Taking a Decorating Risk...not my forte

I decided to participate in a link party that The Nester, over at the Nesting Place, was having. She blogged about taking risks in decorating. After all, it's a creative outlet, and what's the worst that can happen? You can waste 3 hours of your life and cry like a baby when it doesn't turn out the way you want it is what can happen. Here's her original post.

Okay, get ready for a picture heavy post. Because I mucked this up really well (hey, it was a risk!) I want to take you through every.single.agonizing step I took to result in this creation. First off, the inspiration:

You can find the step by step that Centsational Girl took to achieve this beautiful piece here.

I started with my Craigslist nightstand for 10.00:

First, it was a cheap dresser so it was good to experiment on. Second, it had very pretty lines that I loved. Third, it was NOT real wood (I think mostly MDFor particle board). So this was an okay risk (perfect for the control freak in me).

I started by taking off the hardware (which I will replace since I don't like) and filling in the holes :

I bought a paint sample for 3.00 (Walmart) in the color I wanted (Glidden-Deepest Aqua):

My first mistake was mixing it with too much water vs too little color ratio.

Resulting in a very light "stain", if you will, of the piece.

Oh, and see those markings on the lower right of the stand? Yeah, that's how bad of shape this piece really was (not real wood).
Anyhow.
So, I painted another coat with more paint/less water ratio.
Problem was...the brush strokes showed so easily-it ended up like this:

But I forged ahead thinking the other coat of different paint would cover that up.
So, this is where I veered off a little from her tutorial by mixing a dark grey and a light grey I already had from Glidden (sorry I can't recall the names) which made a muddy stone color rather than her silvery light grey she used:

 It's slightly watered down here in the pic and i dry brushed that on which resulted in this:

UGH. Still streaky and looks like I just poured water down the side of it. So, I went to sanding it which made it slightly better but...not really great. It just looked trashy. See?

At this point, I pretty much gave up for the night (it was late). And sure, the lighting is bad. The drawers for the night stand aren't even done (have yet to sand down the holes I filled in-or paint them). And yes, I started out with a white dresser, not a "wood tone". So it's bound to look different than my inspiration. I will try and salvage this piece (or repaint it). I don't have an official "after" pic. But what I saw I didn't like. Still, I'm glad I did it. And I will definitely take another stab at it (maybe with more patience and attention-to-detail rather than the laissez-faire attitude I started out with). This was definitely a risk though (out of my comfortable, white, white, white).

When I'm truly finished I'll post the after product but I wanted to start this post so I could link to her risk party.
Stay tuned for the update!