Two years. That’s how long I’ve been looking for a proper storage unit for our dining room. A few times a week [usually to break up my newfound hobby of doom-scrolling], I’d open my Kijiji app and search for dressers. I waded through so many ads and honestly it wasn’t until two weeks ago that I saw a dresser that I loved so much that it made me panic that someone else was going to get it before me.
It was a 9-drawer French provincial dresser that was in really good shape and wasn’t priced at $300 by someone who has never sold anything online before in their life. I feel I had an advantage as this is the photo that was advertised online, which didn’t deter me at all:
I am willing to guarantee only 5 people viewed that ad because of the photo; it had a drawer missing, but if you took a moment to read the caption it said all drawers were included and functioning [“I’m not dealing with a dresser with only 8 drawers!“]. Their loss!
After a few messages with the seller, we were due to collect the dresser the following weekend. We rented a tiny U-Haul [$14.95 + tax] and collected the dresser [$95] in Ottawa. It was advertised at $110 and managed to get the price down enough to cover the U-Haul.
It’s SO PERFECT for our living room. Our previous dresser, which was 120% a placeholder until I got a much more appropriate piece of furniture [read all about it here!], was so much smaller and flimsier than this piece.
It won’t be a popular opinion, but I will be painting this piece black. It has such a similar shape to our dining room hutch, which I painted black four years ago [and is in perfect condition still!]. I’ll also be distressing the edges like I did with our hutch, which I’m hoping will further tie to two pieces together and make them look like a set. At the moment with the dresser in its original wooden finish, it’s too much brown / orange / yellow in the room. Especially with the gold mirror hanging above it and the ‘kitten white’ beige walls, I do feel the dresser being black will anchor this side of the room.
I’m quite excited to paint it and maybe this week I’ll be able to cross it off my [seemingly never-ending] to-d-o list.
This is a perfect opportunity for some self-promotion as I used my four tips for buying secondhand items online when buying this dresser! To read about my tips in detail, check out my blogpost here.
