My Farmhouse Modern Laundry Room is really coming along! It is such a huge change from the builder-grade boring room we started with. We've done all the work ourselves, on a teeny-tiny budget. 

In case you've missed anything, it all started with new paint and large diagonal floor tiles that are a decorative and inexpensive way to transform the laundry room floor. The next project was adding a Farmhouse cabinet and shelving for lots of storage.

We're taking a little break from the room itself today and looking at this dresser that I upcycled for the laundry room. Yep, even in my tiny 33 square foot space, I managed to fit a dresser!

It's not a big dresser, it's small and narrow but adds extra storage to my laundry room.

The dresser started off looking like this.

I loved the ocean green when I bought the dresser, but over the years it has discolored and yellowed and was looking really dingy. I had to keep a runner on it to cover up the worst of its flaws. Because of its small size, I've used this dresser all over my home, in different rooms and for different purposes throughout the time I've owned it.

For its farmhouse modern makeover, I painted it a soft gray (a custom mix I made using Behr's Paint and Primer in Swan Wing and a sample of Sherwin William's Mindful Gray that I had). 

I wanted contrast with the top and achieved it using General Finishes Dark Chocolate milk paint.  I love how it gives the look of a wood top, and the GF paint goes on so smoothly! 

A huge improvement, but it was looking a little bland so I painted the drawer fronts with Americana Decor Chalky Finish Paint in Everlasting (white). 

I used the same white paint by Americana Decor to add a bit of contrast on the vertical grooves at each side of the dresser as well as handpainted leaves on the knobs. 

I wanted this piece to be a bit quirky so I made a custom stencil using my Silhouette machine and painted on the words Accessories & Accoutrements. A bit of a vintage vibe, and a little quirky which I love!

I can't even tell you how that word came to me...that's just how my mind works! The definition of accoutrements is "additional items of dress or equipment, or other items carried or worn by a person or used for a particular activity". That's exactly what this dresser holds...winter gear (hats, gloves, scarves) in the top drawer and summer gear (suntan lotion, swim goggles, bug spray) in the bottom drawer.

To make a stencil with your Silhouette die cut machine is so easy. I love that the Silhouette machine allows for me to use any font that I have on my computer. I typed the words into PicMonkey, selecting my chosen fonts and size and after saving it to my computer, uploaded it to my Silhouette machine. I like to use regular card stock when I'm cutting stencils because vinyl is too tricky to work with for this application. Using frog tape, I taped my stencils in place and then dabbed on black acrylic paint with a stencil brush. The trick to crisp lines is to pounce and always stencil from the edges in. I pounce once or twice on my cardstock to remove excess paint, and then pounce towards the middle of the letter. I hope that makes sense; feel free to let me know if you'd like additional help or a better explanation with that!

I finished the top of my painted dresser with General Finishes High Performance Top coat in flat and the rest of the dresser was waxed with Americana Decor Clear Wax.

This dresser has come a long way from its discolored and boring beginning! I love the contrast with the different paint colors! And the custom stenciled drawers makes it quirky and fun...definitely not boring or ordinary!

You'll get to see how I incorporated this painted dresser into my farmhouse modern laundry room when I do the final room reveal. Update: see the reveal here.