A Little Furniture, A Lot of Paint

We started adding some color! There is nothing more exciting than cleaning up the walls and adding a fresh coat of paint...it makes the room feel fresh and you a little more accomplished! We decided to go with a bold color, so we chose Midnight Navy by Benjamin Moore.

After 2 coats...oh, and we painted the closet!

Another shot of the color

We got 2 coats up before running out of paint and we are going to add a 3rd just to even everything out. With dark colors, sometimes a 3rd coat is needed to fully cover everything. I love the color, though it's hard to capture on film...it's more of a deep cobalt and it actually makes the room seem bigger!

A view of the big wall...and out new lamps :)

Since we ran out of paint and our favorite paint shop was closed, we decided to tackle the dresser and the drawers we found. When we first started this project, we had no idea what we wanted to do, we just knew we wanted to refinish furniture and not buy new. We set out one weekend to the West Bottoms for some inspiration and though we found stuff we liked, someone had already taken the time to finish the pieces with chalk paint (not a fan) and up-charged it well past what we wanted to spend. It wasn't a total loss, we did realize that we really wanted to find pieces with great shape.

Now for some people, it may take a couple weeks to find a place to start...not me, I kind of obsess and started looking through craigslist and online for consignment furniture and found a couple places that we could visit. And we totally lucked out! The first store we went had a dresser that we really liked and I absolutely loved the shape:

How cute is that? And it was in great shape!

It wasn't that expensive and was in great shape, but I wanted to look around a little more to make sure that we didn't find anything better. And I am so glad we did because one of the last stores we stopped in we found the perfect piece:

Look at the detail!

Ok, it was mustard yellow and missing a piece of really cool hardware, but it was love at first sight, in really good condition. Plus with Brian's slick bartering skills we were able to get it for about $80 less than the other dresser we saw! Score! It was a little too big to fit in my Escape, so we paid for it to pick up later and set off to find some other pieces.

We were pretty sold on the french provincial style but knew it would be pretty hard to find nightstands to match...luckily the consignment furniture fairies were on our side and we found these awesome end tables:

The detail is almost an exact match!

Tequila definitely approved!

 We couldn't believe our luck! All 3 pieces were in excellent condition and we spent a fraction of what we would have spent buying something new. There's a bonus piece we found but we will save that one for another post!

Fast forward to this weekend and it was time to paint! Ideally we would paint everything in the garage with the doors open, but since we've been in single digits and have about a foot of snow out there, our 70's Disco basement is the next best thing.

The first thing to do with any furniture that has been painted or finished before is sand and roughen up the entire piece.

Brian is the sander of the house

 The next step is one of the most important...prime. Find a great primer and apply 2 coats...definitely 2 coats, don't cheat or you won't like how the paint goes on. Trust me :)

This is a great multi-purpose primer, we used it on the trim too

After the first coat of primer

After the second coat of primer...it already looks so much better!

The primer held really well and it dries really quickly so putting 2 coats on doesn't take long...though for some of us, it took long enough...

Sad face...look at that awesome wallpaper (blech!)

Then we were ready for the first coat of paint on the drawers and decided to bring in the dresser to start sanding/priming. Remember the drawer without the hardware? We scoured the internet and cannot seem to find an exact match, so instead of buying all new hardware we decided to just fill the holes with wood filler, so we let that sit, sanded and started priming with the dresser.

After the first coat of pain

We also painted the inside of the drawers to give them a nice fresh look. 

After sanding and the first coat of primer

 I love the shape and the white really looks nice right now. I am toying with a couple of different ideas right now, but we are planning on adding some accents soon.

Time to relax and enjoy the rest of this snowy Sunday!

XOXO,

Sara, Brian & Tequila

P.S. We did take a few breaks between painting to go out and relax a few times this weekend :)

Obligatory selfie...one with Brian's wide open eyes :)