My First Furniture Refinishing Project

There she is. This is the beauty I started out with! I acquired this lovely piece from my mom who had gotten it cheap from a mission store and had been using it in a guest room but was buying new furniture. I had originally tried to get by without a dresser in our Bebe's room because we live in a townhouse and bedrooms are small. I used a few different closet organizational strategies and none of them worked well. So when my mom offered this chest of drawers, I took it. Of course, it matches nothing and needed to be refinished.

As luck would have it, it was mid-May and so the weather in our part of the country gets pretty unpredictable around then. To be more specific, each day could consist of approximately half a dozen periods of rain and sun. I needed to do some sanding before I could prime and paint, so as you can imagine, by the time I got a couple of these dresser drawers out onto our deck a cloud would open up. Then it would stop raining, but the babies would be awake. Long story short, it took me weeks to complete this project. Once I was finished sanding though, I just put a drop cloth in my kitchen (which is unusually large for a townhouse) and painted everything in there. I still had to work around naps during the day, but could do more at night and didn't have to worry about the weather.

Since the chest and the drawers were two different colors I did two coats of primer on the chest (which was painted dark green) and one coat on the drawers. Then I used semi-gloss white paint right off the shelf. It took three coats on the chest and two coats on the drawers.

Then there was the hardware. I replaced the old brass handles with these:

I found them at Lowe's and was completely in love with them since they perfectly matched my Bebe's lavender bedroom. I also wanted to do knobs on the top two drawers (split to look like they're each two small drawers) instead of having two handles on each as it was originally. I found a knob that matched these handles and was thrilled!

Only problem was... I found a knob. Figuring they'd get more in stock, or another Lowe's store would have them, I began searching around. With each dead end, and finally word from Lowe's that they no longer carry the knob, I became more and more concerned that my perfect vision for this dresser might never happen. I went to the manufacturer's website and looked up retail locations. As I started calling them I discovered quickly that the posted list was out of date. Some of these phone numbers were not even hardware stores. ACK! Then I contacted the manufacturer to ask for help. The kind representative suggested... you guessed it... Amazon. Seriously? Where was my head?  There they were. And we had them in just 2 days. Whew!

I also added some cute shelf paper to the inside of the drawers. (I also may have allowed my Bebe to have fun with a basket of laundry while I did this)

Here is the final finished product:

I call it a success! It holds everything I need it to with room to spare! It has made all the difference in her bedroom. While it was a pretty easy process, I think I'll hold off on refinishing any other furniture until I have a garage :)