Naturally, I started this blog with the hope of capturing all my wildly wonderful home projects and making you positively emerald with envy.

I’m not particularly handy, but I am damn stubborn and relatively frugal, which tends to result in risky DIY activities at a regular cadence. As of this moment, I have a (blessedly) short list of projects large and small that I want to get done, all in various states of do-ability:

1. Build a covered porch.
2. Figure out master bathroom.
3. Stain and hang sconces over our bed.
4. Refinish dresser to complement bedroom furniture.
5. Figure out office.

Fortunately, the porch is in progress, although it is going about as slow as possible, and I can put off the master bath and office due to all the thought required before making any decisions. (Although I have been doing some scheming as it relates to the master bath… more on that later I’m sure.)

As for the sconces and dresser, I’m happy to tackle those in the short term and capture them here. I picked up some great wooden sconces from World Market when they were on sale a few weeks ago with the hopes that they would match our urban industrial bedroom. Alas, the wood is more gray than brown, so they require staining so as not to look quite so haunted-country-house. That should be a quick and easy one.

The dresser, however, will require a bit more work. For months I’ve been toying with getting a new dresser, as our old IKEA 8-drawer Hemnes in black (even with the Anthropologie mirror mosaic knobs I bought on clearance a year ago) does nothing for our master suite and, in fact, fades into the accent wall it sits on. Not ideal.

But I can’t find something that matches our bed and nightstands well enough, or for under $800 that I don’t want to spend right now, so I came up with a plan to get what we have looking a lot closer to what I want for under $100.

The plan: Spraypaint the body of the dresser with a metallic finish, cover the drawer fronts with wood-look adhesive vinyl that I’ll seal and stain a bit with poly, and create leather drawer pulls from leather straps and hex-head bolts.

The result: Ideally, an urban industrial, mixed material dresser that looks way more expensive and has extra character.

With any luck, our contractor will be tearing up our grass and putting in forms for a porch foundation in the next two weeks, so I want to get the spray painting done in the hay field that is my backyard before then. Therefore, I intend to tackle this ASAP. I’ve done enough reading to know that I’m not going to bother with sanding it, and I’m optimistic that Rustoleum will do what I need it to (and how.)

Can’t wait to show off some “after” pics!