Dresser Makeover, Hardware Too!

Sometimes I forget exactly how many pieces of furniture have come and gone through our hands. It doesn't seem like that many until I start scrolling through the files on our computer. It's a lot, y'all. There's a lot of learning and hands-on experience that have resulted from doing so many pieces, but from time to time I still come across problems that need to be solved.

Here's a dresser that I just finished. Sorry, I don't have a great before picture, but it's the one on the right. It was blah, painted brown, and nothing to be desired. It's wood, but the wood was painted over with a brown color. Not sure why.

I decided to go with gray and blue. I'm holding off on the "after" picture because I want to talk about my hardware problem first. I may have mentioned it before but ALWAYS, for the love of Pete, ALWAYS count the hardware before you buy it. Why? I promise you that you WILL spend more on new hardware than you did on the piece. And I also promise you that you won't be able to find new hardware that matches up to old holes. Trust me. So anyway, I counted the hardware, but failed to notice that some of it was damaged. Take a look:

Pretty brass hardware (y'all know it's back, right?) with some faux tortoise cabochon type thingies. Except, some of the cabochons were broken and some were missing completely. First of all, let me be completely honest: The cabochons were ugly and plastic-y feeling. But I would have TOTALLY left them on there if they had all been intact. Not gonna lie - I would not have spent a dime to replace them.

However, that wasn't an option. I played around with several things, but I ended up coming up with this:

I married the old, original drawer pull with a new, pretty knob. And....I love it. But wait, there's more. The next problem? Screws. Yep, turns out it was annoyingly difficult to find screws that worked. I got some blank stares at a local hardware store, and one morning I had two employees at Home Depot finally help me put together something that worked. I needed 8 screws exactly, but...