Our 4 year old son Ryan LOVES green. This doesn't just mean that he will choose green if asked his favorite color. This means that he might like green more than trains or diggers (though maybe not more than riding his bike), and that is a lot!
This dresser was part of my baby furniture, and it's been in the basement of a few different houses since then. With the basement project going on, we needed to move it and I came up with the idea of painting it and using it in Ryan's room. His bed is a honey color and he didn't have any other furniture in his room, so the natural choice was GREEN! When we initially painted his room we had added a lower bar/shelf to his closet to make it very functional for clothes storage, so we avoided buying new furniture at the time. This was working well, but lately there have been messy piles of shorts and pants in there, and it's been driving me crazy!
Ryan helped me with every step of this project except for using paint thinner to clean the wood. Our local home warehouse store had suggested sanding, but a paint store we love recommended using paint thinner and primer instead of sanding! YAY for that!!! It cleaned the wood well enough for the paint to bond by ensuring that no polish or oils were left behind.
Ryan took off all of the old hardware himself!! All 20 screws. He was thrilled.
We wanted to center the handles on the knobs, so we filled and sanded the existing holes on 4 of the 5 drawers.
Working with Ryan was so much fun! He has a great attention span and listened well! We did one coat of primer (tinted to match) and 2 coats of the semi-gloss paint (skipped the 3rd coat on the drawers) . Ryan painted all 5 drawer fronts and the bottom and side of the dresser twice. I did the 3rd coat on the dresser myself. Not too bad!! We loved doing this project together and I am looking forward to having him help with more things soon!
Opening the paint can was lots of fun!
We are thrilled with the results! Ryan loves the color and he loved picking out what would go in each drawer. This project inspired me to do a few other things in his room too (with more planned!). I finally hung the alphabet letters he made at preschool this past year, which adds a lot to the room. It was a miracle that I found all 26! When I first put them up, I had all but 1. Want to guess which one as missing for a while? I had always loved the letter cards from Land of Nod but Ryan is really proud of having made these and I think they look pretty cute! They don't show up too well in this picture but each one is decorated based on the letter: feathers on the "F," eyes and eight legs on the "O," etc.
Now I have to move his name letters that were previously centered over his bed. I was thinking about painting a shape on the wall for them, but now I might put them on a decorated board or frame to make hanging them easier. You can see 2 magnetic chalkboard squares propped up against the wall - we have to hang them - we have 9 to make a blue/green checkerboard pattern. We color-matched the paint for his dresser to go with that, and his closet is painted a similar color. Sadly we weren't aware of his green obsession when we painted his walls blue!
Before and After!!
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