I posted all about our plan to makeover our master bedroom on Friday.  As is the usual case, the project has grown beyond its original boundaries.  When the college kids were out giving me a quote on the bedroom floor, they suggested I do all of the upstairs floors at once.  It makes sense since they all flow together.  Then, one thing led to another and since doing the floors involves moving all the furniture around anyway, we decided to swap the guest room and Mr. Q’s study.

Mr. Q’s study was in the smaller of the two rooms and he felt pretty crowded in there.  Our guest room, on the other hand, is only used once or twice per year and the rest of the year just lies idle.

There was one small … or kinda big … obstacle to this plan.  My dollhouse.  Yep, I have a pretty amazing dollhouse.  My dad made it after he retired.  He was bored and he needed a project.  When my dad took on a project, he pulled out all of the stops.

The dollhouse is big.  And cumbersome.  And bulky.  And any other word you can think of to describe a rather large item that takes up a lot of space in a room but doesn’t really serve any purpose.  The dollhouse was doing just that in the guest room.  Swapping the rooms is going to require relocating the dollhouse, but you’ll hear more on that plan later.  Today’s post isn’t about the dollhouse (but don’t worry, that will be coming soon), or about swapping the two rooms around, it’s about the dresser that the dollhouse sat on.  This may be the nicest ‘before’ photo of a piece of furniture on my blog ever …

I have to say, this dresser was pretty much invisible underneath that dollhouse.  I’d forgotten both how big it is and how pretty it is.

I don’t even remember how long ago I painted this piece.  I know it was quite a few years ago.  It was certainly before I knew about milk paint or Fusion acrylic paint, and even before I knew about chalk paint.  It’s from way back in the dark ages when I was painting with regular old latex paint.  I painted quite a few pieces in this color from Behr called Beluga (as in the caviar which is black, not the whale itself which is white).

The dollhouse did do a little bit of damage to the top of the dresser …

It left a couple of big scratches.  But the rest of the dresser still looked great.  So I decided to just freshen up the top with a couple of coats of Fusion paint in Coal Black.

I scuff sanded the top with some fine grit sandpaper, wiped it clean with a damp cloth and then added two coats of Coal Black.  Easy peasy.

Although the blacks don’t match precisely, it’s not noticeable at all.

The details on this dresser are really pretty.

Unfortunately, with the room switch taking place, I no longer have a place for it.  So I staged it up with my faux dress form, Lula, to get some pictures to use in my Craigslist ad.

Lula is made from an old yellow Styrofoam manikin body that I painted with black chalkboard paint, a lamp table base (also painted black) and an old black porcelain door knob.

One of these days I might change it up and paint her white and add an Iron Orchid Designs transfer … hmmm … I’ll just add that to my to-do list.

In the meantime, I got the dollhouse dresser all cleaned up and posted on Craigslist and it sold right away.

The new owner is going to add a sink and use it as a bathroom vanity!  Probably a much better use of this dresser than hiding it under a giant dollhouse, don’t you agree?