say goodbye to ugly furniture.

so lately (over the past year or so.. does that qualify as "lately?") i have been realizing the waste of throwing away old furniture. when i was a newlywed i was that bride who thought she needed to have all new things. you know, the one who gets all overwhelmed because she thinks her house should be full of new furniture and look finished like her parent's house, so she goes and buys all new stuff on a credit card and gets herself into trouble. yah.. thankfully, my husband is a very smart man and didn't let his new bride get them both into all sorts of credit card debt (thank God for that!) so i had to live with old, ugly furniture i hated. or did i? for some reason it didn't even occur to me to update these pieces until we were about to move. i was just living with these ugly pieces and thinking i was just waiting to buy new ones. what a waste of furniture! now i know a tiny bit of creativity (trust me, it only takes a teeny tiny bit) can make you love the furniture you already have so much more! no spending a billion dollars (i don't have) on new stuff!! yay!

let's talk about my bedroom dresser. now... this thing was ugly. i have stained it, which i will show, then decided i didn't like it and painted it. i wish i had a before-before picture. this is the closest thing i have (please don't judge).

 on my gosh this thing was a mess. it sat in a horrible spot in our bedroom in st louis (i guess i hated it so i thought there was no hope, so why bother?) and it had this terrible wooden rim that went around the top of the dresser, along the back and sides. and along the back of the rim, it got larger and there was... get ready... a big heart carved out of it. ICK. i could not stand this thing. so phil, of course, put his big ugly stereo on top of it and it became the place where our ugly junk collected. romantic. (nice blanket over the window too, huh? classy.) and that was our bedroom dresser. it makes me laugh now, but whoa. it made me hate our room and not really try to make it look any nicer.
thankfully my dad used to own a construction business, so he has all sorts of awesome tools. when we moved down here, the big ol' rim with the cute-sy heart got the saw. yep. he took an electric saw to it and the heavens sang when that horrible piece of wood came crashing off of the dresser to the floor. i think even the dresser was thanking the Lord that the hideous piece was gone. amen!

so then we sanded, stripped, restained and refinished the dresser. and it looked like this:

and i still didn't like it. it looked well... not very good. we worked so hard, but i think it's just the finish i used was no good. we used a spray finish instead of brushing it on. that was a mistake. i won't do that ever again. so while this was a GIANT improvement, it still wasn't good. we spent a good amount of money buying sandpaper, varnish stripping stuff, some tools, stain and finish. not as much as buying a new dresser certainly, but it was still a good amount of money so i was hesitant to paint it even though i didn't like it. well, one day phil accidentally bought the wrong color of paint for our wall, so now that we had it i used it to paint the dresser! (we are using it for a couple other projects soon that i will post about too.) just because we spent money trying to get our dresser a certain way well, it didn't work! so why leave it a way that you don't like it just because you spent money on it? i mean, that seems silly. so now she's painted and happy and looking like this:

much better in my opinion. the legs will be painted silver soon i think and i will add knobs as soon as i figure out what i want...

confession: i didn't pull the dresser away from the wall when i did this because i was being lazy. then i messed up the wall.. ha oops : ) and the be 100% honest, one side is still left unpainted since i have to pull it out to get to it. haha oh gee.. oh well, nobody said it had to be perfect! : )