While Bryan is venturing into the world of furniture building, I’ve been stepping into the world of furniture beautifying. I’d much prefer to take an old piece of furniture and make it pretty (I’m green like that I guess). I have a couple projects I’m working on, but this was a quick fix that I wanted to share.
This dresser is one that had been at my parent’s house for pretty much as long as I can remember. It was my furniture when I was younger, was passed to my siblings, and then I took it with me when I moved to my apartment. I always wanted to give it a fresh coat of paint, but never had the outdoor space until now.
Here’s the before pic:
Notice that it’s a little beat up from 3 moves over the past 2 years. The knobs also aren’t really our style, although they definitely worked when this was a child’s dresser. As you can see, our thought process when we moved in back in April was “well, why carry it upstairs? We’re going to repaint it any day now.”
Yeah…that was four months ago and the dresser was still in our dining room until last week. It was functioning as a quasi-buffet, and also served as at least SOME furniture in our previously empty dining room.
So after we built our dining room table, we moved the dresser out to the garage and I got to work. After taking the drawers out, I used the random orbital sander to try to remove some of the (several) layers of white paint from the top.
(Note: Don’t sand the top of a dresser then later use it as a stand to paint some picture frames like I did. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see faint rectangle outlines from where I did another project, necessitating even more sanding. This picture is from Sanding: Round 2).
Next, I removed the knobs from the drawers and did a quick sanding over the drawer fronts as well.
I certainly didn’t remove ALL the white paint (pointless unless I had been planning on staining the dresser, which I wasn’t), but some of it definitely came off.
There were a few rough spots where I dabbed on some wood filler, let it dry, and then sanded it smooth…but for the most part it was in pretty good shape. I moved all the pieces out to the driveway to paint them.
I used more of the same white trim paint that I bought for the bathroom stripes project (obviously it’s been getting a lot of love, as evidenced below).
I also thought I was being really smart and avoiding messy cleanup by just using a paper plate to hold the paint. Don’t do this. Clean-up was certainly easier than cleaning out a paint tray, but there was no way to get the extra paint off the roller, and it was hard to ensure there was a thin, even layer of paint on the dresser. The plate under the paint can worked well to catch drips though!
I gave it about 3 coats of paint, and we moved it upstairs to the guest bedroom. We also wanted to replace the hardware to something that didn’t scream “KIDS FURNITURE”, so I picked up 6 knobs at Lowes for about $2.50 each.
Here’s everything set up and ready for new hardware in the guest room (plus Wrigley lounging in the sun).
I slapped those knobs on and viola! Grown-up dresser!
We still need to do something with the legs…the bright gold tips don’t really go with the new hardware. Maybe paint them all white? Paint them an oil-rubbed bronze color to match? Replace the legs entirely? So many choices…recommendations welcome!
xox, katie
