Two Shades of Grey

I hear there is a trilogy out about the color grey that women across the country are swooning over. The only grey I am getting excited about is Sherwin Williams Jubilee and Stunning Shade.

I picked this dresser up for a song. It had great shape and details and is very sturdy. The drawers even work and I am pretty sure if I had a skeleton key I could even lock them. This is a solid wood piece, but the wood was pretty rough. I thought about removing the varnish and restaining it for a second, but then I looked at the clock and figured it would be too time consuming.

After looking at the sides I decided to try a two tone look because it had a natural pattern I could follow. I started with Stunning Shade (the darker grey) and loved it. After looking at it play off the top of the dresser I decided to keep stain it and keep it natural. I then picked Jubilee as my lighter color. The result:

The previous owner had some of the orginal hardware, but had added some different handles at the bottom. I was a bit peeved because they had drilled new holes to do so. The handles were a standard size so there was no need to do this. I patched the holes and made a trip to Hippo Hardware (www.hippohardware.com) to find matching hardware, but found out it would cost me half the price to simply buy new knobs at Home Depot. By the way for those of you in the Portland area you really should check out Hippo...quirky and very Portland.

The key hardware was a antique brassy color and it looked like it would be a bear to remove. It was also very thin and I was afraid removing it would bend it up. Enter my  handy dandy silver paint pen. I simply used the pen to silverize the hardware and now the new handles and old hardware matched.

I love the way this guy turned out. I am calling him a guy because the grey and wood seem to be well...manly. This stud will be for sale at my Trunk Show. Come and check him out.

This brings me back to Shades of Grey. No, I have not read the books. No, I do not plan to read them anytime soon ever. I am a reader, but typically if everyone is reading a book it will be everybody but me. I have never read Harry Potter (and I teach middle school Language Arts). I have never read Twilight. I have read The Hunger Games, but the only reason that happened was because my ten-year-old asked me to read them with him. As a mom I couldn't say no.