i have been waiting to do the final reveal of the dresser in our room until i was able to take some better photos. but after 2 weeks and still not remembering to take photos in the daylight, i give up. plus our room is super messy right now and the trick of only cleaning the area that you're taking a photo of does not work when the photo will include a giant mirror. hello unmade bed... our room is no where near done anyway, i'm sure that the dresser will appear again in better photos in the future.

as i hinted in this post, when my mom and brother were visiting last month we started a few projects around the house. my mom was staying in the guest room and mentioned that the giant armoire that was in the room made it difficult to move around. i completely agreed with her but was hoping she wouldn't notice :-) when we were arranging our existing furniture in this house we ended up not having a good place for the armoire. it is a nice solid piece of furniture and provids a ton of storage, so we decided to try it in the guest room. our reasoning was that we could use it for linens for the 11 months out of the year when no one was in our guest room. this worked out fine, until someone actually tried to stay in the room and had to squeeze past it anytime they wanted to move around in the room. plus, because it was so tall, it didn't even provide a surface for a guest to put their things on. i was not against finding something new for the guest room, but per usual, didn't want to spend much money on it.

mom said she'd help out with the cost, and after looking through craigslist and even considering some of the furniture stores in the area, i decided that we would go thrifting. really, we only take our guests to the best of places.

we went to an area with several stores that i have driven by a few times but had yet to visit. we had no luck at the first couple of stores. then we went to the last store and right away i spotted this:



at which point we reached a problem. you see, the guest room is small. and this dresser is not so small. so that's when i decided that instead of getting a dresser for our guest room, we would be getting a dresser for our bedroom. and the smaller dresser that was in our bedroom would just move the the guest room. problem solved. plus, this dresser would actually work better with the other furniture in our bedroom.

at this point i should tell you that this dresser was actually part of a set. the store had the dresser, a queen size headboard, 2 large nightstands, and a mirror. i seriously thought about buying the entire set, but didn't really have a need for everything else. and i generally don't like rooms with furniture sets. so we talked to the woman at the store and she said she'd sell us just the dresser for $40. and throw in the mirror for free since it went with the dresser. sold.



i should also mentioned that 2 other groups of people also wanted to buy this dresser while we were waiting to load it up, good thing we got there when we did. i know that this campaign style of furniture has been floating around the blogs and while i didn't set out looking for it, i was excited about the find. while i love my other mid-century modern furniture finds, i was hoping to find some other unique pieces that would mix well with the mcm - i didn't want to keep buying the same thing. i thought that this piece, with the brass detailing and cool hardware and clean lines would look nice with our other furniture.

once we brought the dresser home we started to really look at it. overall it was in good condition but the veneer was scratched in a few places on the dresser and the mirror seemed like it had a slightly different finish. and this finish looked strange with the wood tone of the other furniture in our room. so i decided to paint it.

first we took off all of the brass hardware and cleaned and polished it with a brass cleaner we found at lowes. i can't remember the name, but it worked great. once all of the hardware was removed, we sanded, primed, and then painted. i decided to go with a medium gray. i thought about something bright and fun, but in the end, i went with a color that i know i could use anywhere in the house. it's funny, i've been trying to decide for months if i should paint the buffet, and if painted, what color. but for the dresser i decided to paint it and had the color picked out and the paint bought within an hour.

so anyway, not sure why this post turned out to be so long.... here's the before (with the dresser that will now be moved to the guest room):



and the after:



as i mentioned before, our room still needs a lot of work but i'm really happy with out this turned out. i love the gray color with the brass hardware and i think that the gray is a nice addition to the blue color that is already in the room. as always, it's a work in progress...