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Mastering the Master Bedroom {the Thrift Store Cast-Off Dresser}

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If I can impart only one piece of knowledge today, I want it to be this:  When you find a piece in a thrift store that is exactly what you are looking for and the price is right, purchase it immediately. Should you give yourself time to “sleep on it,” you will obsess about it and then run the possibility of it not being there when you go back bright and early the next morning.  This very scenario has happened to me on numerous occasions.

Luckily, this is not the story of one of those times.  Instead, I obsessed about this thrift store dresser for about 29 hours before I called my husband at work and asked if he’d go buy it if it was still there when he got of off work.  It was.

 

When we went to pick it up, we promptly donated the mirror back to the thrift store (I did not feel like I could repurpose it because of the way it was made) and brought the dresser back to our garage.  There it sat while I finished this dresser and these walls.

I would normally hand roll a huge piece of furniture like this, but for the sake of time (and laziness), I decided to spray paint it.  I used Kilz spray primer on a whim (which I learned I do not prefer over my beloved Zinsser spray primer), and then painted it with Krylon Classic Gray.  After it dried, I glazed it with my Ralph Lauren glaze tinted in Black Silk and applied 2 coats of wipe-on polyurethane.  I spray painted the original brass handles, lined the drawers with Contact paper, and moved the wavy dresser into the master bedroom.

I get the greatest pleasure from seeing a thrift store cast-off become my new favorite piece of furniture.  I can’t believe I didn’t immediately claim it in the store by licking it or something.  That would have been pretty gross, huh?  Anyway, I’m glad no one else in those 29 hours we were apart saw it for the jewel that it was to become.

If you would have seen this dresser at the thrift store, would you have tried to fight me for it?

Joining Motivated Monday at Be Colorful.

Note to Self

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On Saturday morning, I got up before the rest of my family to spray paint my now unsmelly thrift store dresser.  When you live where I live, the best spray painting is done before 7 am when it’s not too hot and the wind is eerily still.  Crazy, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The grass was dewey when I headed into the backyard, so I put down a plastic tarp to protect my dresser.  I normally use a canvas tarp when painting, but I didn’t want the grass to get it wet.

After I painted the dresser, we ran some errands and then came back home to bring the it inside.  Tom and I were surprised to see how much moisture was on the bottom of the plastic tarp.  I guess the sun had drawn all of the moisture out of the grass, which, in turn, became severely dehydrated in a few short hours.

The good news is that my dresser looks amazing (and I will reveal it to you soon).  The bad news is that the grass now looks like this:

Note to self: 100 degree heat + plastic sheeting over moist lawn = dead grass.  Hopefully, it will come back pretty quickly.  If not, our backyard will serve as a reminder of my stupidity for the rest of the summer.