The thing about all those home improvement shows is that if you watch enough of them, you start to believe you can do it, too. My favorite show of the bunch is Flea Market Flip, a program where teams compete by buying borderline junk at a flea market, spend two days and a hundred bucks converting the junk into new pieces of furniture, and ultimately resell the items at the same flea market where they bought the junk in the first place for hundreds of dollars in profit. Week after week, contestants purchase busted up milk crates and rusty wagon wheels and turn them into coat racks and coffee tables, making big bucks along the way.
I can only assume Susan had been binge watching episodes of the show a few years ago when she dragged home an old dresser she found on the side of the road. The dresser was missing one of its drawers and was white, mostly, but Susan said she had plans for it. I personally thought she should have left it in the big trash pile where she found it, but Susan saw something in it I didn’t. Over the next few days, Susan turned that run down, shoddy dresser into an interesting little cabinet that eventually ended up in our living room.
Did I mention she painted it bright orange? She painted it bright orange. You can see it in the background of this picture on the left behind Susan’s mom and her husband. Also note the drawer hanging on the wall, which Susan also painted, and mounted vertically.
A few months ago when we purchased our new house, Susan came up with a plan for the dresser. She decided to paint it blue (I’d call it “Periwinkle”) and put it in our dining room, using it as the basis for a little “coffee nook.” She found the perfect spot for it, and it was just the right size to hold all of our coffee supplies. Susan hung the drawer above it, this time horizontally, and added hooks for hanging coffee mugs. It looked super awesome.
And then, last Sunday, ol’ dum-dum ruined it.
After starting a pot of coffee, I walked away from the kitchen for a few minutes. When I returned I discovered a gigantic soggy mess. Apparently I hadn’t placed the coffee pot in exactly the right position. It was close enough that the sensor recognized the pot was there, but not close enough for the coffee to actually enter the pot. Instead, hot coffee had run everywhere — everywhere — ultimately soaking the entire cabinet. I grabbed some paper towels to wipe up the mess and noticed that the blue latex paint Susan had used was coming off, too. In a few spots, the water had even removed the orange paint below the blue paint, revealing the dresser’s original white color.
A few hours later, this is what Susan returned home to:
I hoped that the dresser could be sanded down and repainted, but the shelves underneath, made of thick cardboard, had absorbed so much water that they were drooping. There was no saving it. I ruined it.
I offered to replace the cabinet with another one, but Susan said she wanted to be the one to pick out its successor. She found what she wanted this morning at Hobby Lobby — a nice little table with metal legs that fits the spot perfectly. We kept the old drawer on the wall where it was, in memory of “Old Blue.”
On Monday we dragged the water-logged cabinet out for Big Trash Pickup, which is where Susan found it five years ago. Maybe someone else will breathe life into it once again. RIP, Old Blue.
That was a totally different hot coffee mod.