An Argyle Changing Table for Baby Gabe

(Featured at Apartment Therapy,  Tip Junkie & The Nate Berkus Show )
(Grand Prize Winner at Westlake Ace Hardware Customer Project of the Month)

I've been up to a lot over the past year but I haven't found time to blog about any of it! I'm regrouping though and ready to share some of my projects!! Here's the first (of hopefully many) blogs!

My sisters JUST had a baby boy. It took a long time to come up with the perfect baby gift but somehow without me really giving it much thought I came with what I feel is the perfect gift for my new nephew! I found a dresser for CHEAP that I thought would make a great changing table - nice height, nice size and nice details! My sister lives 400+ miles South West of me and I wasn't going to back for a visit til the baby was born so I decided I should just paint it for her. That's where the fun began!

Before paint - you needed quite a bit of imagination to see the potential. My husband definitely didn't see potential, except if I was planning on using it for fire wood!



But after a LOT of paint - taaaa daaaa!



Now I'm not going to pretend that this process was quick and easy. I had never painted argyle on anything. I'm not even sure where or when I decided that I should paint argyle.... but somehow the idea came to me and I had to do it. It took a lot of prep work just to be able to start painting. For instance the front of the drawers resembled a wave pool at Big Splash(White Water, etc!)!



Eeeek! Talk about a veneer mess! The craigslist photo didn't really show all the problems with this dresser.









So after patching veneer, using a ton of wood fill, re-gluing all the wavy veneer and giving the entire thing a light sand I had something that wasn't a whole lot prettier! But I was still focused on the potential, not my husbands head shaking!







Once I felt I could do nothing more to help the state of the veneer I primed, put a base coat of red on the drawer fronts and started trying to figure out how exactly to paint argyle.... there was a lot of sketching before I finally started cutting up my church bulletins into diamond shapes and using them as the pattern. Why use new paper when you can up-cycle your church bulletin?!?



I finally liked the size and location of my diamonds so I started painting.... I added 2 colors of diamonds that matched my sisters nursery fabrics. Side note: I taped the drawers together on the side after my 2 small children ran thru the kitchen and everything was bumped out of place resulting in some paint touch up!



Then it was time to try to decide what kind of accent line/dash to put on top of all those diamonds. I ran out of bulletins and yarn seemed more practical for imitating lines anyway. I would like to say I measured exactly where the lines should be painted.... but I didn't. I eyeballed it and put a couple of marks under my yarn line. Then used a ruler to draw the line I needed to paint.



After the chocolate brown line was dry I decided the drawers needed one more thing.... tiny orange diamonds at the intersections. Because I HAD to have an odd number of colors for my sanity's sake.



I had already decided that the top drawer should not have argyle, and I knew I wanted to put a monogram on it somehow but it took me cutting out the paper "G" to decide that the chocolate lines should carry over to the top drawer even thought the argyle didn't. And since my sister waited til the last SECOND to decide on a middle name the dresser only got one letter of his monogram!



You might have noticed that I was painting all these drawers in the middle of my kitchen. Not really a planned thing but it was about 17 in my garage even though it was February and I could not stand the cold! We were getting new floors anyway so I wasn't tooo concerned about floor protection! BUT I couldn't get the rest of the dresser in by myself so I had to wait a week for it to warm up so I could finish!! But I did test out how the drawers would look..... AFTER I finished building a backsplash for the dresser top.



Once the top was primed & painted I distressed the entire thing added some pulls (2 different styles of course) and then shellac'd and shellac'd and shellac'd. I've used poly in the past on furniture I've painted and never really liked the finish durability or the amount of dry time. Whole different story with shellac!! LOVE that stuff!! 4+ stars for shellac!!

And the end result was this:







After a 400 mile journey to T-town, baby Gabe's new changing table was delivered safely to his new nursery to await his arrival!!

Featured At:

The Nate Show

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