Ugly dresser re-do part dos

You would never know that the dreamy dresser currently living in our guest bedroom was once an ugly pile of crap. I can kick myself now for not capturing a step by step of how I actually went about doing the makeover. I learned a lot while completing this project.. and made several mistakes that I know I won't be making in the future.
To refresh your memory:
barf.

And now the new and improved version:


I seriously cannot get enough of this dresser. Sometimes I go and stare at it when nobodys home.... whispering sweet nothings (which may or may not be borderline dresser sexual harassment). Here are a few more close ups of her sexy details:


Here's how I did it...
1) I picked up my hammer and removed all the hardware. No, thats not right... Screwdriver? Is that what that things called? Anyway, I removed all of them and their screws and placed them all in a bucket. I still have them in case anyone is interested in purchasing them at an inflated price. I promise they are totally awesome (and my totally awesome, what I mean is 'kind of smell like old lady' and 'downright scary).
2) I cleaned the snot of of that thing with a damp rag mixed with oxy clean to get any of the old lady goop off that may have been caked on.
3) I grabbed a tube of wood filler I had picked up at home depot. Please note that when you are using wood filler it is not wise to think 'oh, i'll just glob a big glob on and sand id down later. This will NOT work to your advantage in step 4...
4) I picked up a block of sandpaper and started sanding. 2 hours later I had about a square foot partially sanded and was ready to quit for good. None of my big globs of wood filler were able to be sanded down. Luckily I was able to borrow a hand held electric sander and got right back to it. Now i've heard that I should 'sand with the grain', which I did. Then I realized I was using paint, and not stain, and realized it probably didn't matter which way I sanded. I could have sanded upsidedown and backwards and I don't think it would have mattered. Because I blobbed on all that wood filler I was left with some raised bumps on my finished piece. No matter how long or hard i sanded these bumps would not go away. Granted I could probably have sanded longer and harder, but I was impatient and wanted somewhere to store my purses and short shorts asap).
4) After my arms became numb I figured i'd sanded enough. About 90% of the stain was off, and what hadn't come off was dull and faded. The faded blobs were still there. Damn those blobs...
5) I cleaned the snot out of the dresser again to get all that sawdust off. Although I had never done this before, I figured that mixing saw dust with a fresh coat of paint was bad news bears.
6) I used a foam roller and a small paintbrush to cover my entire piece with a coat of oil based primer (which BTW takes about 4 weeks to come off your skin. And is a pain in the rear-o to get off your paintbrush). In hindsight I should have sanded the primer once it dried to get a nice smooth finish.
7) I used a latex based paint in a semi gloss finish from behr and plopped that down over the coat of primer. I then used a clear coat to finish up the project. One mistake I wish I hadn't made was putting the clear coat onto the top and side edges of the drawer. It makes the drawer stick when trying to pull it out.
8) New hardware was added to the front and we dragged it upstairs to see how it would fit in our guest bedroom.

Other than my minor little snaffoos, I'm pretty happy with how this project turned out. I got a dresser for free, spent $45 on paint, primer, and new hardware, and got a fancy place to store all my things that aren't in season or are overflowing from my closet. LOVE IT!

Who has 2 thumbs and stinks at blogging? This girl.

So right after my last post we had a new addition to the family...
Please welcome Trixie!



There she is the day we brought her home. We adopted her from North Shore Animal League in Long Island, NY, which according to their website is the largest no-kill animal adoption and rescue organization in the world. We made the 2 hour drive for their annual adoptathon on May 1st. Even Cesar Milan made a visit!

Overall 620 homeless animals were adopted. We feel lucky to have found our sock stealing, barf in the car, toe licking monster. Here she is today (plus about 25 lbs)...

She is quite the ferocious beast. We have no idea what she is, but she entertains us daily. I can barely remember life without her!

Other things that have happened the past 3 months:
- we went to Chicago (TWICE) for our BFF's wedding festivities
- I finished painting and reupholstering EIGHT dining room chairs
- we updated our patio
- I FINALLY finished Mr. ugly cabinet with random curly thing on top.
- total re-do of our master bedroom closet (after buying a DIY closet kit for a 10 foot long closet.... and our closet is only 6 feet long....)

Whats planned for the next few months:
- repaint the great room a lighter color so I don't feel like we are living in a cave.
- make some new curtains with my new sewing machine!
- figure out how to work the new sewing machine
- try not to sew my shirt to my arm while using the sewing machine
- make some new pillowcases for our 'come with the couch' throw pillows
- paint the kitchen cabinets
- paint the kitchen
- install hardwood floors
- revamp the laundry closet

I could go on forever, but for now i'll leave it at that. My new goal is 1-2 new blogs per week for the next few weeks to get caught up. Then we can see where to go from there!

Free dresser magic

A few months ago I happened to somehow score a free dresser while picking up a cabinet I found on CL. When I arrived to pick up the cabinet the owner appeared to be moving out of her apartment in a frenzy. I was offered at least 4 or 5 random pieces of plastic 80's looking furniture for free before getting a glimpse at the dresser. Although it was in pretty rough shape, it had great lines and detail. I couldn't pass it up when I she told me it was free. I had big plans before I even got her home...
Here are some pictures of the cabinet before I got my hands on it:

This dresser needs more work than Heidi Montag.

Not even missing pieces of wood could deter me from tackling this project... look at that amazing detail!


Heres her side profile next to her BFF Mr. Ugly Cabinet with random curly thing on top (more on him later).

Next up... After shots of my lovely dresser with a play by play on her extreme makeover!

The paint swatch bandit

My latest DIY project (which is the bane of my existence and will be chronicled on here in a few weeks) consists of refinishing some dining room chairs I found on craigs list for a sweet price. While working on this project today I realized I needed to go to Home Depot to grab a few things. While there I couldn't resist stopping by the paint center to check out a few samples for yet another secret painting project I have in the works. While perusing around the paint swatches I realized I have had most of them in my possession at one time or another, however, have absolutely no clue as to what happened to them all. It was around this time that I realized that in order to be green and probably save Home Depot from bankruptcy due to my blatant abuse of their free swatch system I should probably just take them all. After a quick look over my shoulder to make sure I was in the clear I proceeded to grab every single Glidden neutral that I could find. When my stack started to protrude out of my sweatshirt pocket and look like I was trying to conceal actual merchandise I gave up... I told the blues, greens, purples, reds and yellows that I would be back for them one day soon. When I got home I took a few minutes to dig around for a spare key ring or 2 (finally! Hoarding random objects serves a purpose!), and this is what unfolded:

Oh tawny birch.. your tawny birchness is the hi-light of my day. What's that? You see my hold punch coming towards you at a rapid speed? Don't worry... this won't hurt a bit...

See? What did I tell you. Next step is to join your friends on the color wheel-o-fun...

There you go.


Ta da! Glorious! Now I can cut back on wasteful paint swatch thievery and have all of my swatches organized and within arms reach. I may even wear them around my neck and call it fashion. Heidi Klum's got nothing on me.

Adventures in booger green

When we bought the house I was determined to have at least one room painted before we did anything else. The room that I sacrificed to the inexperienced painter gods just happened to be our bedroom. The place that was supposed to scream peace and relaxation. While lurking around on Rate My Space I found a bedroom that was bold and in your face. And it included... an accent wall. My thought process was something like this: Accent wall? Do I need one of those? If I do it then it might sound like I know what I'm doing. It's just paint, I can always re-do it. What colors did this lady use.... green and khaki? How hard can that be?
Little did I know at the time, but there are approximately 4,953 shades of both khaki and green. I picked out 2 that were near eachother on the paint wall and dove in head first. When all was said and done it took us 2 weeks to paint one room. ONE ROOM!!! We made every mistake that the beginning painter can make. Paint on the ceiling, too much paint on the brush, gloopy drips down the wall, painting while drunk (ok maybe not completely drunk, but a glass or 2 of wine will definately impair your painting know-how). You name it we did it.
In the end, we wound up with this:

My attempts at soft khaki and complementary green actually looked like the colors of mustard and relish. Granted those 2 things are TOTALLY complementary... To a hot dog. And ladies and gentlemen, my bedroom is not a hot dog.
Here is a close up of the corner:
(blech).
After 2 weeks of painting hell Mike and I both told each other we liked it and went about our business. In reality coming into that room after a long day of work was downright depressing. When I mentioned to Mike that I was thinking about re-painting it what I got was "Thank god... That room reminds me of boogers". And so I made it my mission in life to start the bedroom off on the right track. After weeks of deliberation the color I settled on was Antique Silver by Glidden. I love Glidden's color wall, mainly due to the fact that it is completely NOT overwhelming. They also offer those nifty little tester bottles (which come in handy for touch ups down the line). It took me 8 hours to prime and paint this ENTIRE ROOM (which was a long way from our first 2 week fiasco)!
Here is my end result:

I'm going to have to snap a photo in the daytime. This was taken immediately after the bed was put back into place (I couldn't help it, I was giddy with excitement). And don't get me wrong this room is far from finished. Our big plans include crown molding, some wall art, fancy window shades and plans for a DIY floor mirror in there to bounce some light all over the place.
Thanks again for stopping in to check out my spaces and listen to me rambling... up next my attempt to take a free(!) dresser I scored on craigslist from broke down and scary to my favorite piece in the house...

Whoops...

I have to admit that I got lazy. In fact, I didn't even tell anyone that I had started blogging back in September because I didn't want my friends or family to actually try and follow me in blog world. I had a feeling blogging was going to go south quickly, considering our wedding was coming up fast.
Our timeline went something like this:
8.08 - Get engaged!
8.08 - 6.09 - Sit around, eat bacon and cake, and procrastinate wedding planning.
7.09 - Decide on a whim to have a wedding in 6 months.
9.09 - Realize we haven't actually done any wedding planning. Crap.
You can imagine the madness that happened after this. Long story short, to date we have made it through 3 whole months of wedded bliss. I consider that a success.

We shall talk more about wedding things later, but now, back to our house. One of the major selling points of our house was a huge great room with cathedral ceilings. The combination living/dining area lured us in and had us at hello. The first issue we had was painting this bad boy. When we first moved in I was convinced we needed to go bold. This ultimately led to some scary choices for paint in both the kitchen and the bedroom. Think bizarre accent walls and pea soup green. I'm still scared thinking about it. Luckily for the great room I took my time and did my research on keeping things cohesive with paint. Our original color scheme in the house included a yellowish brown color in our mediocre great room. The rest of the house hadn't seen a paint brush since the dry wall was covered up with basic white. It was around the same time that I was doing my research that I found out about Glidden's big paint giveaway. It was probably the most exciting thing to happen to me since I discovered loaded baked potatoes. After careful selection I decided on 'soft suede' for my free color. In the neutral family, it looked dark, but not too dark. After living with a giant square on my wall for a few weeks I decided to go for it. We picked a complementary color for the ceiling, although now I kind of wish we'd gone darker. Feel free to let me know what you think:

Here is the view from our front door towards our gigantic room... (the color doesn't look so bad, does it? That may have something to do with the minimal amount of light we get up here. It's almost cave like. I'm pretty sure I saw some bats flying around once...)

Here is my man slave getting down and dirty with some spackle in the living room area of the room.

Is that a church or my house?! Here is the white ceiling in all of it's ridiculous glory. It draws the eye up, and not in a good way. I'd love to eventually throw some beams up there and call it a day. And don't worry, the ceiling fans will eventually be a thing of the past. But onto the painting...
After recruiting the fam for a day to help me paint...


And the end result:

Not too much darker, but enough to make a drastic difference. In all about a million times better than what it was. We are going to have to see how it contrasts with our dark wood floors, which will hopefully soon be installed. I'm not opposed to changing it up if we can find sa color we like better. For now this will have to work. Up next? Our booger green accent wall bedroom makeover. Stick around, you won't want to miss that fiasco.

One Year

I can't believe it's been a year since we're moved into our house! It seems like yesterday that we took the plunge and put in an offer on our first home. We had been vigorously looking at houses for 2 months, and had seen so many that they were all staring to blur together. Mike wanted something new that wouldn't need much work, and I was open to a fixer-upper. With such different requirements we pretty much requested to see anything and everything in our price range. Looking back on it we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort by being more selective in which houses we wanted to visit. After 2 months, 50+ houses, and a lot of aggravation, Mike decided we should expand our search to a neighboring county. I was hesitant because I knew that looking outside of our target zone potentially meant higher property taxes and/or longer commutes for the both of us. Expanding our search to another county also meant ditching our realtor... the realtor who had spent many hours showing us all those houses that weren't quite up to par. Needless to say, she wasn't too thrilled.

On day 1 with our new realtor we had 7 or 8 houses lined up to see. There were a few houses that Mike and I were excited to see, but when we actually saw the first few in person we weren't all that impressed. There was the early 90's bi-level house. Immaculate landscaping... lovely exterior... and about 13 cats lurking within. I can't even imagine how we would have begun to get the smells out. There was the cute bungalo which must have been photographed with a wide angle lens, because all of the rooms were only slightly bigger than walk-in closets. Oh, and there was an entire zoo of dead stuffed creatures in the basement. Birds suspended from the ceiling, bears ready to eat you... It was enough to give me nightmares for weeks. Finally we pulled up to the last house of the day. It was built in 2001, and the price had just been lowered an astonishing amount. One look at the outside and I knew I was in love. The minute we stepped foot inside I turned to Mike and said "I'm sold". Walking through the house it was obvious that it had all the 'new house perks' we were looking for (i.e., central air, lots of storage and an open floor plan). During our walk-through I also noticed that everything in the house was pretty much "builder basic". It was obvious that whoever owned this house had done zero upgrades to it. I liked the fact that even though it was newer, we could still add our own personal touches. We left completely enamored with this house, and told our realtor we wanted to sleep on it. We didn't want to seem too eager, although by the time we arrived home our minds were pretty much made up.

The very next day Mike caught me off guard and proposed.

24 short hours after that we put in an offer on the house... which was accepted! The next month and a half would be a whirl wind of lawyers, mortgages, inspections, and finally packing up our things and moving them into our first house. The house we would work on making our home.

It's been a year since we got here, and we are fully enjoying being homeowners. We have been making little updates here and there, and with all the other things we have going on right now I am ok with what we have done. Hopefully after the wedding is over we will be able to focus more of our energy on our home. I hope to document the changes we make along the way via blog, so I hope you find me interesting enough to stop by often and let me know what you think.

Thanks for stopping in :)
Kristen