Dressing up the Dresser

As I mentioned in THIS post, two weekends ago I was inspired to do a craft project. I had been collecting the materials and waiting on the perfect paper and luckily I found some at Paper Source.

Someone had given me this dresser and although it’s in really good condition, it was decidedly too plain for my liking.

It’s the first thing you see when you look into my bedroom, so I thought I’d give it a little more life. Here is my cast of characters:

I started with the screw driver to take off all of the dresser pulls and once these were off, I made sure to dust off and clean the dresser before I did anything else.

Then I measured the area of each drawer that I wanted to apply the paper to and cut out this length on the paper. In my case, the longer drawers required me to match up the pattern and extend the paper because it wasn’t long enough. I worried that it wouldn’t look right, but you really don’t notice it.

I applied mod podge (which has the texture of Elmer's glue) with a paint brush to the wooden drawer area, laid the paper on top, smoothed it over with the credit card (select a card you don’t ever plan on using!) and then just let it dry. Some tutorials I read online suggested applying mod podge on top of the paper once it’s been applied, but I kind of felt like this was unnecessary, except around the seam area.

After some meticulous measurements, cutting and painting with glue I had this:

I opted to keep the brass handles because I thought they tied the design and wood together. I’ve contemplated spray painting them but it seems like the paint would just wear off since I actually use this dresser.

I did however, want to replace the top pulls with knobs, so with a little searching I found these turquoise cuties at Hobby Lobby (which we don’t have around here so my mom picked them up)

Turquoise and damask! Perfection!

My finished product! I’m so pleased with how this turned out and if I move and decide I want more of a statement pattern, its easy to tear this off and replace with new (or so I’ve been told).

This also started a paper frenzy in me! And with great inspiration pieces like:

via living la vida rita

The oh so plain but necessary ANEBODA ikea wardrobe in my bedroom (the image above is in the ANEBODA family) needs something fabulous like this.

and of course my filing cabinet that’s currently sitting in my living room could use this:

via design*sponge

I found this gorgeous wrapping paper this weekend that I plan on applying to the third dresser in my bedroom (old apartments have NO closet space, so yes, I have two dressers and a wardrobe in my bedroom). Hopefully I’ll get to that soon…

My green bedroom

Moving into this apartment, I had a lot of ideas for my living room. I knew what I wanted to purchase, knew where the furniture needed to be placed, and re-arranged it rather quickly and much to my satisfaction.

But the bedroom...is a different story. I have little closet space, so a wardrobe and dresser was necessary. Plus, I have a slim dresser that matches my malm bed so I had to keep that. As of right now, I have a black bed and dresser on one wall, a very light maple wood wardrobe on the wall adjacent to that and a cherry dresser in the opposite corner. If I had the motivation, I would stain at least the dresser, but frankly that's a lot of work and in an enclosed space.

So my best bet is decorate! And I need some opinions.

I scored this great piece of wall art at Urban Outfitters yesterday.

As you can see, the left side of it has some water damage (from the Rhode Island Flood of 2010) which made this normally $40-50 print a whole $5!

My plan, as of right now, is to hang it over this awkward space where my bed is. I say awkward because there’s a window over part of my bed (as you can see HERE) so my desire to have something placed centered over my bed is impossible. I think I’m going to hang it over to the side as you can sort of see below:

I just love the look of that bright green and the black. It’s so springy! And I was thinking, why not add some additional tree prints to make a kind of leafy collage of sorts. What do you think?

I have an idea for the other wall which is completely bare that may or may not involve a floral print and a moose head, so the new theme for the bedroom will probably be natureish.

Also, I’ll share my other Urban Outfitter deals because they’re so cute. I got this great pillow which I loved when it was on sale for $20, and they cut it down to $10. Have you looked at the price of pillows lately? I’m dumbfounded, I can’t wait to have a sewing machine because some of these prices are crazy! But $10 I’m willing to pay.

And I got this adorable clock for my living room. I tried to make one which I might share later, but I can’t figure out how to make the hour hand rotate properly…hm. But I do love this one and it looks great with the tree coasters that I also purchased at UO a few weeks ago.

I do love my living room. Let’s hope the bedroom is able to come together just as nicely.