Before and After Armoire

After a couple days of prepping and painting, we finally have the new armoire settled into its home in the master bedroom. As you can see, I went with a bold and sunny shade of yellow (Valspar's "Almond Puff" #3008-3A) in a nice semi-gloss finish. I don't have the proper drawer pulls on it yet, but otherwise it's pretty much complete. Here's a look at it's original, straight-from-Craigslist state...

Dirty and blah, right? But I knew the moment I saw the listing that it was the right piece for our bedroom. I was searching for a classic chiffrobe (with the closet on one side and drawers on the other) and this fit the bill. Also, I loved the curved top and the spindle legs, and knew the whole thing would look amazing with some TLC and a bright coat of paint. Oh, not to mention the $75 price tag... sold!

Now, when refurbishing this lovely piece, I didn't stop at the outside. The interior needed some loving too...

Seeing that I take up most of the closet space in the house, I wanted my fantastic boyfriend to be able to make use of the storage in this piece. So in order to make it slightly more masculine, I lined the interior of the closet with vintage map prints from Cavallini (though I'm thinking this would have been an even better choice) and painted the remainder of the wood trim in Martha Stewart's aqua-hued "Vintage Map" (#MS 337, also in acrylic semi-gloss).

Lining the walls was super easy. I simply measured the area I wanted to cover and cut the paper to size. Then after carefully applying a coat of spray adhesive to the area, I applied the paper and smoothed it down until it had completely adhered. $12 worth of decorative wrapping paper can really do wonders, don't you think? And now, Kevin has a worthy home for his gorgeous and pristine new Prada penny loafers (yet another wonderful NM Last Call find!)

The chiffrobe has some wonderful little details. This close-up shows the lock and key that adorns the sweater cubby. This also allows me to show a better example of the paint job. I started out by sanding the rough spots, followed by applying two coats of an acrylic all-purpose primer to the entire piece. Once the coats had dried, I applied 2 coats of the yellow semi-gloss. There were challenges in this process though. I found that the yellow paint was not taking well to the surface, even with the thorough primer coats. There was running and dripping and the coverage was not coming out even. So, instead of re-sanding and re-painting the whole piece, I decided to go along with the imperfections and play them up! Using small pieces of sand paper, I roughed up the surface and corners to give it an intentionally weathered look. After 30 minutes of random sanding, I had a finished look that was just enough "vintage" without veering into Shabby Chic territory (I hope!)

And so, another project checked off the list! I am very excited for us to have this extra storage - hopefully the bedroom will be much tidier, and more cheery, because of it!