Design Evolution: Weekend Accomplishments

My second weekend project was inspired by a before and after I saw on Design*Sponge a week or so ago. A blog reader sent in info on a revamped to a rather uninteresting stool from Ikea. The photo below is of course the after. The before was an unfinished pine Ikea stool that had seen better days. The stool was repainted and the steps decoupaged with Japanese paper; for the complete post click on the after photo. Not only do I think the end result of the project is totally sweet, it gave be a great idea for a piece of furniture I had hanging around half finished.

I bought this little chest of drawers from Ikea several months ago with the intentions of having it serve as my landing strip. It's the RAST three drawer chest and was only $39.99. The chest comes unfinished so I though I would paint the outside of it white and the drawer fronts a sunny yellow. ikea rast dresser chest of drawers As you can see I got as far as painting the exterior white (since we had left over white paint hanging around the house) but never got the yellow paint. I also ordered pretty coral color knobs from Anthropologie. Anthropologie has such a gorgeous assortment of hardware, if you're ever looking to update a piece of furniture that's a great place to start.

Please excuse the horrendous looking door frame and pile of saws next to the chest. We always seem to be in the middle of a project. The door frame has actually been fixed (only took a year) since I took this picture.

So with my Design*Sponge inspiration, I decided instead of painting the drawer fronts I would cover them in fabric. I have this illness that causes me to constantly buy fabric without having an actual project in mind to use it for. Because of this I had several (okay six) yards of assorted Joel Dewberry fabric lying around my studio. The project ended up only taking about 1/2 yard of fabric. Here's the tools I used, nothing fancy or scary.

Off came the drawer fronts and out came my staple gun. I used the little kitchen knife the make the holes for the knobs to go through. I'm pretty impressed with the fact that I got the pattern of the fabric to run level left to right and match relatively well on each drawer. So here's the finished product, what do you think? You can see the wood grain a bit through the fabric but I decided I don't mind. It's actually more prominant in the picture than in real life.