Look What I Found!

Apologies for the weeks of nothingness on the blog! Nothing's really happened on the home front except... Ikea came to my house! They came for a little interview and to take a look at my home. It was a team of three wonderful gals dressed in those not so wonderful yellow Ikea shirts. We ate J's famous snickerdoodles and went over some questions, took some pictures, had an amazing time, blah blah. They probably say it to everyone, but they said our home was the BEST! I'll take it.

Other than that, the real meaning of this post is to go over my lucky garage sale finds. I forgot to take a picture of the items as they were on the street, but this is one of them:

They were two for $20! The seller's grandma lived in Japan in the 40's and 50's. Everything is solid wood, although the finish on them was bad, the metal was tarnished, and some hardware (those decorative circles) was missing. I wanted to modernize it a bit so I took off the handles (there are tiny knobs on the circle plates in the middle) and the decorative circles and painted it charcoal. All those metal details were hammered in so I had to painstakingly paint around every edge. Each one took about 90 minutes. Below is when the paint was still drying. 

Good ole' after. 

Total cost for this project was $20 but if you don't have paint and a brush, those would cost you about $15. Have you found any bargains lately? 

I'm a Gold Digger

Update: Be sure to check out the before and after pictures of the bedroom in the house tour here.

Okay so I'm not really a gold digger, but it's a better title than "I painted dresser knobs this weekend." Anyway, let's go back to the beginning. I was seriously lacking storage for my clothes and because almost everything in this apartment has masculine lines, I wanted to find a dresser to add that smidge of feminine touch. It needed to be simple, clean lines, but with curved legs. And antique. Dovetail drawers preferably, with character because we all know this apartment has too much Ikea already. Then, I found it. It was an hour away which wouldn't have been so bad had this not been winter (I know, I JUST painted the knobs even though I've had this half a year) and where we were going, there was snow. The seller even  had coyotes in her backyard/frontyard/sideyard. Just all around. But we trekked it up there in our sedan, got stuck in their newly landscaped grass lawn which was covered in snow so I don't know why they landscaped in the dead of winter, and somehow shoved placed the dresser in the trunk. I should have taken a picture but just know there were legs sticking out and lots of rope all over. This is the first picture of my beauty: 

In all honesty, I could have just gotten an Ikea dresser and added pretty hardware and legs but I wanted something different, old, mixed so here she was. I live in an apartment with carpet everywhere and have no sander so I sanded this thing by hand. First with 80 grit, then 150. I primed it all with my favorite primer, Zinsser Bulls Eye. 

Some of my favorite perks about Bulls Eye:

• water based makes for easy cleanup
• mold and mildew resistant, inhibits rust 
• blocks ALL stains, I mean ALL
• I've used it on glass, metal, ceramic, laminate, wood and this stuff STICKS. It sticks real good. :)

Then I just painted it with Behr in a custom, slightly modified color - "caviar" in matte. I did two coats to be extra safe, then sealed with polyurethane. Now, here's the gold digging part. I love gold. I used to hate it as a kid and now I can't get enough. It goes so well with dark colors like black, greys, navy blues which are also what I love and it adds a nice girly touch to my dresser too. So, I used some of this magic stuff:

The above is what it looked like halfway through my Rub N' Buff, with the bottom drawer and wheels still left and you can really tell the difference. 

I think I might redo them in an antique gold though, cause the gold leaf just looks super yellow sometimes. So far the only gold incorporated are the knobs on this dresser, the titles on the spines of some books, art, and my gold wood grain pillow.