Pretty Paisley

I went looking for a new dresser to makeover and I hit all my local thrift stores. No luck at the first and second one but at the third store I spotted this dresser and quickly checked it out. A little too quickly. I wanted to get a sold sticker on it so no one else would try to snap it up. I should have taken a closer look but I was looking for anything to take home at that point.



It's an okay dresser, but not great. The top and drawer fronts are pine (a very soft wood) so they are kinda banged up. I thought the drawers were wood at first look but they are actually MDF with a pretty convincing woodgrain-looking paper on it. Boo. Even though the dresser was only $3.50 (yep, you read that right, only 3.50!) I felt like I should have passed on it.

I got it home and tried to rough it up with some sandpaper but it seemed the stain on it was too thick. It didn't work very well. Although the dresser has some problems, the drawers do slide smoothly and it's clean, so I went ahead with the paint job.





I still had paint leftover from the can I bought for a previous dresser so I used that. I also had more of those wooden oversized knobs that I bought at the Re-Store (aka my favorite store) for $0.25/knob.

Since I had already done two dressers with pink accents I thought I would change it up and do one with blue. I went to Michaels and picked up some Robin's Egg Blue acrylic paint and a paisley stencil.



I tried using a sponge brush with the stencil on a practice piece of wood but it didn't have a crisp enough outline for me. So instead I used a light blue pencil crayon and traced the stencil in the corner. I then used a tiny little brush and painted in the stencil with the blue acrylic paint. It was pretty tedious but only took an hour and half while I watched some tv. Not too bad.




I like this dresser but I don't love it. I'm having a hard time pricing it (so far I've sold all the dressers) because it's not solid wood. It's cuter than anything you can buy at Walmart (not that I'm biased or anything) which is all MDF but this dresser is not new. I guess I'll just have to pick a price and go with it and see what happens!