself with my Mum, and how we'd construct them. It stayed my plan right up until I visited some friends in the village who moved here around the same time as me and are also doing up their own house. They'd bought a lovely pine dresser from eBay for their dining room. I love dressers, I'd just not thought about getting one as it didn't fit in with my idea of what storage I was after. After seeing theirs I completely changed my mind!

As it turned out, I had pinned a couple of pictures of dressers to my house inspiration board. The second was my direct inspiration for the style and colour of my dresser.

{ Source: Sally's Zuhause }

{ A Tapestry of Dreams }

I toyed with the idea of keeping the table top part natural wood to match my dining table but as it turned out it had been stained far darker and would have looked wrong.

I was very clear that this was going to be my sewing cupboard, everything crafty was going to be stored in the one place. I also loved the blues and greens that shabby chic seems to be predominantly painted in.

1. Cupboards 2. Door 3. Door
4. Mirror 5. Shelves 6. Crate
7. Cupboard 8. Cupboard & Shelves 9. Drawers

Picture #7 was a direct inspiration for the way that I wanted to shabby up the paint. I love the white and blue, and I did toy with painting the entire thing blue but I plan on painting the double doors to the lounge a light blue and felt that it would be too much to have another large piece of furniture the same or similar colour, and I do love white furniture. The corner the dresser's in doesn't catch an awful lot of sunlight, despite its placement right next to a huge window. The back faces north and between the mountains on either side and the house next door my little dresser's corner doesn't get very much sun, it made photographing it very difficult! Painting it white brings a little more much needed brightness to that corner of the room.

I'd found a couple of tutorials on painting, pinned to pinterest of course! I loved the idea of pulling a colour through under the white and this tutorial offered just that.

{ Source: Brassy Apple }

I didn't have any solid soap, so I borrowed the idea of a candle from this tutorial and it worked perfectly. I got a bit carried away and in a couple of places used the candle on the blue undercoat where I shouldn't have because I wanted blue and not wood, but live and learn!

The end result is some great flashes of blue, not really noticeable but visible when you look.

The ceramic striped handles were another eBay purchase and cost ... well, rather a lot actually, but are totally worth it! Aren't they great?

The only real issue I came across (other than tired arms from all the damned painting) was the very large gaps above the doors on the bottom cupboard that hadn't really been noticeable when the wood was dark. As you can see, the white paint made it very noticeable!

Luckily it was easily fixable and for less than £1! Usually, where drawers are built in to cupboards there are strips of wood running horizontally along the underside of the drawer to prevent just this sort of problem. In this case no such strip existed. In the picture below you can see the support for the drawer on the left, basically the drawer runner, but no wood under the drawer itself along the front as you'd expect.

So I nipped to my local B&Q and picked up a small piece of trim for around 79p, measured and cut it to almost the right size (I used a saw and didn't cut anything vital, yay left-handed me!). I then painted it, sanded the edges and got this:

Which I then wedged in place:

Ta da! Instant hole filler! See:

Have you painted your own furniture? Have you any tips? I've got several more pieces in mind to purchase that are all going to need to be re-vamped, any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for stopping by,