DRESSERS!!!!!

So like I told you all before - if you were paying attention - I've been working on refurbishing our bedroom dressers that I've owned since before I can remember. Well...that my parents owned from before I can remember, and then they let me take them when I got married. 1 1/2 years of marriage proved too long to have those dressers in our bedroom in the shape/style that they were in, so I went about the task of whipping them into good looks. Those babies have now been through rigorous cleaning, sanding, five coats of paint, and knob replacement. And they now look FANTASTIC! Here is a before picture, again:

Cleaning the dressers before sanding them down was quite a revealing activity. It brought to mind the fact that never - NEVER - in the course of my relationship with them have they ever been cleaned, other than a dust here or there. Before my eyes, the dressers turned bright white in areas I always gullably believed to be *ivory*. Stains of various colors that I had always glanced over came off easily with a little soap and water, and made me a bit guilty that I had never thought of cleaning them off before. The girl who helped me clean the dressers even suggested that they didn't need repainting, they had just needed a wash, the difference was so dramatic! Watching all the years worth of dirt and grime come off the dressers before my eyes has made me feel icky every time I use my bare fingers to touch the old knobs I still have on there that I haven't yet scrubbed...need to scrub them asap!

So before I show you the after pictures, I need to fill you in on one detail. These aren't really "after pictures" at all. I'm not quite finished with them yet, and I've been waiting so long to post the pics on my blog because I was holding out for the day when they would be truly and completely finished. Not much more needs to be done with them, all I have to do is scrub with metal cleaner the pulls that I left on the drawers. Having scrubbed one of the pulls I know the visually pleasing difference a good scrubbing makes, so I wanted my real after picture for you all to have scrubbed pulls, not 20-years-worth-of-grime pulls. Also, I wanted to wait to post pictures until I was finished decorating the areas around the dressers and my bedroom was perfectly clean, but I'm realizing none of those goals are going to be reached anytime soon, so I'm making you settle for less than "after" pictures. Sorry.

Now, here are the long-awaited after shots:

Cuter-than-cute knobs from Anthropologie:

More cuter-than-cute knobs from Anthropologie:

So because the spacing between the holes for the pulls is an outdated two inches, I haven't found pulls that I like that have the spacing for the screws that I need. And I don't feel like drilling new holes and gumming up the new ones. However, the old pulls don't look half bad now that the paint job and the other knobs have been updated. So I'm keepin' 'em. In the following picture, the knob in the upper right corner is the one that has gone through one round of good scrubbing. You can see the difference it makes:

Even the small things, like brass-colored hinges instead of the old white hinges, make such big statements and help to make the dressers so classy:

And the grand view of the bedroom!

Voila!