My town recently had a community-wide yard sale. It’s one of my favorite days of the year! Anyone one who wanted to hold a yard sale at their home paid ten dollars to have their address included on maps that were handed out from City Hall. Over fifty homes participated! It was a yard-saler’s dream.
I spent the morning driving from yard sale to yard sale – hitting nearly twenty sales in about two hours.
It was great to talk to the homeowners. They were having sales for different reasons. Some were cleaning out their basements, some selling off boat-loads of children’s items their kids had outgrown, some helping their parents clear out their homes, and others were putting their homes on the market.
The last home I visited had a For Sale sign in front yard and several pieces of furniture out on the lawn. This was my kind of sale!
I purchased this beautiful, solid wood, six-drawer dresser for a great price.
The dresser had a very heavy coat of polyurethane which took about two hours to remove. I happen to sand all of my dressers – but as a precaution, I wear a heavy-duty mask and only sand outside in the driveway.
The shape of this dresser screamed GIRL. It would have looked beautiful in a glossy white, but I’ve done that so often lately. I was ready for a little color.
I already have pink and yellow dressers in stock.
A light mint green or a soft blue were options.
In the end, I settled on a pale lavender.
Last year, I purchased so many different paints to try out different brands and colors. This year, I’m really working on using those up – and often that means mixing my own colors.
So I mixed up four parts of a bright blue and one part red to make a dark purple tint. From there I added that purple tint, one spoonful at a time, to a white semi-gloss. The result was a pale purple.
While really pretty, the pale purple looked a little flat. So I brushed on a much watered-down white semi-gloss; letting it settle in to the groves then wiping off most of it with a rag.
The white wash turned the flat pale purple into a softer lavender with a cloudy finish that’s just barely there.
With the very first dresser I painted eighteen years ago, I painted it inside and out, including the drawer boxes. Every time I slid those drawers open and closed, the paint sanded off and my clothes filled with paint chips. It was awful. I’ll never make that mistake again.
This particular dresser, however, already had the drawer boxes painted. In order to freshen them up, I had to apply another coat of white semi-gloss.
I was able to sand back the outsides of the drawer boxes though – so no chipping paint here!
This dresser is now clean and ready for it’s next home.
This lavender dresser is for sale in my Shop.
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Thank you & Enjoy!
Vicki
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