our rainy weekend project - the ikea malm dresser hack.

hi! hope you had a good weekend! we finally got to go on that apple picking trip that eluded us for a couple of weeks and picked out pumpkins which we plan to carve some time this week. i already picked out my template and can't wait to give it a good ole carve.

today i thought i'd share a thing we did a couple of weekends ago -- an ikea hacking project. unfortunately i didn't take a proper before shot of the dresser and so i had to scour iphone photos i took within the last year to find some what of a decent one. {see above left} {it'll just have to do!}

the weekend when it rained nonstop i had mentioned that we went a little overboard with painting. the garden pitcher was one victim project, and this was the other. 

a couple of months ago i came across this pretty diy on hej juni in which i was subsequently led to a link that featured her project as well other "ikea hacks." i have never heard of this term before and was intrigued. this thought sort of sat in my head for a while and during that dreadful weekend downpour i remembered. and so i gots the husband on board to work to transform our malm dresser. 

this dresser does come in white, but we bought it in birch. i had contemplated on whether to paint it the sunburst yellow coat we gave our dining chairs, but decided to go with the "you're the boss" white {both are from clark+kensington}.

we probably broke every rule there is to painting and hacking ikea furniture. 

there was no sanding. no protective coating. we ran out of paint to do the legs and the inner and bottom and sides. and the holes didn't drill perfectly in the back. eecks. i know. sounds a little sloppy. but so far the dresser is doing {and looking} just fine. we're still new to painting and furniture diy and as we do more we'll get the process down pat. it's sort of like a big ole learning process for us and i guess we need to screw up first to learn {is that an odd concept? i hope not..}

we painted the outer shell first and left the drawers for later. yangkyu needed to make holes for the knobs, which he did the following day after we headed over to anthropologie to rummage through their sale section. we got knobs at $2.95 a piece but were bummed to find so many of them broken and cracked. we got some duplicates but we hope to go back in a couple of months to pick up a few new ones to switch the them out. i'm also thinking that if the all white look gets tiring, i may just re-paint the drawers in the sunburst yellow color. what do you think?

^^ that's piri overseeing the whole process. he likes to make sure we're on top of it like this time here.^^

so there it is. our newly transformed dresser. we gave it two coats of paint. we hope to pick up some more to finish the legs and also the bottom and side inner sections we didn't account for soon.  i'm still gushing over this shade of white and the mismatched knobs. just really satisfied with the look. yay to another finished project {well almost}. 

would love to know if you did any furniture re-dos and your lessons learned! please share and have a good week ahead!