Project Thirty Six: Painting the Bedroom Chest of Drawers

Well, I have had a very busy and highly productive week getting started on The Bedroom Masterplan, and am ready to start unveiling some of the finished projects!

First up, the old chest of drawers. Let’s start with some before and after photos.

Before:

After:

I know I say this a lot, but I absolutely love it! This project has turned out so well, despite my initial reservations about painting a perfectly good piece of (broken) furniture, and my slight panic that the colours would seem childish, doesn’t it look brilliant! I was thinking about buying some new, much bigger, knobs for the drawers, but actually I quite like the look or the original ones now, still in their unpainted state, and think I will keep them.

So, here’s what I, and the boy, did:

• Bought four little tester pots of colour from Homebase: Lemon Tropic, Apple White, Mineral Mist and Sweet Pink. I already had the lilac grey for the top drawers from a previous project.
• Adapted the colours slightly, adding some grey and green to the Mineral Mist as it was too blue for my liking, and adding some white to the Sweet Pink and Lemon Tropic to tone them down a bit.
• The boy then set to work, removing all the knobs and painting the drawers.
• While he was doing this, I painted the frame of the chest white. It had four coats of eggshell white.
• I will be varnishing all the drawers in clear varnish, as tester pots of paint are just a matt emulsion and therefore not very hard-wearing, so adding a few topcoats of varnish helps to seal it all, makes it easier to clean and stops the paint chipping and scratching off easily.

Total cost: about £7

So Pretty!

 

I still haven’t fixed the runners for the drawers, which are broken, but that is another project, for another day, that I will tackle soon.