Birthday Preparations

Paigey-girl's 8th birthday is less than a month away, but we've been working hard on preparations for the past couple weeks already, mostly on one of her big gifts.

Paige is the kind of girl who needs to know where things go; if they don't have a specific place to put things, things just don't get put away. So when we decided to give her an American Girl doll for her birthday, we were going to have to figure out a storage system that would work.

Pinterest to the rescue! I stumbled upon these great solutions:

Image via Cynde's Place

Image via Rambling Renovators

image via California Callahans

There were bits and pieces of each that I loved, so I incorporated them into our final product!

Here's what we started out with; my mom found it for us at a garage sale:

It had great bones and was the perfect size for Paige's room. I began demolition (something I love!), and soon Pete was able to help me put in a shelf, and we had this:

The top two drawers have been removed (and will be used for another project), and the remaining two drawers had the hardware removed and one of the two holes patched. I tend to like two small drawer pulls on dressers better than two bigger ones! I was very excited that the moulding came off easily and in one piece so we could use it above the top drawer to cover up the edge of the shelf.

You can see that there are bits of sticker on the original drawers, and I wasn't looking forward to removing them. I found the idea from California Callahans' dresser makeover on Pinterest; the pin said to Mod Podge lace onto drawers, then paint over it. Easy peasy, right? Well, it was...but when I went back to read the original blog post to see if they had tips on trimming the lace edges, I realized they didn't use lace, but textured wallpaper! Thankfully the lace worked out amazingly well...and to do the edges I cut as best as I could with regular sewing scissors, then trimmed up the edges with nail scissors. You can't tell where the stickers were or all the little dings from pulling out the original hardware.

Knobs were from Home Depot

I love the look of the lace!

So here's the almost finished product! All we have to do is install the rod to hang doll clothes from, but that'll be easy to do whenever we have a few spare moments:

Ta da!!!!

I loved the look of the accent color in the Rambling Renovator's dresser makeover, so I just used the same color as on Paige's walls. I'm hoping it'll keep the piece from looking too bulky, plus she loves blue! The blue does look a little funny here; it was still wet, and I was just so anxious to take pictures of it!!!

Total cost for the project: About $50! That includes the dresser, paint, board for the shelf, wood putty, and new hardware for the drawers.

And, last but not least, Miss Felicity was just cleaned up after being in storage for many many years. She was my first American Girl doll as well, so I'm very emotional and sentimental about Paige's birthday this year. I can't believe I'm going to have a girl old enough for an AG doll, and handing over my original (and favorite!) doll makes me weepy.

Looking pretty good for being 19ish years old!!!

What projects have you been working on lately?