Typecast

I can’t believe I forgot to post pictures of the dresser I painted for Missy’s studio.  Or maybe I was afraid we’d start getting typecast as “those housebloggers who repaint things and recover chairs in black-and-white floral fabric”.  But we’re so much more than that.  Just wait for the post where I show you what’s sitting behind me, for example.   But that’s for another time!

I found this midcentury modern dresser on Craigslist for $25 (although the seller dropped the price to $20 when we got there because of some chips in the veneer on one side).  Like the last dresser, the drawers have center glides and front-and-rear dovetails, so even though the finish was in rough shape, it’s a solid piece of furniture.  I don’t know what it is about midcentury modern stuff and wood – I like the lines & shape of it, and the construction generally seems good, but almost all of the nice things I’ve seen would be at another level entirely if they were built with oak and stained, instead of veneered with cheap crap.  I don’t understand it, but at least it makes the decision to paint easy.

Missy decided to go with an oil-based Colonial Red, which turns out to be a great match with the other colors of paint in her studio.  The girl’s got an eye for color from what I hear.  She asked me to leave the wooden legs unpainted, and good call, I say.  Since I had some problems with running and dripping when I painted the white dresser, I tackled this one more methodically.  From the outset, I resigned myself to doing lots of very thin coats, which turned out to be a really great way to cover the vertical surfaces without any drips or runs.  I’m glad I learned the lesson before I started on the kitchen cabinets.

The side chair is a $2.00 ReStore pick-up, with the seat recovered in the same fabric as the chair Missy’s using at her work table.  You can also see the alligatoring on our floors in this picture.  They’re maple, which has almost no visible grain and doesn’t take stain well (creating an alligator-like finish).  Maple floors are meant to be either left unstained (like most basketball courts, which are made of maple because of its hardness) or dyed with analine.  At some point we’re going to refinish all the floors in the house (probably the same time we tear out the beige carpet that’s featured so prominently on Josie’s blog), and then we’ll get to have that debate.