Refashioning Delia's Room, Part One

Delia got a new twin mattress yesterday, thanks to my Mom. It works beautifully in the Wheat colored Heywood Wakefield twin bed Lisa found for us earlier this year at Goodwill. Delia wants to paint her room in peaceful beach colors, but we aren't quite ready to do that yet - it'll probably have to wait till spring.

What we can paint, and have been planning to for a little while, is her dresser. My sister and I used it when we were little. Delia didn't really like it because it was a bit too girly for her. Also the drawers were getting difficult to open and close. It was decided that the dresser would be the first thing we overhauled on the road to a more grown-up room for Delia.

they call that green stuff growing in the crevices "verdigris" in the antique shoppes

The first thing we did was remove the old knobs and handles. Over the last 30 years or so they got pretty yucky. These handles were not attached with screws like most normal knobs, but were affixed with some kind of expanding anchors. They required (as Delia predicted) a screwdriver, a hammering implement (Keith used a ratchet) and brute force to extricate. Luckily, my husband lives to knock things about with a ratchet. Now we have a free set of six moderately yucky drawer pulls, but I have seen uglier on the Internet being sold as Antiques, so if you would like them to add a bit of antique elegance to your next rehab project, they are yours! Otherwise I guess I'll just toss them.

So the Dresser, sans hardware, moved into our huge bathroom for the painting phase of the project. Delia sanded all the chipped paint places, and then I scrubbed the whole shebang down with Trisodium Phosphate. That was yesterday, and today I primed that dresser with the Killz Primer the cute guy at the Lowes paint counter sold me. Tomorrow when I get home from work we will slap on some Valspar Low VOC Semi-Gloss in Well Water, and then we will wait for it to dry.

And then the exciting task of replacing the drawer glides! Stay tuned!