New Old Dresser (and Other Old News)

Being that I find I seem to need some sort of home improvement/ building project to be working on (or dreaming about … or both) pretty much most of the time, I started eyeing up the old dresser in our bedroom. It was fine enough, but nothing is safe when the reno-ing urge takes hold of me.

So, first I wanted to whitewash it (a technique of thinning white paint with water and using it as a kind of stain to lighten wood while still showing off the wood grain.) Seeing the dresser had such a thick, dark stain and sealer on it already, there was no grain to be seen. Whitewashing it was about like whitewashing a veneer finish…

… I went with the back- up plan which was painting the dresser a solid colour. Sort of. I wasn’t quite ready to be finished with experimenting with washes. So I wondered what a green wash would look like on top of a white wash.

Mark randomly had this shade of green in his collection of cast-off paints…

… I threw a little of into the watered-down white paint I’d already used and created a gorgeous mint. Exactly like I was looking for. Then, I tried it over the whitewashed dresser. And it looked like this…

And this…

… which turned out to be a little too exact. It looked kinda cool. But only kinda. It was a nearly perfect match to the green in the quilt. I ended up finding it a little much green. Too… matchy-matchy. And patchy-patchy. The watered-down paint was not watered down enough to look obviously intentional but not solid enough to look …solid. It looked more like I’d given the dresser one coat of paint and was too lazy to give it a second.

So, I thought I’d better just go ahead and paint the thing. But then Mark suggested a blue wash over the green wash by watering down some blue paint we had left over from the blue bathroom. Worth a try!

The end result was a sort of mottled blue green that looks painted but in such a shade that you can’t quite tell if it’s blue or green. And seeing that mix are the theme colors for our bedroom, I decided that with some new handles (seeing I never did quite end up liking the round wooden knobs, no matter what I tried with them), I would call the dresser done. Here are the before and afters (as usual, true colors not showing up on camera. But you’ll get the gist).

And in other news, all is well. Mark and I finally recuperated from a three-week respiratory bout. We’ve been seeing some visitors from Canada and are expecting more soon. So that’s been exciting as I don’t know when I’ll be able to cross the border again. The immigration process stalled out before it began, what with a little snag we ran into. We’ll have to start soon, but we’d appreciate prayers for wisdom with what direction to go with it. Our future direction (as in, which country we end up settling in) may need to determine the direction we go with immigration for now, but we know we need to be here for at least another year while Mark wraps up his property-management business before retirement. And a move to Canada after that year is looking less and less likely every day what with land prices being what they are.

So… it’s complicated!

Thanks for reading. Chat soon.