How To Transform Free Into On Fleek

When I was in high school, I cleaned house for the Martin family.  Mrs. Martin had me polish her silver set once a month.  One afternoon she told me, “If a visitor picks up your silver when they don’t think you are looking, don’t invite them back.”  She told me this was a sign of bad manners by a house guest.  Note: back in the day, if silver was heavy, it was expensive.

Buying low, even better finding it free, and selling high as a DIY Queen is an art. Recently we found a couple of free dressers on Craigslist.  When we got them home, I peeked in one of the drawers and found a label I hadn’t seen before: J.B. Van Sciver Co.

I did some research and found out that J.B. Van Sciver Furniture Co. was opened in Camden, N.J., in 1881 by Joseph Bishop Van Sciver.  It was later run by his sons. Read more about the company by clicking on this Wikipedia link.  I Googled the name again and found the furniture label alone was being sold on EBay for $19.99.   Click here if you are interested in buying it.  The photo on the left was one of their fliers from the 1950s.

While I loved the hardware, I thought the wood dresser needed an update because there were a number of scratches.  I looked in the garage for a trusty quart of Annie Sloan Old White chalk paint and went to work.

An hour or so later, the dresser was done!  The original hardware looked stunning on the updated piece and it distressed very nicely.

 

I didn’t want the dresser to look naked for its photo opp, so I styled it up with pillows lying around it and then tried a sheet.  It still just looked like a dresser that was trying too hard to hide the asphalt around it.

The photos didn’t have the pop I was looking for, so I pulled the heavy dresser against the fence and re-arranged the staging pieces on top of it.  

In case you were wondering about the staging pieces, I bought the red sphere at TJ Maxx Home Goods and the candle at C. Wonder, which has since closed.  Read the article on how Tory Burch’s ex-husband’s knock-off store crashed and burned.  Adding three books from my bookcase, I chose The Cardinal Way (because I am a die-hard Redbird fan), the Word Book II and a Rick Steves Travel Florence book.  Rick Steves is a legend and his travel books are a MUST if you are heading to Europe!

The dresser was ready for its close up!  As the kids say these days when describing something cool: ON FLEEK.  By the way, for the millennials who think they invented the words ON FLEEK, it’s been around since 2003!  Finish my blog by reading an article on the phrase! I hope you agree: #mydresser is #onfleek.