from drab to FAB!

the pinterest creativity bug bit me! 

ever since i saw the "coffee bar" posts on pinterest i knew i had to have that. i loved the idea and thought i had enough space in my kitchen to do it. and move the coffee machines off the counters and give me more space for when i cook and bake. also since we moved into my grandpas house after we got married, and he moved out, our basement storage room has a few older pieces that are just dying to get a new life!

my hubby and i took on the challenge of refinishing my parents old dresser. this dresser was their first dresser given to them when they got married. (aww sentimental value) 

it has seen nicer days, before we moved into my grandpas house the basement flooded and the water did get onto a few pieces of furniture. does anybody know what that smells like? not pretty, and definitely not something you want in your kitchen. so, we stripped it down. sprayed it down. wiped it down. vacuumed it down, inside and out.

here it is in its naked glory.

it took a little bit longer then expected, for a few reason, 1: i have no idea how to 'properly" strip finish. and 2: i probably did not have the "proper" tools. so i used what i had, sand paper obviously. but to get it down to its bare butt, i had to scrape off the top finish. to do this i found a wood working tool with a sharp flat end and just started scraping. (remember "the claw" chandler had from friends? that was my hands after a few hours of scraping.) i only scraped the top down completely because we wanted to keep the top natural wood.

starting to look amazing!

my hubby taped off the top and spray painted the bottom. he did 3 coats. 

i now realize i forgot to take pictures of the drawers. but i am sure you get the idea :) we took off the oldschool knobs and hinges and filled in the holes in the middle of the big long dresser and my hubby created new holes for the new knobs.

for the knobs, i love my bling, so i knew it had to be crystal knobs, when we refinished our kitchen cabinets we have crystal knobs with silver base on white cabinets. for the black dresser i thought crystal knobs with a gold base would look pretty.  

and in my opinion, its gorgeous! 

here is the finished product :) 

i love it. 

the only thing we are adding is a clear glass top, so that over time the coffee machine's do not ruin the wood top. 

i love the natural wood look.

so happy with the way it turned out. we had my parents over for dinner and they loved seeing it. i love bringing back those memories and glad that my hubby and i could bring their first pieces back to life, for our first pieces too. :)

my very own pinterest inspired "coffee bar" infront of my pinterest inspired curtains also!

i am now inspired to refinish more!!

golden graham smore bars

do you know how difficult it is to find golden graham cereal in canada?? at least thats what i thought. i finally found them at one of the grocery stores in town that i havent been too in so long, right under my nose they were sitting on a shelf. (i was gonna go to the states to snap some up...yikes)

i have been wanting to make these for my hubby, because we keep buying the golden graham bars at costco, and i saw a recipe on pinterest and figured it has got to be cheaper to make them then buy them.

it is. 

sometimes at the richards we cant sleep till 2 am or 3 am. so that seemed like the perfect time (in my head) to make these smore bars. and at that point of sleep depravation, you think everything is funny.

i used the recipe from macaroniandcheesecake.com. we tweaked it a little bit, it was my hubby's idea to put a layer of chocolate on the bottom, because thats how "costco does it". all i had on hand is semi sweet chocolate chips, next time i make it we will use milk chocolate, because we are milk chocolate kind of people.

hubby pressing the bars down.

the final product, YUM!