A Heavy One

Look what we acquired this weekend:

We were in the market for a cheap (read: free) dresser to paint for our upstairs guest room/office/tower. My parents came up with just the thing. This ole chest-o-drawers has made it's way into four homes now (that we know of) since my mom picked it up at a flea market back in Kentucky. It is a very solid piece and I love the character it has, including the scalloped top and the ridged details along the sides.
Best of all, Mom and Dad gave it over generously, as my mom said she'd been saving it for us for when we had room. Does she know me or what?!
Getting this ginormous piece of furniture up our winding staircase was quite a feat. It involved lifting up and over our bottom railing, and not one, but two instances of flipping the dresser en route. Since the dresser outweighs me by a bit, I wasn't the ideal moving partner in this endeavor. However, my 5 am workouts must be paying off, because I held my own and miraculously the dresser made it into the room.

As you can see, this dresser offers lots of storage space. We plan on using the top sliding drawers for office-y storage (since our almost-finished, made-to-order desk won't include any drawers or cabinets).  We'd like to leave the bottom two drawers for guests and maybe to store our guest linens as well.

Clearly, this guy needs a lot of lovin'. Like I said, he's been through at least 4 moves and he's definitely showing some wear-and-tear, even for an antique. I'm planning to paint the entire dresser white with some gray accents to highlight the details, and distressing it so that the nicks in the wood don't look out of place. Of course, new knobs from Anthropologie are in the plans as well...

Aaaand I want to finish it by Friday. Call me crazy but we have our first house guests coming this weekend and Nick and I are in a mad dash to get this room ship-shape for them (not that they would care at all if it wasn't!). To paraphrase Mr. Bob the Builder, "Can we do it?"

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"Umm... I sure hope so!"