The Pink Dresser - my first project

Recently my family of 5 purchased our first home.  For the first time I could paint walls on a whim and work on furniture projects without fear of getting paint on the landlord's property!  Yay!  I was so excited to get started! (so I excited that I didn't take several "before" pictures that I really should have. ah well.)  I started with my daughter's room.  Her dresser had been painted white some years before, but since then several pieces of veneer had broken off and various art supplies had been applied to the front and sides by my apparently under-supervised children :).  This was my first furniture project, and I was going to go big and bright, since that sort of thing seemed to be in style on Pinterest and I had spent the months prior (waiting for our house to close) loading up on Pinterest ideas for my new home.  I had pinned several pages that encouraged me to skip the sanding step by simply using stripper on the dresser.  This was when I learned that not everything works as well as it does on Pinterest :(.  What a fiasco!  Applying paint stripper made this job about 10 times harder then it had to be.  Not only did I still have to sand it (to even out all of the inconsistencies left by the stripper), but I also had to clean off gobs of glopping paint stripper and apply copious amounts of primer.  Luckily my mother-in-law (who is totally awesome) came over for a visit while my half finished project was sitting out on the back porch and helped me get it back to a paintable condition.  At any rate, after the veneer was repaired and the primer was applied I was finally able to use my watermelon colored high-gloss spray paint.  I left the pulls in their original condition because I decided the distressed white paint that was already on them looked good with the pink.  My daughter loves the result, but I could probably have done it much quicker and better if I had simply fixed the veneer, given the whole piece a light sanding, and then spray painted it without even using a primer.  5 months later it is standing up well to the abuse of being in my 10 year old daughter's room however, so I too am happy with the eventual result. :)