Growing Up In Oz

I am by no means a DIY blogger.

 

In fact, I’m not even much of a blogger these days so the fact that I’m trying to put together this post complete with pictures that I am terrible at taking is almost comedic. But I loved this project so hard that I thought I’d give it a shot and also give you a glimpse into what DIY projects are like in MY house. Hint: they include lots of beer and/or wine.

 

Materials Needed:

1. “Tall Boy” style dresser or “chest of drawers” as you Southerners call it.
2. MDF or plywood for shelf
3. Whatever tools your husband uses to cut the shelf (ha! see… I’m so precise)
4. Beer
5. Primer
6. Paint
7. Wine
8. Clear coat poly (we used Minwax clear water-based)
9. 220 grit sand paper
10. Shower Rod
11. Wrapping Paper for inside of dresser and shelf
12. Modge Podge for applying wrapping paper.
13. Foam Roller
14. Exacto Knife (for trimming paper)
15. MORE WINE & BEER & patience
16. Mirror and Hooks for sides of dresser

Time Needed:

1. In our case, 3 months. In yours, probably a week.

Step One:

Acquire veneer dresser from your parents that will be perfect for dress-up station. Make your husband pull out all the drawers and hardware except the bottom drawer and add a shelf on top of the drawer. Take a crappy instagram picture. Stare at the dresser in your garage for 2.5 months.  Drink lots of beer and wine in those 2.5 months. Talk about how you need to finish the project, never actually do anything about.

Step Two:

Get high from some some 65 degree weather in late January, decide to actually pull out the dresser and prime it using this stuff:

Yell at your husband for not using a mask while priming. Don’t actually get mad enough to do it yourself.

Take a few pictures of the dresser primed.

Drink a few beers because it’s a gorgeous day and you don’t ever do any more work than one step in a day because that would be PRODUCTIVE.

Note: this is not the actual Shiner I drank that day, just use your imagination.

Step Three:

Paint the dresser. Ours was veneer. It took two coats. We used the leftover pink paint from Madison’s nursery. Yes, Madison. Clint and I are notorious for over buying paint. It seems bad at the time but we generally always have paint lying around for other projects so I guess it works out?

Step Four:

Poly. This part is a giant pain because you have to be really diligent about straight brush strokes, yadda yadda yadda. I left this part for Clint. You have to wait for it to dry and lightly sand it and then wipe it down and do it again. We used two coats. If this was a piece of furniture that would be in the main part of our house I probably would have done a third but we made this for our preschooler and toddler to play with so we choose the “eh, this is good enough route.”

Step Five:

Pick out wrapping paper to cover the insides of the dresser and the shelf. Put the beer on ice (trust me). This process was terrible. I’m not going to sugar coat it. There was lots of tearing out of paper, near breakdowns (me) and general displeasure for the route I chose. Just keeping it real, there are a LOT of bubbles in the wrapping paper. We chose to deal with it. Once everything is IN the dresser you can barely see them and again, this is for little kids. You may want to use wallpaper, it’s probably a lot more forgiving. This was the most time consuming part of the process. I used a foam roller and modge podge to adhere it to the dresser. Then used 3 coats of modge podge on top to make it durable.

Step Six:

Curse yourself for not being careful with the modge podge. That stuff stains the paint. This set us back half a day. We had to sand down part of the dresser, re-paint and re-poly. Damn modge podge.

Step Seven:

Install shower rod.

Step Eight:

Add mirror & hooks for jewelry on either side.

Step Nine: 

Fill it with fun stuff and drink another beer because you deserve it! Watch your girls fall in love with it and know it was all worth it.

 

In all seriousness, this project was so much fun and my girls immediately dug into it and started playing. We had most of the stuff on hand so I would say the project cost us less than $50 total (my parents gave us the dresser). If you have any questions on paint colors or where we got anything in particular, feel free to ask!