Très Belle Dresser

Oh la la.. I don't even know what else to call this dresser but très belle.  I just think it is so very pretty.

I know I say this a lot, but this is one of my favorite makeovers.  This one just turned out so much more lovely than I expected.

I started with this dresser....  Nothing special to look at and she had some pretty significant flaws..

This is actually the 2nd makeover to this girl.  The 1st one was beautiful, but she wasn't moving and just needed something different.  I won't lie... I tried a couple of different colors that I had on hand.  Nothing was standing out saying "this is it, this is what I want to be".

I sat on it for a few days.  Nothing!  And, so as I was working on another project, I just started going over all the possibilities.  And, right in the middle of waxing another piece it smacked me in the head.  Naturally I couldn't finish waxing fast enough.

I went and pulled this poster out from my stash ....

It is a fairly large poster..  I took out all of the drawers laid the poster across and it was a perfect fit!  It was meant to be!!

I painted the entire dresser in a custom mixed paint.  I mixed up some paint to compliment the blue in the poster as closely as I could.

How I did this was laying the poster over the 3 drawers and marking where I'd want my cuts.  I didn't need them to be perfect since I knew I'd be distressing.

Once my paint was dry I used mod podge to decoupage the poster to the drawers.  Keep in mind that the poster will bubble a bit when you first start with the mod podge.  If you are worried about that, there is a trick that you can use.  It bubbles since the paper gets wet.  You can spray the poster with polycrylic spray and let dry.  This prevents the poster from getting wet.  I prefer just to go with it and work out the bubbles.

While the edges were moist from the glue I lightly went around the edges with a course sanding block to rough up the edges a bit.

This was just a little sneak peek at it before I walked away for the night...you can see where I had roughed up the edges.

And, then I walked away to let it dry overnight.

The next morning I went over the edges with a little of the paint to tie everything together.  I distressed the dresser to show the layers of paint.  The original color of the dresser was white primer, a green color, off white, light blue and then the final blue color.

And, then I used wipe on poly to go over the entire dresser to seal. Once the poly was dry I used grey lime wax.  It added just that depth to the color to pull all of the colors together.

I knew that I didn't want the hardware to overpower the design of the drawers.  But, all I had on hand was super shiny silver, oil rubbed bronze or a ton of knobs with designs on them.  None of them would work.

So what does a DIYer do?  Makes a set of the ones she has on hand work of course by using spray paint :)  I had 6 of these knobs that would be perfect, not too big, but the color....all wrong.  It is oil rubbed bronze (bad picture).

I spray painted it with looking glass spray paint...and then used my CeCe Caldwell's metallic wax in graphite.

I am seriously in love with how this transformed these knobs.  I've used this same wax on another set of hardware that are still going strong and no rub off.

Now...the très belle dresser is all set and ready...

I hope you love her as much as I do...  

Another poster decoupage makeover I did was this little side table you can read about HERE!!

With much love, peace & happiness....