Various Projects - Refinished Dresser

My lovely mother-in-law gave us a dresser that she had had as a child. Her younger sister had it in turn and painted it in uproarious colors. It lived for years at their mother's house in a side bedroom. I had been wanting another refurbishing project after last summer's coffee table success and, as they were emptying out Grandma Alice's house, I received the dresser.Though I appreciated it's boldness, it didn't quite fit in with the rest of my decor. So, off to the garage with it, for some paint. A nice glossy black hides a multitude of ills, and so I went with the pain-in-the-ass to cleanup, but fantastic-for-coverage-and-wear oil based paint. Only 2 coats were needed.

As for knobs, I wanted some funky old glass ones and there's a great historical salvage place in Savannah called Pinch of the Past. They have quite a selection of old hardware and functional pieces of furnishings. I loved them all, so I had hard time choosing. I went for 5 different colors. They had a variety of other colors and shapes, but I figured that I should at least have a common shape and size and then I could have different colors without schizophrenia in dresser form.
To my surprise, in the end, I liked the palest ones the best. I had thought I would have liked the darker ones better.
The finished product is now installed in the guest room upstairs. It's shiny and new (to me)!

Various Projects - New Locks

In addition to the new front door (still no picture because I can't paint it in the current hotter'n blazes weather) the house has all new, non-crappy lock sets. I changed out the back door handle and the garage sets today. Hooray! I'm a little proud of myself as the instructions were not so fabulous and I'm not known as the mechanical one in the family. There was liberal use of the dremel and a chisel and various and sundry other tools that I haven't got to use in a while, followed by dustbuster cleanup (the best kind). I felt quite handy!

Various Projects - Kitchen Chair Cushions

Now that I'm actually home, I've had some time to get various house projects done. Near the top of the list was cushions for the kitchen chairs. Though I like my kitchen chairs (comfortable, sturdy, solid wood) if you're going to spend much time in them, the backs of your thighs get a little sore. And the sad truth is, that when I'm home, my computer sits at one end of the table and I spend too much time there.

So my requirements for the 6 chairs were that they cost less that $40 to do all of them and I had to use fabric I already had. Voila!

I dug out some batik fabric from Malaysia that had been languishing in one of my fabric bins and found some nondescript black twill for the undersides. They have zips on the back for easy removal and the cushion inserts are supposedly washable too.