Dresser Makeover

Here’s the dialogue going on in my head when I see a large piece of furniture at a thrift store: “Wow! That’s nice! That would be so pretty painted (insert color choice here) with new pulls or knobs. Oh. It’s solid and built well. That means it’s HEAVY! Hmmmm….I’d have to get Husband here with his truck. I wonder if he and I could unload it. I am pretty wimpy. Will he be mad that I have ANOTHER project that I may or may not get to? When would I have time to paint it.......” And then there's a whirlwind of thoughts about kids, laundry, dogs and work ….. I walk away and pick up a picture frame that’s much easier to sand and paint.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not 100% lazy. I have done large furniture projects in the past. I’ll probably share those in a future post. They were all done pre-blog. And they were done before I had two active kids and a full time job. But I can’t put it off any longer. I have so many grand ideas that involve furniture and paint and the furniture is not going to paint itself! So I finally got my butt in gear!

My sister’s best friend generously gave her a couple dressers from a family member that had just passed. My lil’ sis is going to have a baby and so she’s been doing some reorganizing and has plans for those dressers. Only problem was that the dressers were a little dated and a little too fancy for her décor. That’s where I came in. I don’t remember if I volunteered or if she asked me but I was eager to get to work! It had been quite a while since I did furniture and I was excited to get going. But of course my project was thwarted when we experienced a major heat wave with temps of 100 degrees and 95% humidity for several weeks! I digress….. Fast forward to September and we FINALLY have decent enough weather to get out into the garage and get painting!

I started by sanding off as much of it as I could. (With a little help from my new DeWalt Orbital Sander!)

Instead of priming it before painting I decided to try out Home Depots paint with primer. I used an off-white called Café Cream.

You can see that I have no loyalties to any hardware stores!

The Behr premium paint does a pretty good job in one coat. But there were some spots where the dark showed through that needed a second coat. I used a 220 grit sander between coats.

After the second coat and more 220 sanding it was as smooth as glass and gorgeous! Since distressed furniture is the big thing right now I did some heavy sanding to bring out the original color in spots. I also wiped some watered down glaze onto the drawers.

I sprayed the gold pulls with oil rubbed bronze spray paint and then I got carpal tunnel when I had to screw in all of the pulls!

I finished with a coat of Minwax Finishing Wax to protect it. Pretty darn gorgeous if I do say so myself!

You may have noticed that I mentioned that my sister received 2 dressers. The second one is still in the works so stay tuned for more!

Happy Friday!