a new project

A few nights ago I was casually searching through the local Craigslist when I found a dresser, quite large with cute hardware and made of solid wood, for $15 dollars! Even though it was 9:30pm and we were about to go to bed, we called the guy up, he said come and get it, and we zipped right over. Luckily he lived in a neighborhood just a few blocks away!

This is the dresser. It's an antique, but somewhere along the way somebody updated it with modern drawer runner-thingies. Some of those were broken and the drawers no longer slide in and out properly, so my husband took them all off and will install new ones when I'm done painting. I didn't get a chance to snap a picture before he took the runners off, so I sort of haphazardly stuffed the drawers back in there to get a photo. That's why they look so unstable and wonky.

The wood is so dark and pretty that it really kills me to paint it at all, but sadly this dresser is a bit of a fixer-upper. A lot of the trim on the drawers need repair, a few holes need filling, etc. and there's just no way to fix it up and not paint it. I went to Home Depot yesterday to pick out paint, and was very excited to see that they finally have the Martha Stewart paints available for purchase there! I love her colors, and love how there's a little symbol system with a symbol on each paint chip, helping you see what colors would coordinate well.

I was immediately drawn to the "Ballet Slipper Pink", and used the little symbol system to pick out coordinating colors. Love this!

For this dresser, however, I am going with a very trendy color scheme since this dresser is just for fun and I plan to sell it when I'm done (we have enough dressers!) I chose Martha's "Zinc", which is a dark gray shade, and found a whole gallon of butter yellow on sale for just 5 dollars in the "oops" section. Gray and yellow seems to be the hot color combo right now, I'm seeing it on practically every decor blog, so I'm going with gray on the outside and yellow on the inside of the drawers for a fun surprise when you open them up.

Working on it tonight, hope to post pictures by tomorrow night or Friday at the latest!