When you are short of budget for renovations or even decorating you learn to always think out of the box.
We found this very elegant dresser on site when we moved in. The only problem was one of the drawers were missing.
Incomplete dresser
Being an absolute nut…this highly irritated me. Our bedroom was about nine steps to being perfect, when Ashley moved it there. Now we were ten steps away from perfection!
Every time I would enter the bedroom, this hole would be staring at me! I had to do something about it. Ashley got a small reno-job this week, with the result that my right-hand man, Chris, is helping him. Leaving me alone at home with no-one to assist. But I would not let this stand in my way…I had to fix up this poor dresser.
So I rummaged around and found this piece of supawood.
Time to get my hands dirty!
I got some dark brown paint and jumped right into it! This is how it looked when done…
Close...but not yet perfect
Not perfect yet. I didn’t want to make it exactly the same size as the other two drawers as I knew I would never get the same finish. So instead I decided to make it a bit of a feature by making it bigger.
Firstly, it needed a darker finish, and it also needed a frame. Once again…the men were gone, so I had to think on my feet. I didn’t have the energy to make a frame by cutting wood etc. So I once again searched through the house and look what I found…
What on earth...pencils?
Pencils…why not? Chelsea has such a lot of them…she wouldn’t miss a few or would she? So I used my mitre box to cut the pencils to fit around the wood. This is the yellow hand tool in the background. It is used for guiding handsaws in making cross-cuts or mitre joints
Colourful pencil frame
First I used prestik to plan which one would go where, then I used the glue gun to fix them permanently. I then lightly sanded the unit and stained the wood by using left-over black enamel paint. I then used a black curtain ring and used the hot glue gun to stick it to the centre. This is how this project turned out…
My fix on things
Once again…not exactly perfect…but it looks much better than before. It is not exactly the same semi-gloss finish as the rest of the unit. The dresser is made of solid wood and it has been laminated. Depending on the way the light reflects on it…you can see the difference. It doesn’t bother me at all. I am proud to say…this cost me R0,00. Zip…I like it. Getting low-cost solutions to everyday eye-sores make me tick!
Lilly Loompa 