One project down.

As I've mentioned in several posts, Dale and I (mostly I, but he does help when he's not working) are slowly giving our house a teeny facelift. Mainly paint and decorating, but I'm hoping, that over the next year, we will have the house refreshed and better organized.

With that goal in mind, one of the problems/DIY project on our list,  has been to figure out garden storage. We have a small, lean-to, style shed against the side of the house that plays the part of "catch all" for our gardening detritus. Lawnmower, wheelbarrow, shovels, rakes, bags of soil, buckets, small garden tools, fertilizer, hose pieces, etc. are all piled in the little shed and most of it has to be removed each time the lawn needs to be mowed. I thought that a nice dresser or small hutch, painted as a part of the backyard decor, might be a partial solution. At least we would get the little bits out of the shed......

I trolled Kijiji for about a month, looking for something cheap (like under $50 cheap), but solid and didn't really find what I was looking for (it had to fit in a certain spot against the house). One day I drove past a garage sale and found the perfect dresser... for $20. The gentleman selling it, said it was solid wood and it was hard to tell because he had painted it with some kind of super thick plastic deck paint, but I thought we'd give it a go.

I forgot to take a good picture of the before, this will have to do.

It sat in the garage all summer, until it finally rose to the top of the "honey do" list and Dale started the stripping process. He found out pretty quickly that it was NOT solid, but some kind of laminate over pine. The laminate didn't make it through the stripping process (nor did the drawer bottoms or bottom of the cabinet, but I'll fix that in the spring) and it turned out to be a much larger, more expensive job than I had anticipated. I was finally able to start staining on the weekend. My plan was to stain the body of the dresser one colour and all of the drawer fronts and doors different colours. I think it turned out looking fabulous, but the cost and effort of the redo, relative to the  quality of the initial (and ending) piece of furniture was not worth it. I think we'll have paid over $200 in stripper, stain, varnish, new drawer bases and pulls which would have been worth it had the dresser been of better quality.  Something for me to think about in the future, that is for certain.

Here it is after being stripped. Again, I need to learn to take better pictures, but you can see the inside, bottom of the cabinet is trashed. All of the drawers are the same.


It does look pretty though. The cabinet itself is stained dark red, the largest door was stained purple, but it looks dark brown, which is unfortunate. I LOVE the teal/turquoise doors! In retrospect, I wish I had stained the entire cabinet with that stain..... I couldn't wait to show you, even though I have yet to put on handles and pulls and fix the drawers. I don't plan to do that until Spring though.

I can totally picture it with a flower pot on the top. What do you think?