As you know from following along with the progress on our house, we decided to repurpose the master suite into a family room, meaning we’d take one of the smaller bedrooms for ourselves. This was only going to work comfortably if we could fit a dresser in here, because despite the closet in this room being a decent size, it’s a tad tight for two people’s wardrobes. After measuring out the rug and bed placement, we concluded that the ideal dresser depth for this room would be 16″ or less. With most standard dressers hovering around 20-22″ and dipping to 18″ at best, this was a challenging quest.
I searched for months looking not only for that shallow depth, but something that had enough width and number of drawers to still be useful for the amount of storage it could provide while also not being ugly. We landed on the IKEA TARVA, coming in at a svelte 15 3/4″ depth with great bones similar to our previous MALM dresser that I still love so much but it’s too big for this room. The reason I didn’t initially end my search here was because the TARVA only comes in an untreated wood intended for DIY customization and truthfully, with the stress of the move and work going on in our house the thought of spending days working on this felt like it was going to kill me. Being unable to find an alternative with these perfect dimensions or resist the affordable price however, I called off the search and accepted the task to make the TARVA our own. Here’s how I gave it a makeover.
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