I’m Melting … I’m MELLLTING!

Here’s a handy tip if you plan to strip some furniture in the future: go ahead and make sure that it is 100% wood first.  Otherwise, you might end up melting decorative elements that only look like wood and are in fact, plastic.  That’s exactly what happened to the cute little inserts on Christina’s dresser. Sadly, they are no more.

This also happened to me once loooong ago, when I was a poor poor college student trying to spruce up our apartment.  I found an oval mirror at a secondhand store with a nice frame, barfy color.  It was $25, which was a HUGE splurge! For some reason, the thought to spray paint right over that ugly color never even occurred to me, and I decided that paint stripper was duh, obviously the way to go.  I laid a shower curtain over the floor of my tiny balcony, slathered the frame up with paint stripper, then watched in horror as it dissolved before my eyes.  I might as well have taken my $25 and started it on fire.  It was traumatic.

Luckily, Christina’s whole project didn’t disappear after her stripper mishap, she still had an entire dresser left to work with.  She decided to frame out that space and use it to show off a set of gorgeous gold knobs instead. So pretty against that coral! Take a closer look on her blog Phoenix Restoration.