I’ve always loved my little white dresser. I bought it second-hand during my senior year of college to store my ever-expanding wardrobe and to help my bedroom looks less spartan. The paint job wasn’t great. It had been quickly painted with a single coat of white paint that left splotches of the wood showing through. There was a giant splinter coming off the corner of one of the drawers. And a few of the knobs were stripped to the point that they cannot be tightened. But I liked that it was solid wood and the perfect size to provide a decent amount of storage without being obtrusive.

When I moved to my current apartment, white actually went quite well with the color scheme. The paint job was still splotchy and the knobs were still janky, but it actually looked all right. And then I redid my birdcage stand. After months and months of idly scrolling through DIY blogs, dreaming of one day doing a project like that myself, finally did and it was pretty easy. I figured I might as well do it again.

I decided to try something a little more interesting, and settled on a two-color design. I also would use this opportunity to change out the stripped plastic knobs for new metal ones. I picked a shade of blue that I thought went well with the leftover green paint, and dragged the dresser down all three flights of stairs to my parking spot in the basement. After sanding the whole thing down and priming it (a very important step), I painted on all of the green. This included the raised front face of the drawers and a rectangular border along the top. I painted the rest of the dresser blue, including the borders of the drawers, and use painters tape to block off that green rectangle so that it can stay green. This is not turn out perfectly but I deemed it good enough.

The blue did not turn out as deep as maybe I would have liked, and some of the pencil outline of the green rectangle still shows through. It’s definitely not perfect, but it has a little more personality than just a plain white dresser, and now at least all the knobs are fully functional. After my Marie Kondo spree a couple years ago, it graduated from being a clothes dresser to being my substitute linen cabinet, a job which suits it very well.

-Erica

(There are going to be a lot of generic cover images for two reasons. One, I’m playing catch-up and taking actual photos just falls by the wayside. Two, I don’t have any “before” pics because I painted the dresser long before I started this blog)

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