Wanna- be DIY'er

I love DIY projects... I'll never have my own tv show about it or make any money doing it, but it makes me happy AND it saves me money (sometimes... lol)

Here's the first DIY project I completed after husband and I moved into our apartment, he brought a dresser into the relationship that I HATED (I had been using milk crates to put my clothes in... so really.. who am I to complain? I mean, it didn't stop me from complaining, but at least I acknowledged that I had no right... lol)

My mom loved this dresser as it was, and was very worried about what I would do to it (I went through a phase in my teens where everything needed to be as bright as possible, check out my room from jr. high

I chose the colours for the walls and mum tried to "bring it all together" by making some throw pillows, curtains and buying that bed spread. There's a great picture (somewhere) of my dad painting the first wall yellow wearing sunglasses...haha

But, I digress...

Back to the dresser.
So my mom was very worried about what I would do to it (now you understand why) so she really wanted me to leave it as it was, we have very different tastes. Leaving it like that would have been *almost* as bad as hanging on to the milk crates. lol

Just to drive home my point, here's a close up of the gold flower part.

I don't have any pictures of the steps (cause who knew I'd be blogging about it!!)

Step 1. I put down some garbage bags - *tip* splurge on a tarp, trust me.

Step 2. I sanded the crap out it. Not with a fancy sanding machine... but with actual sand paper...that's right, I'm hardcore!

Step 3. After waiting for the dust to settle and wiping it down with a damp cloth, I stained it black (classic black satin to be precise). I was super impressed with the stain, it only took one coat and I still have over half of the can left!! (946 mL can!!)  Maybe it's because I don't know much about painting that I'm so impressed about that. LOL
It cost about $15.00 for the can of stain.

Step 4. I replaced the hardware, we bought 2 packs because I plan on buying another dresser on kijiji and matching it to this one.
It was about $40.00 for both packs.

Here's the finished product.

The flower is still there, just not as gold... lol

It was super easy to do, so much cheaper than buying a new dresser and prettier than milk crates.

The one downfall was that I spilled paint on the carpet... whoops... so let's add $20.00 on to the final cost for the mat we had to buy to cover the black spot on the carpet. (but yay for a new mat... haha)

It took me the whole day to do it (you'll notice how much darker it is in the second set of pictures).
I love doing projects like that, because at the end of the day you can say "hey, look what I did!" and that makes me happy.