Unfinished Business, A Love Story

I don’t know if my husband understood what he was getting into when he married me.

I mean, my mom sat him down and did his astrological chart the first time she met him. Whether you’re into astrology or not, that has to make you wonder what’s swimming in the gene pool. There were also pretty clear early indicators that I was going to be the Oscar to his Felix, though the whole “spray painting of dressers in bedrooms” thing never came up in Pre Cana.

But marry me he did, and he has been my rock, steadfast and true, the calm voice of reason, ever since.

One of the first times he went shopping with me, I was buying a robe for my mother. We were chatting as I got to the register and pulled a crumpled wad of bills from the front pocket of my jeans. We both watched as a few bills floated to the floor. He looked at the wad, he looked at the floor, he looked at me.

“You are not taking care of the money,” he said.

And he didn’t blink when he found me stripping an old dresser in the tiny dining room of our first apartment. He obligingly took a ‘before’ picture and cheerfully ate meals on the living room floor until the project was done. That phase of it, anyway. There was a bit of scope creep because the dresser wasn’t big enough for both of us. We found a “budget-friendly” unfinished maple dresser that I planned to finish to “match” the old one.

1981. That’s me…the Vanna White of dresser display.

The new dresser was not the success of its suite mate. The poly went on too thick, dripped and ran and…yuck. It was sanded down and prepped for recoating, but that was preempted by life. If you had told my 22 year-old-self that I’d be a grandmother before this thing got finished, I’d have told you to lay off the sauce, kid.

To paraphrase Piglet, “the haycorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I just wish I’d gotten my mother’s astrological DNA instead of her ‘unfinished project’ gene.

The old dresser still looks good and has been in constant use since it was refinished. The unfinished-unfinished one? That dresser is the mother, nay…the grandmother of unfinished projects. It’s been an ugly ass bane of my existence for decades. Finish it or get off the pot, you say? Every time it’s about to get axed, it wrangles a last minute stay of execution and gets exiled to the basement or wherever we need some functional, if ugly, storage.

this would be a fun picture to recreate.
1983. We had just moved into our first house, I’d long since given up re-refinishing and just put the hardware back on.

When we needed something in the little guest room of our new(ish) old house, it made its way up the stairs and across the hall from our room. It taunts me regularly. A couple of weeks ago when a client asked me about chalk paint, I dedicated its body to science.

2020. Go away or I will taunt you a second time!

I’ve refinished lots of furniture, but never used chalk paint. This was a prime opportunity to experiment, share some insight and, one might hope, produce some content.

For the uninitiated, Chalk Paint® was invented by Annie Sloan thirty years ago, when she wanted a furniture paint that required little to no prep and a fast dry time, in order to turn projects around in a day. Named Chalk Paint® because of its texture and ultra flat finish, it’s been replicated by many over thirty years, but Annie Sloan’s remains the preeminent brand.

Perfect for the dresser that’s been waiting 40 years to get turned around in an afternoon.

Okay, but at $38 per liter, it’s also the champagne of decorative paint. And you can’t get it just anywhere. Online, sure. But if you want it now, you need a local, hand-picked, certified, grade A stockist.

When now is 7 AM and the budget for the dresser is more Bud Lite than Veuve Cliquot, you cross the parking lot from the gym to Home Depot and take your chances with a $20 quart of Behr “Chalk Decorative Paint”.

There are 45 postage stamp sized paint chips in the Behr brochure, a subset of the 218 available colors. You can’t see the remaining 173 colors before you buy. Not in the mood to throw caution (and twenty bucks) to the wind, I chose from among the mini chips. Fossil Gray seemed appropriate for the albatross in the guest room.

for realz yo.

My husband wasn’t surprised to find me in the guest room laying drop cloths and removing hardware from the dresser. Well, maybe he was a little surprised about the drop cloths. I told him not to talk to me because I was going to be recording a video of the process. My friend Darla has encouraged me to do this because video is the social media wave of the future.

Trust me, unless you’re looking for an answer to the question, “Does this dresser make my butt look big?” don’t do it.

After giving the dresser no prep other than a good scrub, I brushed on the first coat of paint. I didn’t love the color, but it was going over ebony stain, so I reserved judgment. Sadly, after two coats of Fossil Gray, the situation had not improved.

I’d learned something about the paint and the process, but I was left with a dresser I found more offensive than before the “easy afternoon makeover” had morphed into three trips to Home Depot, five kinds of replacement hardware from Amazon and $147. At least $47 more than we’d paid for the dresser forty years ago.

So maybe I was a little anxiety ridden when I started Googling my options.

The first thing I realized was that chalk painting is a cult. If you find yourself in the company of one of its members, don’t stand still or you’re likely to be chalked, distressed and waxed, though not necessarily in that order.

Experiencing a sample of the blogs and videos reminded me of the furniture antiquing craze my mother fell prey to in the early 1970s. Whether it was a compulsion induced by paint fumes or she didn’t want to waste the product, by the time she came to her senses, a set of shelves, a stool, her sewing machine cabinet and the upright piano fell victim to the peacock blue paint and brown glaze meant to “unify” the disparate pieces of furniture in our dining room.

1973. Girl with her mother’s blue piano.

My search was fortuitously interrupted when I accidentally checked Facebook. I saw that there’s a new documentary out called Gray is the New Blonde. Watching the trailer got me thinking that dressers are like women. Some look amazing when they go gray.

Me and my dresser? Not so much.

hardware trials on the ol’ fossil.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s one thing to be a grandma, quite another to look like a grandma, so I’m gonna keep touching up those roots. As for the dresser, Fossil Gray was looking a bit like embalming fluid. It needed a shot of color, but I couldn’t find one that would inject life and work with the rug in that room.

All this talk about grandmas reminded me of my grandmother’s desk just down the hall. It has wear and tear, but it’s aged quite charmingly and it would work really well in this little room.

If I swapped it with my Fossil Gray friend, I could paint her something that would work really well in her new space. Something trendy and chic, like Pantone’s Color of the Year, Classic Blue.

It was nine at night. A good time, it turns out, to finish the unfinished business, because I’d discovered that Waverly Inspirations® Chalk Acrylic Paint was on the shelf at Walmart. And they’re open till 11.

A proprietary mix of Ocean and Ink. Maybe four parts to one. Measuring is for wusses.

My husband was traveling when I had this epiphany. When he got back home, he noticed that my grandmother’s desk had taken up residence in the guest room. He said that he thought it looked good in there and casually asked where the chair had come from.

Yesterday he finally noticed the finished dresser as he walked into my office.

“Hey, wow! This really looks great!”

I started to warn him as he tugged on one of the new drawer pulls, that I hadn’t fixed the drawer stops, but he caught it before it fell out.

”Still a piece of shit,” he said. “But it looks really good.”

Two hearts, living in just one mind.