Dresser

We finished the dresser for Chat's room! We bought a dresser we found on craigslist and decided to paint it. So, I did a little research on pinterest for ideas and I found a really cute dresser with an elephant on it. At first we wanted to do a painted elephant, but then I saw this dresser and thought it would be really neat to do a reverse stencil of an elephant. :) So, this is how we did it.

We bought this dresser and I really liked the color of the wood, so we thought it would be a good one for the reverse stencil.

The first step was to measure the dresser to figure out how big we wanted the elephant to be and then I drew an outline on some construction paper. We got stencil blanks that I taped together until it was big enough, then we traced the design on the stencil and cut it out. We sprayed it with a stencil adhesive so it would stick onto the dresser and we had our stencil. :)

After we removed all the hardware and taped the edges of the drawers, we stuck on the stencil and then lightly sanded the wood around it.

We did a coat of primer first. I tried to be really careful when painting over the stencil edges.

Then we did two coats of a latex paint. In the future, I might use enamel paint or be more careful with the latex because it stretched a bit when we took off the stencil. There was also some bleeding, but not much really. Just around the drawer edges mostly.

I had already done some cleanup when I took this picture, but you can see some of the damage at the elephant's feet. I was able to touch it up with paint pretty easily. The really frustrating part came when I tried to open the drawers and realized they were painted shut pretty well. I had to cut around them with a utility knife and even then, Robby had to pry them open. I was relieved that it was able to be functional as well as pretty. :) After all the touch up, we put on two coats of polycrylic.

This is the finished project! I think it turned out really well overall. It was a bit more difficult than I thought, but most projects are like that. Now we just need to figure out how we are going to arrange the furniture. :)