diamond in the rough.

my aunt and uncle sold their house about a month or so ago and while i'm sad that that means the end of pool parties, bonfires, and lots of open space for our big family to roam... i'm now the new owner of the dresser below! hootie hooo for free dressers with awesome lines and bad cell phone pics you send your cousin on your way to the office! really though, isn't she a beaut?? we got rid of my old ikea dresser in the guest room (which had traveled with me from my parents house, to rental house, back to my parents house, to another rental house, back to my parents house, etc.) a while ago and have been in desperate need of a replacement ever since. i had been looking on craigslist, overstock, higher end stores, etc. but never really found something that spoke to me... and was in our price range. AND THEN! oh that garage sale glorious day! we were helping out my aunt and uncle at their garage sale and my eyes fell on this dresser of perfection and my aunt said "take it! for free!"

"ok!" i cried!

exclamation point!

as you can see from the picture above... kind of... the dresser was in need of a little love. it had been my cousin Erin's... Beyonce Erin... and as most childhood furniture becomes, was a little beat up.

so Kevan and i tossed her in the back of my mom's car and brought her home. 

as i said before, she needed a little work and my initial plan was to sand it down then spray it with a new coat of white. 

we ended up spraying it with Zinsser Strip Fast and sanding it down after that. These are the tools we ended up using:

some sanding things

steel wool

Zinsser StripFast 

gloves... definitely need gloves

picking tools

i keep saying "we" as if i had some huge part in this whole thing. you can probably tell by my description of our tools that i didn't. in actuality, our day looked more like this:

i threw the ball for the girl, while the man sprayed that shiz down. i did help... he just did much more than i did. the Zinsser spray was really easy to use. it came in the tin pictured above with a spray bottle, as well. you just fill the bottle, spray down your furniture, then wait about 15 minutes. 

it'll all start to kind of bubble a little and turn neon green... at least ours did.

so you peel away the layers and layers and layers of paint and then surprise! it's not too bad underneath.

we sanded for hours, after taking most of the paint off... i can definitely say "we" on that one. ugh and it was so damn humid that day. fine dust + manual labor + minnesota humidity equals nasty. 

at the end of the day we were left with this:

 she's still a little homely, but once we started to strip her down we knew we had to go ahead with the stain. i'm pretty sure Kevan has stained the whole thing, but i'm not sure. after i put all of my blood, sweat, and tears into getting that paint off, he took the dresser into the garage and made me promise i wouldn't peek. and i haven't... too much. i haven't really looked, like up close and personal. 

so i guess for now this is a to be continued... for me too. can't wait to see the finished product!