dresser: before and after

Faith and Brett Hall asked me to paint a dresser for their baby's room, but before we get into the nitty gritty details of baby changing table makeover let's just talk about how flipping adorable Faith's baby bump pictures are... she posed with the fruit that Baby Hall is the size of that week. It doesn't hurt that she's a great photographer and has an eye for fun shots.

Here are the colors Faith and Brett are working with, all inspired by this feminine but not typically pink girls' room fabric. I love it.

Without further ado, here is their hand-me-down dresser:

Here is the dresser top after a rigorous (and I mean workout level!) sanding job.

The entire dresser was dutifully sanded to get off any polyurethane. I was completely covered and then forgot about that fact that my back was so covered with red dust when I sat down in the chair in Drew's room to nurse him. Oops, sorry white chair and thank goodness for bleach.

The next muy importante step was to whip down the whole dresser with a damp rag so none of the dust will get into your paint or primer. See everything that's on the rag... yeah... that's what's on my white chair now.

While I painted my little musician sat next to me serenading me. The paint was water based so the smells weren't bad for him, or me for that matter. I can just see people wondering if I'm giving my son some brain damage from painting near him.

Here is the amazing primer Faith picked up for me. I coated the dresser with two coats of it and it was thick enough that the former stain color never came through.

I've got everything laying down in this next photo so I could get at all angles with the primer. I did two coats and it covered just like the photo on the right. It doesn't matter if it looks worn, the paint will still cover beautifully.

Next step... the fun part... finding out if the paint color will look different on the piece of furniture from the color that the nice man at Lowe's dabbed onto a dime size amount on the top of the can. I poured it all out into a Tupperware covered in tin foil and immediately loved the color, but it wasn't until I got two coats on that I really noticed the difference between white and this blue / green color. Oh, and side note: I love, love, love cheapo foam brushes for nearly any kind of painting, they reduce lines so well!

Here is the dresser after three coats of paint and after I went over little spots with sandpaper where I noticed a little uneven texture. I'm not putting on the knobs because Faith plans to get some fabulous ones from Anthropologie (I'm mean, are there any non-fabulous knobs from Anthropologie?).

The color in the photo above isn't true to life, which is mildly frustrating when trying to shoot a flattering "after" photo. And then of course the sky looked like it was going to downpour so I brought the dresser inside by myself (not fun when your sciatic nerve is spazing out) and took some photos with the flash on to see if it would make a difference in the way the actual color was represented. It did. Although, the best way to see the actual color is to look at the photo of the swatch at the beginning of the post. Once I can get a better photo I'll post it!

So, there you have it. This morning you saw the evolution of a Popsicle and this afternoon you see the evolution of a dresser.