Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Fixer-Upper

We're too poor to get nice furniture for the apartment. Instead, I've been perusing KSL and Ikea and Craigslist for dills and sells (that's Utah speak for deals and sales for those uninformed) and buying things little by little.
A couple of weeks ago we bought this table for $20. The chairs were $25 each, and we got 4 so we can entertain guests or something.
I call the color something in the neighborhood of puke green.
Then last week we bought this a-mazing dresser for $40 (it was originally $50, but there's no way I'd pay that much for this beast). Those are glow-in-the-dark red stars. Just fyi.
Anyway, clearly these needed fixing. So we went to Lowe's where we had a coupon for 10% off everything and bought paint and hardware for the drawers.
And then the great project began. We sanded everything (I took stalker-y pictures of Sam working)...
Here are post-sanding pictures:

Then painted the table a "lovely green"
Then painted a gray base coat on the dresser
Then painted it turquoise and sanded some more to make it look sort of antiqued
Et voila! The finished product!
This was my first experience attempting antiquing of something. It turns out it would have been loads easier had we rubbed a candle on parts of the base so that the top coat would have come off a lot easier. But you live, you learn, right? And I think it looks pretty dang good for a first attempt.

P.S. These are crappy pictures taken at night with my phone and/or Costco camera. It looks a lot cooler in person, promise.

5 comments:

katie said...

they look great! good idea getting 4 chairs, too. we only have 2. we had the missionaries over for dinner about a month ago and about an hour before they came, i turned to shaun and said, "how are we going to do this? we have 2 chairs at the table and our bed is in the living room." we ended up using the picnic table outside. i don't know what we would've done had it been raining.

Emily said...

They look so cool! I love the colors you picked too.

LP said...

Wow! I'm impressed. Maybe I'll have you do some work for me when I decorate my new home. I, too, really like the colors.

Megan said...

yay and hooray for colors!! I like your furniture and I can't wait to visit you guys when you have everything all together.

Adrien said...

Ohhhh that's cool. I like the colors! Although I definitely think you should have kept the glow in the dark stars...