Silver bedside table

I have a been living with a set of dressers since college that I have been wanting to get rid of.  I haven't ever liked them.  But they were free.  And solid wood.  They are also in terrible shape.  And verrrry heavy.  And not my style.  Every time we move I say that I'm going to get rid of them.  Then I realize that will mean picking out and spending money on new dressers.  And then I give up and keep them.  I've decided that instead of getting rid of them, I am going to have some fun.

I started with the single bedside table.  If there was ever a second one, it was lost in the basement of my mother-in-law's house long before we dragged these pieces into the sunlight.  I don't have a before picture of the side table but here is the tall dresser from the set:

It really is that orange.  Bits of trim missing.  Water stains.  Mismatched pulls.  Chew marks.  Sticky hazy veneer.  Cracked veneer.  Peeling veneer.  Smells like veneer. 

I decided to paint and let my daughter choose the color.  She needed a little cabinet next to the piano to keep her music in.  Her color of choice was silver.  I found a non-sparkly silver in the Martha Stewart line called Polished Silver.  I suppose I could have gone the spray paint route but I've never found a silver spray paint that wasn't laced with faux sparkles and glitter.  

I told myself that if my 11 year old was helping I was going to take a more relaxed approach.  I did sand the top because it was really rough.  I filled in a few obvious scratches and gouges with wood filler - and now that it is finished I see many more and I think "Man, I really should have done a better job at filling in and sanding!"  Live and learn.

I added an entirely new piece of trim to the left side on the front of the door.  *That sounds confusing:  it's the vertical piece near the door knob.  I was quite happy with how that turned out.  I cut a slice off a 1/4 piece of luan we had around.  It was perfect.  I glued it in, sanded it down and rounded the edges.

Then we took it into the yard and primed it inside (not the drawer) and out with Rustoleum Ultra Cover Primer.  I used a bit of cream colored paint I already had to brighten up the inside of the cabinet.  Finally finally  (11-year-olds are quite impatient) it was time for the silver paint.  My 11-year-old also doesn't mind having paint all over her hands while she is holding the paint brush.  Ugh!  So we painted and painted and painted.  This paint is very thin and it seemed to take a dozen coats.  *In reality it was about 4.  I also didn't take any pictures of the process, so thanks for playing along.

 My daughter picked the knobs.  She really wanted to use these from Anthropologie.  It bothered me a bit that one is silver and one is brass but she wanted something that made it look more funky not fancy.  She didn't want fancy but she picked silver paint.  That is how an 11-year-old thinks.

It was a total accident

I needed to patch a hole in the bathroom. 
 
My little guy managed to rip the towel bar off the bathroom wall.  He said it was an accident.  No, not an accident that he was h a n g i n g  from it.  THAT was intentional.   But, the "tearing it off the wall" part was completely an accident.  We're still working on that whole "repercussions of your actions" thing. Such antics left a giant [OK, not so giant, but when you have to patch and spackle and prime and paint it suddenly gets a lot bigger] hole in the wall.  I put off fixing it because I couldn't decide if I should rehang the bar for him to, well, rehang from. There was also the issue of the paint color which I didn't have more of and disliked anyway.  That meant it would be time to paint the whole bathroom.   
 
Yesterday I patched, spackled, sanded, primed and painted.  I even took down the cabinet above the toilet to paint the wall behind it.  It's all in the details, right?  Then I rehung the cabinet.  Almost. 
 
I hung it from two anchors [I thought]. Just as I was reaching for the screwdriver to sink some screws into the cabinet to ensure it didn't fall... it...fell.  Hard.  It managed to break the toilet tank lid and dent the freshly painted wall in the process.  It could have been worse.  It could have broken the toilet tank full of water.   Unfortunately 10 year old toilet tank lids aren't sold at your local big box store.  You need to call the manufacturer so they can tell you they are out of stock until Forever.  Then you have to contact websites like ibrokemytanklid.com and bobstanklidemporium.com [OK, maybe I made these particular names up] before resorting to eBay.  eBay?  You can find everything on eBay!   
 
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to patch a hole in the bathroom.

Update: I only slightly exaggerated those website names.