Guest Blogger: Lisa from Before Meets After

Today’s Guest Blogger is Lisa from Before Meets After! Lisa loves to take furniture pieces of furnriture and turn them into something beautiful!  She also has some other great stuff on her blog so be sure to go and check her out.  And if you are lucky enough to live near Atlanta GA you can actually purchase some of her great pieces!

I am honored to be guest posting today for Ange as she makes this exciting move with her family! Ange has some great ideas for around the home and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with in her new house! I am so excited today to share with you a furniture project that I did for a friend!

I bought this dresser a while ago, and I’m pretty sure I told you I’d reveal it last week. Well you know life and a full time job got in the way. So let me remind you what the before looked like:

My friend Lori contacted me about doing a changing table for her new baby. She’s newly pregnant and hasn’t found out the gender yet, so she wanted something gender neutral. I just happend to pick up this dresser that day and sent her this blurry image from my cell phone. She loved it! I told her it took every ounce of self control for me to willingly sell it to her because I loved it so much 🙂

I swear this piece had a 2 inch layer of varnish on it. It about killed my arm (and sander) to take all of it off. But I needed it down to the bare bones to paint it.

Here are the drawers all sanded down.

I mixed a custom paint color with the BEHR Agave I did on this piece here, along with some dollar oops paint that was gray and then added a little white. I really love the color!

Lori wanted a stained top, so I used Dark Walnut by Minwax. I knew it was going to be used as a changing table, so I wanted to make sure it was durable. I did 2 coats of stain, covered with 3 coats of poly! 

I then painted the drawers and cleaned up the knobs. 

You can see the before and after of a good cleaning with steel wool. Well, even after cleaning I still didn’t like the gold look, so I dipped them in the stain and covered with a spray poly.

After I finished the knobs and put poly on the drawers, this is what I came up with:

This is what I ended up with! I am in love! This is going to be one stylish baby! I can just image a chaging pad and cute baskets to hold baby things on top!

I didn’t do any distressing or glazing because Lori isn’t sure what she’s having yet, but I think it will be great for a boy or a girl!

I love the details on the sides and legs!

I love the dark knobs and the dark top too!

Maybe we can talk Lori into sending a picture to BMA when she gets it into the baby’s room!

Thank you Lisa for posting today!   I am off a day of the schedule and losing my mind, so come back tomorrow for Heidi from Chick Hardware!   We say goodbye to our house in just a few short hours!  My camera is giving me a hard time so I hope I can get a few last photos before we leave!  Then we’ll be taking off for a three hour drive to the new house.  We actually managed to fit everything into the big U-Haul and a trailer so that was wonderful!  The goodbyes have been sad but we know that we will be back to visit and our home is always open for our friends and family as well.  So hopefully I can get some pictures up on facebook this weekend of the new house but we’ll see how crazy my life is!