By the numbers…

This dresser has been through a few reiterations.  This was another basement find from my grandmother’s house.  This is what it looked like when I got it a few years ago (minus the silver handle on the top right… I was testing out my new handles):

The dresser had been in the basement when it flooded and had a few issues.  The broken drawer (you can see the gap at the bottom right where the broken drawer had pushed the frame outwards) was fixed with a little wood glue and some nails.  The top is warped from the moisture, which I never fixed because it is still functional and isn’t overtly obvious (plus its not an easy fix!).

At that time I sanded this guy down and stained it with a Minwax Jacobean stain with a high gloss polyurethane coating.  It stayed in my master bedroom until we got married and needed a little extra clothing storage.  We upgraded this guy for our master bedroom and moved this dresser out into the garage.  Unfortunately I don’t have a good picture of what it looked like stained in the master bedroom (one day I’ll get the hang of this whole ‘taking before pictures’ thing).

I decided this would be a perfect canvas to do a dresser upgrade that I’d seen around the blogosphere, knocking off this Anthropologie Dresser (you can see some here and here).

I didn’t want to make this a big project, so I left the dresser exactly as it was and just bought stencils and some black paint.

First step, we centered the stencils on the drawer and added some painter’s tape, a little wider than the roller.

Next we just rolled on the black paint:

As soon as we rolled the black paint on we removed the stencils and wiped up with a wet paper towel the one spot that wasn’t as crisp as the rest.

I like that the numbers aren’t super obvious, but think it spruces up the dresser quite a bit! And for 15 minutes and less than 20$ (free if you already own the paint and stencils) it was a pretty stellar upgrade!

We’ve moved it upstairs already and it looks great in the space, but I can’t show you it without ruining the project I’m working on now, so you’ll just have to live in suspense…