Sunday 24 August 2014

The Hot Mess Dresser

They can't all be gems.

The plan was to update my red Ikea dresser and turn it into a sophisticated steel and chrome masterpiece. 


Big red

Because it's an Ikea dresser, I didn't want to sand it. It looks like it was painted red, not laminate, but the smoothness made me afraid that maybe I don't know what laminate means, and I know you will ruin it if you sand it, so I skipped that step.

I didn't skip the primer stage, however. I'm a personal fan of that step, no matter what anyone says! It just makes everything uniform and ready for the colour as bought, not muddied by the original colour of the piece.


Good clean fun

To start the spray painting process, you need to get a paint mask, gloves and eye protection.  I decided to do it in style.


Always use protection

You have to spray paint in a really well ventilated area. I chose my balcony, though outside on the lawn would have been preferable. Unfortunately, you can't spray paint in your sports bra and Walmart rip-off yoga pants on your apartment building's lawn. I'm pretty sure I signed something when moving in saying I couldn't do that.

Once I started spraying, I realized I was making a mistake. My blog-guru has often talked about using a spray painting gun/ tool to have a neater mist, unless you use this specific brand and then you don't need it. I bought that "good" brand for the bones of the dresser, but the drawers I used the "bad" kind. 

Bad nozzle/ good nozzle

The cheapo gloves I used kept getting in the way, and I only found out when globs of paint started to drip out. And no matter what kind of spray pattern I went with, it kept coming out totally streaky.

Oh mannnnn

I did three coats, and still, this is as good as it came out:

Wa waaaaaaa

As I've done in the past, I used a poly coat to seal it. I went to my local Canadian Tire to buy a small can of the poly acrylic that I was using in my dad's garage. Unfortunately, that brand was not to be found. So, using my expert skills, (read: no skills and not wanting to try to explain myself to a sales person with my limited refinishing vocabulary) I tried to pick something similar. I went with Minwax Fast-drying Polyurethane. It was not the same.

The polyacrylic was like a milky whitish gluey texture. The polyurethane was water-thin and not clear. It had a faint brown/ beige colour to it. It rolled on looking clear anyway, so it didn't really matter. 

Finished product, I guess

I really noticed the difference when I went to wash the paint tray and roller. I've been able to reuse the same roller for ALL of my paint jobs after washing thoroughly. When I tried to wash this, it was very waxy, and impossible to wash out. Not only that but it's been hours and my roller-washing hand is still sticky. I used a scrubber brush, nail polish remover and then lotion and still my hand feels like I stuck my hand in a honey pot.

Oh bother

The other problem is that the actual dresser is too heavy for me to carry out to the balcony alone, so the rest of the job will have to wait for another day.

So the half finished dresser looks like this:

Big fat meh

Not my best work, but hopefully, with tricky lighting, I will make it look fancy enough for the new apartment.

-Until I get bored