A Big Girl Bedroom Alongside A Daybed & A Secondhand Dresser

A dove and a moose walk into a bar. Simply kidding, not a bar. That is not kid-room appropriate. How about a dove and a moose walk onto a playground? Anyway, I will simply cut to the chase. We at last found a dresser for Clara’s big girl room, complete with dovetailed joints! Hence the mention of a dove (ah, they do not make ’em like they used to).

We hoped one for the playroom/ big girl room for Clara once she moves in there (so that eventual-second-child can use Clara’s original dresser since it works so well as a changing table in the nursery). And that way we are not undoing one room to redo another room, which consistently feels counter productive. Plus nine more drawers worth of storage in our house = jackpot. Especially when it is taking the place of an old room full of clutter, which used to be what this space was.

It was a fairly strong secondhand score thanks to Sir Craig And His List (craigslist for those not down with my dorktastic lingo). For simply $50 we are the proud owners of this nine drawer dresser. As for how we found it, we simply searched “dresser” on craigslist in our area a few times a week (perhaps once a week if I forgot) for about a month and then at last this guy came up:

Our only real requirements were something from a non-smoking household (that is a hard scent to remove), something with at least six drawers like Clara’s nursery dresser which has worked out so well for us (nine is a total bonus!), and something long as opposed to tall (since we figure as she grows she can reach these drawers and get dressed herself more easily than she would with a tallboy since she might not be able to reach all those upper drawers).

After we got it into the room, we tried the daybed and the dresser on a few distinct walls and preferred the dresser right to the left of the door as you enter the room (it is a lot shallower than the daybed, which sticks into the room quite a bit, so we liked that on the back wall with the dresser across from it).

And here is the other side of the room to assist you get your bearings:

Oh but our new dresser’s not in ideal condition…

… so we are planning to either refinish it or paint it depending on how the room evolves around it. We do not want to rush into anything so it is easiest to do what we call sticking & moving. We drop it in place in the room and simply keep on adding other elements that we need in here (a rug, window treatments, art, a new light fixture, etc) and we are sure at some point it’ll become a lot more clear if we want to refinish it in a deep wood tone, paint it a moody navy, or go snowy white with it. Who knows, we might end up somewhere else entirely! No matter what we decide, you know we will keep you posted!

But where does the moose come in? Remember the estate sale light that I sprayed ceramic-animal-white back here? Boom, moose.

I promised you folks a shot of him with his final lampshade on, so there you have it. Remember the fabric-covered shade was a book project (#182) so we could not share it until the book was out but now that it is out, I am all about it. We used fabric leftover from Clara’s monthly picture to recover a shade that we already had, and I in fact used the back side of the fabric (I am a large fan of using a fabric backwards to mute it down a little).

So now you’ve in short seen one wall of the room starting to come together. Cannot wait to hang something over the dresser. Hint: it is not going to be frames or “traditional” art. We will share pics as soon as we have it done! Hopefully Wednesday (we are on a plane all day today coming back from the West Coast, but we have a giant to-do list that we hope to tackle tomorrow and then shoot and share things as soon as we can).

Oh and you’ve already seen the daybed on the other side of the room, but simply for lively I thought I’d toss this picture in here too so you can see how the upholstered lamp shade “plays” with the pillows and blanket. It is looking fairly glad in there. And I cannot wait to add some other colors like navy and teal and yellow. Soon I hope!

In the meantime, who is the cutest fake sleeper you know? Does her name start with a C and end with a lara?

What are you folks searching/eying/buying on craigslist? Any other furniture sources that you enjoy? Do you know any dove/moose related jokes? Did any of you folks go thrifting this weekend for the ol’ Macklemore Challenge? Thanks so much for all the lively we had with that on Friday. Cannot wait to see what you folks scored!