Dresser Hack Build and DIY Chalk Paint Finish

Were to start with this story.  Hmmm.  I guess I start 12 years ago when we bought this house and found this Malm dresser at Ikea as-is for $80.  We brought it home and put it in the girlfriend's room.  It was tall and fit in the teeny tiny room so it fit the bill.   Over the years, it has slowly but surely started to disintegrate.  By this spring only a couple of the drawers actually worked.  

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We went off looking for a replacement and found this.  Its lovely BUT it was too wide to fit in the little spot in the little room.  

After looking at it a few times, and REALLY thinking about it, I thought, I can build something similar and make it fit the spot AND I can reuse some of the parts from the dresser that is falling apart in the process. So I drew up my idea and proposed we build what we need.  My original idea had a shelf at the bottom as you can see from my sketch.  Nice idea but once we measure we realized it was too tall for the girlfriend to ever put anything in the top drawer.

Off to buy wood for the parts we didn't have and or needed to build.  We used out trust Kreg Jig for this one.

A big part of this project was to make the dresser have a chalk paint distressed finish.  We stained the sides brown so we could distress them later.  DH came in and commented that it was so BROWN.

I hope to do another blog post about the finish but I will touch on it briefly here.  I wanted a chalk paint finish but I couldn't find any locally so I made it up.  We stained the key new wood parts brown.  We then took odds and sods of paint we had, white, a bright emerald green and the blue left overs from little DS's room and mixed them together in a jar.  I then added some watered down drywall compound to the paint which gave it a very flat chalky texture that dried REALLY fast.  I lightly sanded the edges so the brown would show and viola.

As you can see, we built the frame to accommodate the drawer fronts we had.  The large drawers faces are from the gutted dresser and the small ones are left overs from a cabinet project that have been sitting here for years waiting to be used for something.

 This is the test run to see if we have measured everything approximately right.  And YES we did.  Measuring is not a strong skill of mine.  I'm more of a guess it and hope it works kind of gal.

I tried to get an up close and personal picture of the distressing.  The brown peeks through and it looks like its been around for a really long time which is what we were going for.  We put a Minwax finish over it and buffed it.  It has an amazing feel to it.  Its soft and smooth and has a nice luster.

And here it is, almost complete in its final spot.  The cow are is mine that I painted a few years ago.  I think they look FABULOUS together.