nursery – dresser drawer saga

It’s an IKEA dresser so you know I couldn’t leave it just like it was supposed to be, right?  I wasn’t planning anything more major than lining the drawers and swapping out the knobs – I’ve seen some crazy awesome IKEA hacks on Apartment Therapy but nah…

I just went simple.  I lined the drawers and swapped out the knobs. 

Unfortunately, lining the drawers proved bizarrely complicated.  Or maybe I just made it overly complicated.  I don’t know.

The bottoms of the drawers are yellow and white stripes.  I think I’ve mentioned my distaste for yellow, right? So I bought 4 different scrapbook papers – 8 drawers, each paper for 2 drawers – to line them.  I decided that it would be easiest to do this before putting the drawers together so that I could just deal with the flat bottoms of the drawers rather than wholly made up drawers.


My materials – paper, drawer bottoms, DIY modpodge (I don’t recommend it or find better directions than the 50/50 mix of elmer’s and water that I was working with), and a foam brush.

Apply glue with brush.  Stick paper on…

and watch your paper destroy itself :(

Try the rolling pin… no dice.

Try stacking a whole bunch of flat weight on top… no pictures but this didn’t work either.  Actually, that was a complete disaster.  It all stuck together.  No, actually, first it worked but the paper peeled right back off so then I tried to put the “modpodge” on the top surface too and that stuck to everything.

Finally move on to Plan B – use spray mount to stick the paper down and then cover in clear contact paper.  That actually worked like a charm.  I lapped the contact paper over the edges since they would be hidden under the edges of the drawers once they were put together.  I figured that might add to the staying power and make for a more seamless look.

Will put the the rest of the drawers together.

With his little supervisor watching every move, of course ;-)
 
These are the smaller top drawers – the bigger bottom drawers are lined in the green polka dots you see above or pretty plain turquoise-y.

The dresser comes with dark, nearly black knobs which I didn’t think “went” with a pretty white dresser in a baby’s room.  So awhile back, I picked up some pretty pink glass knobs half off at Hobby Lobby.  I know I said that I was going gender neutral but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put in pops of girly that can be easily swapped out if the next munchkin turns out to be a boy.  I also convinced my mom to give me all the brushed nickel knobs that she got for her kitchen cabinets but had to replace since they were too shallow.  Score!

Complete!

 
Bonus – you can almost tell that the walls are 2 different colors in this picture! But – oops!, I just realized that this picture is actually from before I swapped out the rest of the knobs.  D’oh!  Oh well, other things changed too so you’ll see later.

So that’s my very basic, simple IKEA hack on the Hemnes dresser.  Here’s the first part of the story.

nursery – fill up the room

We have a room.

We scraped the ceiling free of its disgusting popcorn.

We painted everything.

Now we had to work on getting her moved in there which meant a little bit of furniture.  I wasn’t keen on putting her in there with just her crib. 

I had originally wanted to do one of those “find a dresser on craigslist and paint it” things.  Like from Domestic Adventure here.  But then I thought about my personal track record with painting drawers… ok, I’ve only done it once but, seriously, the darn thing gets stuck all the time.

So off to IKEA for the dresser that was partially the inspiration for our own custom made dresser – the Hemnes 8-drawer dresser in white.  And a chair and ottoman – we’re cheapish and just went with the Poang chair and ottoman.  I really wanted to like the Poang rocker but it costs a heck of a lot more than the standard Poang frame.  We went for the medium brown finish – it screams IKEA enough without being birch finish.

The dresser was by far the hardest piece of IKEA furniture that I have ever had the pleasure of helping to assemble and we have a lot of IKEA furniture in our house.  Here’s a few pictures:
 
Sort the pieces.

Sort the bits.

Which we cleverly, at least we thought, sorted into a breakfast tray.

And begin.

And more…

And more…

And nearly there without drawers.

We actually moved it into her room without the drawers.  I was attempting to line the drawers with pretty paper and it was taking me way longer than I expected.  So we didn’t build the drawers for a few more days.

There she is rolling around getting the lay of the land.  I actually had to take the crib apart and put it back together to move it from our room into hers.  I managed it pretty well by myself but I was afraid to put the mattress platform in without Will for fear that I would scratch the crib.  And I’m not sure why I only have a picture with the footstool in it and none with the chair.

pre-dresser delivery details

I felt the need to document the process behind getting a new dresser in our tiny apartment. 
Yes, we’ve had the dresser now for like 5 weeks…
We began like this:
 
or close enough anyway.
First we moved Will’s “dresser” over under the windows and cleared off the top of my dresser.
 
Then we moved my dresser into the living room.
Then came the vacuuming.  We have a bit of a dust bunny problem so we had to clear them out.

Then it was time to take all the pictures down and we’re left with a mostly blank wall.  It was sad.
 
Then we had to take down the shelves too and patch up the holes in the wall.  And get the paint and touch up.  It was a lot of stuff involved for a simple new piece of furniture.  But in the end we had a blank canvas for this:

So pretty.

dresser saga part 3

I have to write this today because we should have a dresser on Saturday!

After all the saga on deciding on a dresser and the adventure to PA to order it and the wait since February, it’s supposed to be delivered on Saturday.

Yippee!

But first we had to decide on a finish.  We had left Pennsylvania with a couple of color chips but Marlin was supposed to come up with something similar to one of the ones we had – a little lighter or a little redder, I can’t remember now actually.

I had to call a few times in order to get the extra chips but we did finally receive them – all 8 of them.

The bottom two are the ones we left PA with and then there’s the whole set that he sent us.

Then I quickly nixed half of the new ones for various reasons – mostly for being too brown – I think cherry shouldn’t be too brown.

So then I was left with these six and I ignored them for about a week.

Until Marlin started stalking us and leaving messages which I never returned and he resorted to calling me at work.  He was stalking me because a) our dresser is finished assembly and b) he’s going to be in Manassas on Saturday so he wanted to be able to deliver our piece in the same trip.  Reasonable. 

So we had to make a decision quickly. 

As in I talked to him on Monday (yesterday) and had to call him back Tuesday morning so that it could be stained and delivered by the end of the week.

I decided to take them into our room – future dresser’s new home – and put them up on the shelf to make the final selection.
all of the choices in a row.

 
Sorry #4, you’re out for being too light.  Thanks for playing.

  Could you take your friend #5 with you as well?  He doesn’t suit our need for darkish wood either.

And #1 is out of the running – a little too brown.  Like I said - I like redder cherries.

At this point our handsome co-host got bored with the selection process and decided to have a one-man shadow bunny show.

Our winner!  Oddly enough it’s one of the original 2 chips that we left PA with.  This picture sucks.  It’s the left one of the 2 by themselves in the 2 pictures above. 

It’s a special mix that he randomly had lying around when we were there.  It has the following formula on the back:

9 – Brown Sienna
2 – Yellow Oxide
1 – Raw Umber
1 – Black
1 – Brilliant Red

Now the bad thing is that as much I was thinking about needing to call Marlin when I got to work as I was on my way to work – I forgot! 

But then I remembered!  At 10am.  Still morning so not too bad.

I had to leave a message and then decided to follow it up with an e-mail just to cover my bases.

Can I tell you that I love that even for Mennonites the e-mail worked better than the phone message?

Now I just have to remember to call him tomorrow about delivery since he’s supposed to call me but I’m not going to be in the office – oops.

I just can’t wait to have real “adult” furniture!