Monday, August 5, 2013

Mariah Dresser Before and After

You can never take enough pictures and that's how I feel about the Mariah dresser. I know I took more pictures of her, but I just can't seem to locate them. Oh well. The ones I do have are post cleaning, so they don't do her justice.

Many of you have asked where I find the furniture pieces that I redo... My most favorite finds often come on trash day. The kids already know the drill on Tuesday and Friday mornings. They have good eyes for Mommy! I have sweet friends who spotted this dresser in their neighborhood (thank you).

At the time, I thought I would just have to re-trash it, but after lots and lots of cleaning, sanitizing, and cursing the gods, I started to see something. Most of the time, I don't know the story behind the furniture piece I am working on. I like to let my mind go as I'm painting and create a prior life for the piece. It's weird, I know, but fun. It had good bones and nice curves- which equals perfection, in my book. This dresser had a shady past with scars to show for it. One of the drawers had "Mariah" carved into it, which gave me a name for my made up story. Of course you can't see it now, but it's there. Underneath all of the pretty and fixins, there's a scar. It made me think about all my scars and stuff that made me who I am. Some pasts are shadier than others. Sometimes things happen to us that we had no control over. Other things we did intentionally at the time, never realizing they'd come back to bite us years later. With all that said, the way God's grace covers all of our imperfections is incredible to me. They're washed away, not just covered up. In that, there is no shame, just an abundance of forgiveness that will forever change us. 

Here is the dresser/buffet before:
 
 
This was my original color choice, English Yellow.
 
It looks like a dull yellow here, which would have been perfect, but in reality it was incredibly bright, even with antiquing wax. Mariah was nearly neon and I knew that wasn't what I wanted, so I decided to give her a coat of Miss Mustard Seed's Lucketts Green milk paint and I am happy with how she turned out.
 
Drum roll...
 
 
 
 
 
And here she is, full of soldiers, cowboys, and princess stuff! I'm loving all the storage space. I can't wait to paint something else in Lucketts Green! Isn't it the most happy color ever?
 

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