Going Green: The Guest Room Dresser

I’ve decided that the guest room project is like a “choose your own adventure” for our amazing readers. First, I asked you whether we should paint all the walls in the room white, and you said a resounding: Yes! Do that immediately!

So per your instructions, Sam and I got to work and last week I shared our amazing, incredible, awe-inspiring painting transformation:

Today I have another decision I need your help with, but you have to read this really long post to get there.

The paint has definitely taken the guest room leaps and bounds forward, but as I foreshadowed, there’s a lot more in store for the complete room transformation than just painting. Now that we have a blank slate, I’m working to add back some color through furnishings and accessories — all while sticking to a relatively modest budget of a few hundred dollars at most (including paint for the room, which came in at about $75).

Today I’m talking about one particular project: the dresser.

No guest room is complete without somewhere for folks to unpack their clothes if they so desire, especially given that we expect one of our guests (Sam’s sister) to stay for a few months at least. Fortunately we already have a relatively spacious dresser in the space that I bought for $40 at a yard sale in the fall.

It’s perfect for the space because it’s long and low, which works with the sloped ceiling. The color is what originally caught my eye as I was running past it (literally: I was out for a run when I saw the blue out of the corner of my eye, and anything blue with tapered legs can stop me in my tracks).

But I’ve actually come to dislike the color — it clashed with the walls back when they were blue, and now in the white space it just doesn’t feel vibrant enough. Plus it was painted with a flat finish, so it feels very dull and has a lot of markings on the top and is overall pretty beat up. Also, I’m not in love with the hardware.

Fortunately, this is all pretty easily remedied. I’ve been considering green and orange accents for this room, which is outside my usual decorating comfort zone in that neither green nor orange are, in fact, turquoise. But I wanted to work with the orange throw blanket we have on the bed that Sam’s mom gave us, and I totally fell in love with this green bed (with orange accents…) when gathering inspiration images for the room:

I thought about painting the bed frame we have (which is a wooden frame that the seller of our house left behind), but once I painted the walls I decided I liked the dark wood frame (as some of you prescient readers predicted that I might when I first mentioned the idea).

I also loved the idea of a wood dresser in here, but I was not interested in taking on the work of stripping the dresser — especially not knowing if the wood underneath was any good, or just laminate.

So instead, I decided to repaint the dresser a rich green. And by a “rich green,” I mean I looked up the exact shade of green that Lindsay from Makely Home used in the bed project pictured above, and just used that (it’s Cat’s Eye by Benjamin Moore). Because I don’t work with green very often (my first foray into it was with my two-toned cane chair makeover), I was worried I was going to pick out something I didn’t like — I think a rich emerald green is awesome, but so much of the green I see looks too yellow or washed out to me. But Lindsay’s bed looked perfect, so I thought why not shamelessly copy her?

I grabbed a quart in a satin finish, and got to work. First I removed all the drawers, cleaning them out as I went. We’d been storing some things in a few of them (batteries and extension cords), so I removed those and put them away neatly in a new storage place.

The other drawers were empty of our belongings but did contain a lot of dust, bobby pins, and random items belonging to the previous owner.

To be fair, the wrench would have come in handy for removing the knobs from each drawer, but I didn’t find it until the last drawer. I just used a regular old adjustable wrench instead to loosen the hex nuts and then removed all the knobs.

Next I gave every surface a quick sanding and a wipe down with a damp cloth.

Normally you would need to prime when using latex paint, but I figured the existing light blue paint was essentially acting as a primer — a non-glossy surface (since it was a flat finish), and already blocking the natural wood. So I just got straight to painting. I gave everything three coats to get nice even coverage, which still felt like a breeze compared to painting the walls.

I only painted the drawers fronts and along their edges. I normally like this look and it’s really not that hard to achieve, but the person who painted it before me was the messiest painter ever and got blue everywhere so I will probably put decorative paper or something along the drawer sides at some point.

Originally I was planning on putting new drawer pulls into the same original holes, so I didn’t bother patching over them before painting. But then I decided this wouldn’t give me the flexibility I wanted, so I made a late-in-the-game change that involved patching the holes with wood filler:

Then sanding everything smooth and repainting the drawer frontsso I had a clean slate.

I then proceeded to have an existential crisis over what hardware to buy — I frittered away hours on etsy, pinterest, ebay, and an aborted trip to Home Depot to buy supplies to make my own. I suspected that I wanted a brass finish since I thought that would look great with the green, but just couldn’t decide on the shape.

I considered pretty much everything out there, from adorable knobs:

To campaign pulls:

Cup pulls:

Bar pulls:

And ring pulls:

I clearly did not previously fully appreciate the vastness of the hardware world, and this is just the narrow slice I decided to show you after days spent exploring options.

I also toyed with the idea of DIYing them, inspired by some awesome projects like these genius DIY copper pulls from Upcycled Treasures (which thought about riffing on with dowels for some natural wood tones):

These faceted wood knobs:

And these dowel knobs from the very talented Daniel at Manhattan Nest:

I also couldn’t decide if I wanted hardware on all the drawers, or just the outer ones like the dresser originally had. At first I thought that was weird, but then looking at the dresser more I realized that the middle drawers are different heights than the side drawers and are shaped so that they have a natural lip that you can open them with.

So trying to line up hardware across all nine drawers might actually lead to some strange spacing, which is probably why the previous owner just went with the outer drawers. I guess she wasn’t as weird as I thought. Also hardware is annoyingly expensive, so the idea of just having to do six drawers was definitely appealing.

This is the part where I would like to tell you that I made a decision, finished the project, and photographed it for your viewing delight today. But that would not be the truth…and the lack of final photos would make that pretty obvious.

The truth is, I need your help! I’m totally lost in the sea of hardware. I can’t see shore. My boat is sinking. Sharks are circling. Insert more terrifying water metaphors here. The bottom line is: I need you to be my Coast Guard rescue I would love to hear what direction you would go with this dresser!

To help you with your visualizing, here it is, looking all pretty and ready for the finishing touches:

So what kind of hardware do you think would look best? Or maybe something I haven’t even imagined? (Note: I definitely do need hardware, because right now the side drawers are impossible to open without wedging a screwdriver between them and jiggling…probably not a good long term solution.)

(UPDATE: I made a choice! See what hardware I picked and how I installed it)

(Sharing at Link Party Palooza, Tip Me Tuesday, Two Uses Tuesday, Whimsy Wednesday, Think and Make Thursdays, One Project at a Time, and That DIY Party)