Once upon a Trash Dresser

Once upon a time there was a young hoarder princess with her eyes always wide open looking for junk to collect and keep forever. On her way home from work one night, with a freshly garbage picked sign in tow, she spotted what looked like a perfectly good dresser by the garbage of a large storage tower near her castle. After driving to retrieve her Lego-loving knight-in-shining-armor from his studio arts dungeon she made him go with her to explore the garbage dresser's plight. The dresser was deemed a worthy rescue endeavor and she quickly cleared the other “treasures” in her carriage to make room to safely transport the dresser and store it before it rained for two weeks straight. So it stayed in her carriage for weeks, riding around in the big car she didn’t want. (Her father, the king, knew better than to get her the tiny hybrid car she thought she wanted. She has thanked the wise king for all of his knowledge)

When there was a break in the dreaded rain long enough to take the dresser to the studio arts dungeon the Lego Knight Chopped the legs down because he is irrationally afraid of spiders living under there.

He measured twice

He cut once

It wobbled on the uneven floors and made the princess panic.

But when put on a level table it was declared passable

Then the dresser was taken inside and ignored for 3 months

The princess and her Lego-Knight graduated college…

On her birthday…

She picked her teeth…

Cooked yummy foods…

Sewed some stuff…

Started Grad-School...

And pinned dresser after dresser on Pinterest…

Until finally the day came for the princess to officially start re-doing her beloved trash dresser… And here stops the princess fairytale analogy because it got really annoying to write that way….

So the weather in Pittsburgh is terminally bad. It’s either snowing, raining, or so hot and muggy you wish it were snowing or raining. Very rarely there are days with good weather that allow you to work on DIY projects outside. Every time one of these days came around in May or June I was working or in class, Lego Man was working, or we had to drive an hour and a half to where our moms live for some thing or another. So my poor little trash dresser sat lonely in the Lego living room. With him actually set to move in to my place very soon it became more important that we finish that project, as it was a vital part of the “our room” turnover. Last weekend when I wanted to work on it he decided that we should move all the current furniture instead. So this past week I watched the weather very closely and was amazed when I saw this…

Little to no chance of rain for multiple days AND temperatures that won’t kill you? It was a sign and I took it. Because of the design I eventually decided on for the dresser we would have to wait 2 full days between re-painting the whole thing white, and adding the Navy embellishments. Given work schedules I insisted on starting Thursday night and Lego Man agreed (only he tunes me out a lot when I talk about DIY so he thought we were doing all of it at once. Silly Boy base coats have to dry before you can tape off stripes.) But anyway I started the project the night before wiping down the dresser with a wet rag and removing the hardware. Here’s him helping for thirty seconds. He kept coming over, saying I needed some tool or other, and walking away. I thought it was to get me the tool… but he was just walking away. We're in love.

The next day I arrived to my summer class and gladly announced to my friends that it was “Trash dresser day” I think they were just as happy as me because it meant I was going to eventually have to shut up about the thing. I beat him home and anxiously awaited his arrival, (and wrote up the post from my Monday project this T-shirt dress). He got home and we started by fueling.

Then we carried the dresser from his living room to my front yard (it’s not far at all luckily)

And taped off the places I felt needed taped

Then WE FINALLY GOT TO PAINT IT! (I'm looking real hot in this picture BTW)

We did three coats and decided it was good enough, plus I remembered that we needed to save white paint for sealing the tape when we did the stripes. Here’s how she looked. So clean and white, no longer yellowish and dirty.

We waited the required 48 hours before adding the next part (it was actually like 42 hours don’t tell the spray paint can though). I told Lego Man for like the millionth time exactly what I wanted and he sketched it a little, but I had to work that evening so we started the taping. I put him in charge of the chevron’s because with a studio arts and architecture degree (hot off the presses even) I figure he was better suited to that level of figuring. I took control of the big vertical stripes. I decided where I wanted stripes to hit and how, and then did some math and measuring to figure out how wide each needed to be. I marked the lines with a pencil using my big quilting ruler. This was both wonderful and terrible, wonderful because it is clear, terrible because you get it lined up perfectly… and then it slips because it is plastic. But eventually I got all of my lines marked out.

Then I taped very carefully, I chose to tape straight down the whole thing because I felt like that was my best chance of getting them perfect to each other.

Then I used a box cutter to cut the tape so the drawers weren’t attached to the chest anymore. (I misses a spot cutting before taking the picture… oops)

Then it was time for more painting. As per all of the tutorials I have read on painting stripes, I started by sealing the tape with the base color. This means that I painted over the tape and around the seal with the original white paint.

Then I did 4 layers of the Navy paint on each drawer.

While I was doing all of those things Lego Man was still taping the chevrons. I kept telling him “I have to get in the shower at 2:30” Then 2:45. Then 2:50. But eventually he finished and it was time to paint those.

Unfortunately my hand cramped up from doing all of the other drawers so I had to relinquish control to the Man of Legos. Since I felt like he might be trustworthy I left him alone and went and got ready for work.

Work went so slow because I just wanted to go home and rip all of the tape off and see how well things went. At one point I texted LM to see if he wanted to check that nothing had happened to the drawers on my front porch. He asked me if I wanted him to take the tape off and I refused to let him! That was my Christmas morning moment of this project! I wasn’t going to let him do it without me! I called him when I got home to see if he wanted me to wait for him to take the tape off, but I knew those 2 whole minutes it would take him would kill me. So I did my vertical lines and left the chevrons to do with him.