I originally fell completely in love with an orange dresser with white trim online from my favorite store in the world Nadeau; however, when I drug my husband and mother-in-law the 2 1/2 hour drive (one way) all the way to Chicago to check it out, and, of course, buy it....I was disappointed when I saw it. Well, to start with I was going to use this dresser as a changing table for the nursery. The size was okay as I knew the dimensions before the mission, but the quality of the piece was not like the other Nadeau gems. The drawers basically fell out and even more strangely was that the drawers were only half the size they could have been, meaning they only went back half the depth of the piece. Strange. I had to cut my loss and move on despite how hard it was. It was not practical. Plus, it cost $314 and wasn't even solid wood. I could only imagine our little guy pulling out the drawers and them tragically falling on him when he is one day mobile. Couldn't do it.
I was still enamored though with the color and style of the piece, so my husband and I scoured Craigslist to try to find an old dresser that needed some TLC. My husband found the perfect piece, a claw-foot dresser. It had amazing bones where I could pull out the white trim I so wanted against the orange, and it was solid wood! After much sweat and frustration from my husband (poor thing), he was able to sand the entire piece, pull out all the tacky drawer lining and apply the many, many coats of paint to pull out the right color. I have to pay homage to him for this project, as I was purely the visionary and he, the heart and love.
We purchased the dresser for $75 off Craigslist, and purchased the hardware from 2 suppliers on Etsy.com for a total of $33 including shipping. The white paint was leftover from the paint we used for the baseboards and the orange was a Behr $30 gallon from Home Depot. We had thought about painting the hardware white, like the trim, but the character that the patina showed on the old knobs just took on a beauty of its own. Plus, as you will see the nursery unfold, it meshed perfectly in with the rest of the room. To tie it all up, we got a beautiful solid wood dresser with more storage and for less than half the cost of the original inspiration. Gotta love it!
