Moody Blue Dresser

NEW DRESSER! That’s right - I’m finally breaking my radio silence to bring you a fresh flip. A lot has happened since I last debuted a piece so I am WELL overdue to get back on here. Let’s do a quick bottle episode to recap what’s been keeping me from workshop all year:

Jan 2021 Took a new role at my day job and found out we were pregnant with No.2
March 2021 Started house hunting
May 2021 Kicked-off a string of unexpected health challenges culminating with my husband’s mysterious partial hearing loss
July 2021 Moved into the new house
Oct 2021 Had another baby

Whew. It’s doesn’t seem like much when you distill it down to bullet points but it was enough to keep me from tackling many new projects or sharing any of the ones I did. Maybe I’ll get around to posting about those before the new year, but in the meantime I at least have a pop of color to splash on here. Dusting off my old MO, let’s start with a quick before:

If you thought that dresser looked familiar, then good eye!

It is from the same line as the one and only 2020 Flip List Item I shared in August of last year.

Yup, in the turbulence of the pandemic, I shared one flip list item and then completely abandoned my furniture goals of 2020. I didn’t even pick up the mantle to set any goals for 2021. But, I am trying to be gentle with myself. And as I have stated from the get-go, my annual Flip List comes with automatic grace if I fail or falter.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you may already know that I often like to preserve wood finishes as often as I can. I’ve been painting furniture since 2013 and have come to appreciate a beautiful wood grain over time - mostly because I can appreciate how much work it is to strip a painted piece to restore it back to its wooden skivvies. I typically choose what to paint on a piece and what to leave alone based on repairs. If the veneer is damaged or a drawer chipped, they I am likely using a high-performance wood filler which will never blend in perfectly if left un-painted.

Inspired by MCM Furniture Designer Arne Vodder,

I chose a moody blue. This dresser is serving as a pop of color in our guestroom/ nursery.

And this piece had all that and a laminate top. So I painted the body in Nocture Blue by Behr - adding wood legs to match the sculpted divots for the finger pulls which I left in the original wood finish.

To me, a dresser without legs feels like you might as well leave your clothes in a box on the floor. I think the leg-lift allows a piece to not feel as heavy in a space and for-sure makes vacuuming the dog hair easier (if that’s your vice).

I ordered the same legs as it’s 5-drawer sibling but had some challenges upon install. These legs require the mounting hardware to be inset. Which means I need to drill a hole big enough to sink in a threaded brace that I can screw the leg into. I didn’t want the brace or the attachment screws to poke through the bottom of the dresser and compromise the bottom drawer’s functionality so I tried to inset them as close to the corners as possible where the inner frame of the dresser would provide more wood to screw in to.

A lot about what I do is trial and error

which is all part of the creative process. Fun fact, I accidentally screwed shut the bottom drawer of this map chest by installing the legs with the wrong length screws. I didn’t realize until the buyer came to pick up - which was t-minus 10 minutes before I was supposed to leave for the airport to go visit my sis. I had NO TIME to fix it and was mortally embarrassed. Luckily the buyer was handy and wasn’t intimidated by the quick fix and was willing to still buy it with a discount.

This dresser had a slight lip that prevented the wide legs I chose from screwing in flush to the base.

Leaving the legs like this would completely compromise their stability so I ended up cutting some scrap wood to recess into base.

I could then sink the mounting hardware into the scrap wood and attach the legs safely.

Since our guestroom is doing double duty as a nursery, I styled this piece with some of my favorite children’s books.

The illustrations are so beautiful that I put them on display using pant hangers (another frequently deployed trick of mine).

And in case you’re pondering the dimensions of this piece for scale, it’s a smidge taller than Huntleigh.

I’m a little rusty, but happy to be in the workshop again. As I mentioned earlier, I do have a few retro-active projects to share that got lost in flurry of house-hunting/ moving/ baby-birthing. I hope you all are well and will pop by again for more reveals.

Maybe Mauve Dresser

Creatively speaking, I don’t have much to show for myself lately. When the world shut down, many of you found sanctuary in projects while stuck at home. I found myself going to my day job in full PPE. Suddenly I was signing waivers at the door each morning, bruising my nose and breaking out under an N95, getting COVID tested twice a week, limiting my water intake to avoid taking off my mask, wary that a single mistake that could compromise my health or that of those around me.

My 9 to 5 is working with residents at an Assisted Living Facility - a very vulnerable population that I have seen wither under sequestration. My creative bandwidth was eaten up by how to keep spirits up among the residents and how to keep us all safe.

For these reasons, my garage workshop stayed quiet for most of last year (well that and because Caleb turned it into a home gym for a while). My 2020 flip list fell by the wayside with only one project completed and others never tackled or never shared.

I have a lot of hope that this year will be different. I do want to see more pieces unfold on this platform as my time and energy will allow. These projects still bring me great joy and your support and positive response to them are such a source of encouragement for me to keep creating.

I found this gem listed in Facebook as a curb alert. It was free and in the neighborhood so I snapped it up while I was already out running errands.

I was kinda digging its dusty color but the original paint job was a HOT MESS. The body was shellacked with thick drips of high-gloss beige while the top was and unfortunate clash of flat cream from what I can only assume was a bad repair job.

The stripping process revealed several layers of paint that started peeling off like wallpaper - indicative that it wasn’t applied properly in the first place.

This piece had lived at least three other lifetimes as a shabby chic dresser with obvious brush strokes in a white paint finish. Then it did a stint as a vivid aqua/teal dresser. Then it turned into the mauve-meets-beige mess that landed it in my workshop. But that mauve gave me an idea to try something new so I picked up a new color to try.

Now mauve is technically in the purple color family but that scalloped detail was calling for something soft and pretty and reminiscent of Shire’s pink room circa 2018. I browsed my favorite paint line (Behr Marquee) and chose Retro Pink that lands in right the dusty hue range.

The scalloped detail lends itself to a sweet overall look while the dusty pink color still reads mature for all you millennial-pink lovers out there.

Keeping with the original dresser’s look, I painted the tapered legs in the same color as the body.

I did not however, keep the ridiculous pulls from the original dresser. Instead, I filled those holes and drilled new ones for a single gold whistle knob on each side.

Just enough gold to give it a touch of glam.

I had wanted the color to be reminiscent of a dried clay so naturally I had to style with a ceramic touch.

I pulled this trio of ladies from various corners of my house and invited them to come smirk from atop the dresser.

They agreed to make eyes at the dresser’s potential buyers until the right one comes along.

Maybe Mauve Dresser
Now Available for Sale
$545

If you are interested in this piece or a custom order like it, email me at cate@stylemutthome.com

Wink of Wood

This pair. This pair of 3 drawer chests. This pair of 3 drawer chests with their clean lines and their gold buckle hardware. I wanted them so bad that I drove two towns over to pick them up. Twice.  No - not because they didn’t fit in my car but because for the first time in my furniture flipping career, I had to call an audible on account of the screaming baby in the car.

When I set up the meet, I figured all I really had to do was get baby H and me dressed enough to be considered decent, drive out there to pick them up, throw them in the car, then head home. Easy, peasy lemon squeezy.

That was my first mistake.

Baby fell asleep on the way. The seller was running late - no big! We can just wait in the car.

Strike two.

I had scheduled this pick up during what I learned later that many moms call “the witching hour” - that hellish time of day where baby can seem inconsolable…

YOU STRAIGHT FOOL YOU.

Never. Stop. Driving. If baby is asleep in the car, you keep that magical motion going or you’ll have hell to pay. Unbeknownst to me, the delicate window to get these pieces and be on our way without a nuclear meltdown BEGAN TO CLOSE as soon as we pulled up to the rendezvous. After 10 minutes of waiting, baby H went all Chernobyl and we had to evacuate STAT.

Driving home, my hormones triggered a meltdown of my own. I had been so hell-bent on maintaining my need to create that I hadn’t stopped to consider her needs. What if we drive all the way out there and we can’t get the pieces to fit around her car seat? Where will baby wait if I have to finagle them down some stairs?? What if something breaks in transit and there is super sharp debris rattling around her in the car??? These questions were raising an unforeseen growing pain of new motherhood (emphasis on the pain): how to rewire a ME to better think about SHE.

As she was wailing for relief from the car seat, I realized I had popped her in the car like an accessory. Something I could just bring along with me on a craigslist pick up like a tape measure or moving blanket. Yeah… NO. Babies are not tape measures people. And they will (un)happily let you know that.

It was a valuable lesson about new motherhood and I have a hunch that I’m not done learning it. And perhaps never will be. Yes these dressers were a great buy for the business but if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. I pulled a new-mom mulligan and reached out to the seller to explain our no-show. She was gracious enough to reschedule with me the following day so I had a second chance to make juggling baby and a small business work. So we set out again - this time I made sure that baby had a full belly and a clean diaper first, and that the pieces were grab-and-go ready, and that they would fit safely around my most precious cargo (the baby… not the dressers). Fortunately for us this time, it worked out in the end but I’m acutely aware that that might not always be the case. And that’s ok. The beauty of owning your own business is that you should make it work for your family. Not make your family work for it.

With the challenges of my first postpartum pickup behind me, I worked on the dressers when it wouldn’t interfere. Stringing together bursts of productivity during naptime or when Dad was home - and even sometimes with baby snuggled up and strapped to my chest.

A series of nicks and dings meant I had to paint the majority of the pieces after all the repairs. I chose a favorite sIlky black paint finish for the body but still wanted some way to keep at least a touch of wood.

The only place I could salvage ended up being a unique opportunity for a wink of wood. I knixed the original concave metal backplate in favor of staining the recessed cavity behind the gold buckle pulls.

It’s just a peek but I hope someone will appreciate the subtle detail.

I added dark walnut legs with brass sabots (that’s fancy furniture talk for brass shoes) to play up this little detail.

With such richly dark pieces, I decided to keep the styling simple with a couple white accessories and a pair of arched floor-length mirrors.

These babies are ready for a new home and I’m ready for a new project - provided I’ve figured out how to be a mom and a maker… *wink*

Black 3-Drawer Dresser Set
Now Available for Sale
32”W x 18”D x 30”H
$795 for the pair

If you are interested in this piece or a custom order like it, email me at cate@stylemutthome.com