First things first, the winner from last Monday’s drawing was Paulette.  Congrats to Paulette, and thank you so much to everyone else for all of your wonderful comments!

For today’s post I’ve done something I don’t do very often, I’ve painted a matching set.  If you’ve followed me for a while you might know that I’m not a fan of matchy-matchy furniture.  I prefer a more ‘collected over time’ look.  But, in this case I decided to paint both of these two pieces in the same color, just in case some future buyer wants to keep them together.

These pieces were originally part of a 3 piece set that I purchased a while back.  I’ve already painted and sold the matching washstand.

The bed is the one that didn’t fit in our van and I had to go back for it with nnK’s dad’s truck.

It’s a little hard to judge the scale of this piece by that photo, but that headboard is 73″ tall!

The foot board needed a little work after I got it home.  It had been inexpertly repaired in the past and had some drippy glue spots and some oddly placed nails.  My handyman/neighbor Ken loves these projects, he treats them like puzzles.  He takes the entire piece apart and then puts it back together again with fresh glue.  He’s a firm believer that glue (when used properly) holds better than nails any day.

Once those repairs were complete, I sanded the piece lightly and then painted it with two coats of Dixie Belle’s Midnight Sky.  Dixie Belle has two shades of black, Caviar and Midnight Sky.  I’ve used quite a bit of the Caviar, and I do love it.  It’s a deeper black than the Midnight Sky.  I used the Midnight Sky on my piano and was drawn to its slightly more subtle shade, so I decided to go with that on this set. Although honestly, you can’t go wrong with either color.

Once the paint was dry, I sanded the bed to distress and then added a top coat of Dixie Belle’s Best Dang black wax using one of Prima Marketing’s new wax/stencil brushes.

Let me tell you, that was a workout, talk about functional fitness!  That headboard is huge!

By the way, this is a full size (or double) bed.  However, it could be easily modified to fit a queen bed using an adapter (like this one from Rockler).

This bed would be an amazing statement piece.  I’d definitely keep it if we didn’t live in a 1 1/2 story house.  In case you didn’t know, the ‘1/2’ means that we have slanted walls in our upstairs rooms, which is why we had to cut down the headboard we used in our bedroom (and that is a full size headboard paired with a queen size mattress in our room) …

OK, enough about the bed, well, OK, here’s one more photo …

Let’s move on to the dresser.

That is not a truly legit ‘before’ photo of the dresser.  It actually came with a huge framed mirror attached that matches the headboard.  However, I find that dressers sell better without their mirrors, and mirrors turned into chalkboards sell really well too.  So I’ll be turning that mirror frame into a chalkboard down the road.  In the meantime, Ken had to do a few repairs on the top of the dresser where it was missing a couple of chunks of wood at the back.  The damage was hidden by the mirror, so once I removed it we had to do something to fix it.  I suspect that the weight of that mirror had done the damage.  Ken also added a new trim piece at the back to make up for the missing mirror.

Unfortunately, those fixes meant I had to paint the top.  Otherwise I definitely would have stripped and waxed it and just painted the body of the dresser.

I followed the same process to paint and wax the dresser that I did on the bed.

Then I cleaned up the original hardware and put it back on.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I did not find too much at the Kenny/Armitage neighborhood garage sale last weekend.  Just a couple of gems, including a set of old bugles.

Wouldn’t these be great for Christmas decorating?  Either added to a wreath or tucked into your tree?  I’ll probably hang on to these until the Christmas season and then take them to Reclaiming Beautiful to sell.

But in the meantime, I used one of them to stage my photos of this dresser.

The warm aged brass of the bugle worked perfectly with the dresser’s hardware.

I almost forgot!  These pieces came with the most fabulous original metal casters.

Even the bed has them, but I totally forgot to put them on before staging my photos.  Here are the casters for the bed, they are huge …

So, there you have it, a matchy-matchy set.

Thanks to Dixie Belle Paint Co for sponsoring this post with free product, and thank you to Prima Marketing for sharing their new wax/stencil brush with me.

If you are local and ready for a change in your master bedroom (I’m just talking new furniture here people), be sure to check out my ‘available for local sale’ page for more details on these pieces.