Frédéric-Franz -- A Chest of Drawers Makeover DIY Chalk Paint

by Delusions of ingenuity

My daughter has been away at college because apparently she couldn’t learn everything she needed to know on the streets, and she loves being in debt.
All joking aside, she graduates next month, Magna Cum Laude, I might add. I’m proud beyond proud.
Can’t you tell how smart she is? She loves all the things Mama makes for her.

fr d ric franz a chest of drawers makeover diy chalk paint, chalk paint, painted furniture

Apparently she has an affliction where hair grows from only one side of her head. I’ve completely come off the rails. Back to the chest of drawers.

When I shoveled her into her first apartment, I wanted her to have a piece of personalized furniture, so I dragged the nastiest, stinkiest chest of drawers I could find out of the basement and gave it a makeover.

It smelled nasty. It’s always smelled nasty. My mom tried to de-nastify it when I was a kid, to no avail. Here's the before:

See the wallpaper liner in the drawers? That was the wallpaper I had in my room when I was a kid. NICE!!

I primed Mr. Nasty down to his nether-regions. Every crack and crevice. He even giggled and said it tickled. I swear he did. Then I did a second coat. He passed out.

I mixed up some DIY chalk paint. This isn’t a scientific recipe. You can find them everywhere online, but basically I took one part Plaster of Paris, gradually added bits of water and stirred it until smooth, then added 3 parts latex paint and stirred completely. Got it? (This was when I first started experimenting with chalk paint. I could have just as easily used plain latex.)

She’s a music major (piano is her main instrument) so I had to do something musical. She was enamored of Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, thus, the name of this little project.

I painted the entire body/drawer faces in white, then got busy planning the design in black. I also picked up some red(ish) paint for inside the poor boy’s drawers.

I downloaded the “Chopin” font from dafont.com and transferred the letters and painted them in.

For all the transfers on this project, I printed out the images, placed graphite tracing paper underneath the design, traced the design, and then painted with black. Inside the lines, to be sure.

I had to do the keyboard in several steps. After tracing, I used painter’s tape to ensure all the lines were perfect. After taping, I first sealed the tape down with more white paint so the black paint wouldn't bleed through. Nothing bled! I hate blood.

This was the perfect design for the front (because I heart her very much) and it was a great opportunity for my running shoes to photobomb.

I reattached the handles, painted them up, sealed everything with Johnson’s Paste Wax, then took a much-needed shower.

Before and after!

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2 of 35 comments

Deb on Dec 31, 2019

Very creative. Love when someone steps out of the box for something different and beautiful

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Ruth Minsk Whitehead on Jul 21, 2020

It is beyond AWESOME!

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