teaching an old dresser new tricks.

Here’s a little lesson in teaching an old dog new tricks. Well, an old dresser anyway.

My mom and dad helped us do a furniture swap a few weeks ago. They brought us this changing table from my sister Cait’s house and delivered to them a new one to take its place.

The dresser is the same one that my parents used with me and my three sisters and for the past year it’s been home base for a certain little East Village nephew. Now it’s time for it to get some action from a Junebug and his or her cloth-diapering-maverick parents (we’re on a confidence-boosting campaign over here).

I’ll admit that my sentimentality for old furniture has its limits. I’d really rather the angles were a bit less curlicued and I couldn’t abide by the brass handles. I also didn’t want to spend a lot of time or money on an update.

Enter the humble roll of flat lace leather.

For less than 10 dollars and in under 30 minutes, I made 8 leather dresser drawer pulls. The space between the two holes was a perplexing 2 and 5/8 inches, so going the homemade route was easier than redrilling to fit a standard 3-inch pull.
For this dresser, 10-inch strips of leather were long enough to make a pull that was a comfortable 1.5 inches away from the dresser with room enough to tie knots. To make each pull, I tied three lengths of lace together in a knot, threaded it through one hole (starting from the inside) and made a simple braid. Then I threaded the remaining end back into the drawer and made another knot to secure the handle. I tired my best to keep the width standard so that the dresser didn’t end up with pulls of varying depths. Pretty close to even, I’d say. Et voila. An old dresser made newish again.

Details about the paint choice here. More on painting furniture right here.

{Chemical-free cotton changing table pad with washable covers courtesy of my hard-working mama—otherwise known as grammy.}