5 Drawer Dresser Makeover/Refurbish | Painted and Knobbed

I finally got back to the dresser I was restoring and refinishing.  I am a little spastic when it comes to projects.  I like to have too many going on at once.  In an effort to reduce the number of projects outstanding and make my wife happy by providing the furniture she has been asking for I am focusing on a few quick wins.  The Dresser being the first. 

I spent some time on and off today in the shop and was able to get the dresser in some color.  It is called Java Brown it’s an interior latex from Lowe’s. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can see the Java Brown color and the 3 Drawers that I have completed sanding and painting.  I have some final sanding that will need to be done after the final coat is put on, I will use 220 grit sand paper this is eliminate any orange peel that I get from using my sprayer. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My wife found some knobs at Hobby Lobby that she liked so I took a couple of minutes to put them on to see what she thought.  She likes them.  I don’t know if she is 100% on them.  One thing I should note here is, originally this dresser actually used two hole drawer pulls.  The other holes had been filled by the previous owner.  It’s hard to tell from the pictures but the current ones look slightly off since they are pushed so far to the outer edges.  They should actually be about an inch or two in if you are going to use single pulls.  She is  thinking she might have me drill out the holes and move to a wider drawer pull. 

Once I have the other two drawers sanded and painted we will move it to its new home in one of the guest bedrooms. 

 

 

 

ALERT ALERT FURNITURE REPAIR TIP ALERT ALERT

Okay here we go.  If you have an older piece of furniture or even a newer piece of furniture with drawers that ride on wooden rails then over time you will find that they become harder to open.  One thing that you can do to ease the friction of the wood to wood contact is to apply some petroleum jelly to both the bottom of the drawer and to the rails inside the piece.  I have also heard that you can use a bar of soap and accomplish the same thing.  I have not tried the bar of soap so I can not attest to it effectiveness.  I might have to give it a try on this dresser and compare the two methods.

If you would like to know which works better, comment at the bottom and I will take on this very scientific project and report my findings. 

Coming up……

I am excited that I am bringing this project to a close.  Once this project is complete I will be working on Four Custom made Ink Pens for a Wedding, as well as finishing up the Jelly Cupboard build.  I have decided to use two different colors of Milk Paint.  The exterior of the cupboard will be Sea Green and the interior is going to be Light Cream.  It should be interesting.

Have a Great Day!

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5 Drawer Dresser Makeover/Refurbish Progress

Sorry no pictures as of right now.  I ran out of the paint stripper the other night and have not been able to get much more done.  I was able to get the two sides stripped and most of the drawers.  Tonight I hope to get some more Formby’s and stripe the rest of the paint off.  I did take the chance last night to spray some paint I had mixed up on it and decided I really don’t like it.  It’s very odd as in some light it looks a little purple, then blue and even black.  Oh well… You live and learn.  Oh yeah I said in the last post that I was going to stain it. Well… I’m not, okay not totally…….

After getting the two sides stripped and some sanding done I realized that the original stain was very deep in the wood and wasn’t going to come out 100%, and the wood was freaking ugly, so I will be painting the body of the dresser a color to be determined probably black cause I feel monochromatic and stain the top with some ebony stain.  I hope to finish up the project this weekend.  I was able to stabilize the dresser from raking back and forth.  When I get back into the shop with the camera I will show how I accomplished this.

Have a Great Day!

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Restoring and Refinishing a Five Drawer Dresser PT. 1

My wife and I inherited this five drawer dresser from her grandparents.  It’s a great old dresser.  The current finish has about four or five coats of paint on top of stain.  You ask how I know that it has stain under all those layers of paint, I know because I took a belt sander to the top when we first got it to the house.  I quickly realized what I already knew you don’t take a sander to a restoration project that has paint all over and OLD paint at that.  Not only did I have a ton of dust, it was one of the worst smells.  A combination of a musty sock drawer and that funk you get after about an hour on the treadmill. 

 

Here is what I was able to do with the power sander before the belt gummed up from all the paint and heat.  I discovered there was some great looking wood under there.  I honestly had no idea what I would find.  You can see in this picture that there is some stain underneath all that paint. 

Formby’s Paint and Poly Remover to the Rescue

I went to Lowes and got some Formby’s Paint and Poly Remover.  This stuff works great.  I really didn’t expect it to work as well as it did.  You paint it on thick to your surface and wait about 20 – 30 minutes.  After that you take a scraper(just a typical plastic spackle blade) and scrape the gunk off.

This is after the first coat and scraping.  I was shocked at how well it took it off in the first pass.  There were some stubborn spots so I reapplied the paint remover on the troublesome areas.  After another 25 minutes I scraped the rest of it off.  There were only a few spots so I just sanded those spots off.  My wife joined in the fun and games and helped with the side of the dresser.  After a couple of coats and a little bit of sanding we have an almost bare dresser side.

There is some wood missing on the bottom foot.  I am going to spend some time figuring out what I want to do with this.  I believe the wood is oak so I could get some oak and make a filler for it.  I might also just leave it as is.  The dresser does rake side to side when you push it.  I will go over how I resolve this in a future post.

 

 

 

 

We went back and forth deciding if we wanted to repaint it or not.  You may wonder why I would strip it if I was going to repaint it.  Two reasons 1) I really wanted to see what kind of wood was hiding under all that paint. 2) I’m not sure what kind of paint is on the dresser.  It might be lead based as old as it is but I am not positive and even though my shop helper doesn’t go around biting the furniture I would rather pull it all off and redo it, plus I have a better base to paint it.  If we decided to paint it, which is totally not what we decided to do.  We are going to stain it.  Out of curiosity I threw a little Cabot Ebony stain.  You can see that in the picture above.  I gotta tell you we both think it is going to look

great.  A few coats of stain to get a nice dark color on it and I think it is going to be great.  I hope to get this finished over the next couple of weeks.  Check back to see the finial restoration and further posts on shoring this thing up. 

Have a Great Day!

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Bedroom Makeover: Nightstand Edition

So it is now time to make over our bedroom.  It’s still in the drab white that was painted with the house built.  In an effort to maximize our dollars we decided to give our current bedroom suit a make over.  There are several things wrong with it all of which I will fix over time but the first thing that hits you is it’s just plain ugly.  We still haven’t totally figured out why we bought it 10 years ago.  I guess we were young it was in our budget and we needed furniture for the house we had just moved into.  That being said how do you take a 10 year old not so good looking night stand and bring it into the new decade.  Let’s explore this in a little pictorial.

The ugly nightstand

I guess really it’s not all that bad but it is far from our current taste in furniture and design.  I have some ideas on how I would like to fix this guy.  The first thing that needs to happen is that I need to remove all that molding next to the drawers.  I just think it really disrupts the look of the nightstand.  So what to do…..   Find one chisel well two actually and one hammer and presto you get the following result.

The Ugly Nightstand Molding Removed

Now how did I do this?  It is not that hard really.  The molding was nailed and glued in place and my goal was to have as little tear out as possible so take one of our chisels and place it on the back edge of the molding and start tapping it breaking the glue joint and prying the molding away.  Take your time and do a little bit at a time.  You are most likely going to get some tear out, not to worry we will address that in a minute.  Eventually you will be able to pry the moldings off of the project and you get to take a cool picture like this one.

Demolition Tools

As  you can see the moldings don’t always come off in one piece no problem I had not planned on using them for anything anyway.  Now we can address any tear out that may have occurred.  There are at least  two ways of dealing with it.  One if you are planning to paint you can fill any of the tear out with wood putty if they are really bad, do this before you start any sanding, let the pudding try and sand it flush with the rest of the wood.  Now if you are going to stain the project then the putty isn’t probably a good idea as the stain at least in my experience will be soaked up more and look different than the rest of the wood.  If you are in this situation or if the tear out is not all that bad then you can do what I did.  I sanded the faces down until most of the tear out was gone and anything that was real deep I smoothed out with the sand paper and made them appear and part of the character of the project. 

A Sanding we will go…..

Here is the result of a few couple of hours of sanding.  I wasn’t worried about totally removing all of the finish that was on the nightstand previously.  I mainly wanted to get it scratched up real good so that the latex paint I am using would have something to grab a hold of and stick to.  If you can get it to bare wood all the better but I didn’t find it totally necessary on this project refinish.

 
And now through the power of the internet we have a mostly refinished nightstand.
  This is the first of 2 coats of Satin Black latex paint.  I wasn’t worried about overspray so I didn’t mask off the interior of the nightstand.  Now that the main part of the night stand is taken care of lets focus quickly on the drawers.  Remove the hardware sand as you did with the main section and paint.

You can paint the sides if you want to, I decided it wasn’t needed as the drawers are closed 99% of the time.
Now that you have everything painted you can either put the hardware back on and be done or you can distress things just a little.  I spent a little time sanding off the paint in some key areas.  It is pretty hard to tell from the picture but there are several distressed areas.  I took the sand paper and sanded until I got bare wood and then took a little stain and stained over the area let it dry for just a little while and wiped the excess away.  Once I was done I had the following refinished nightstand.

So I hope you have fun taking on your own refinishing project.  If you have any questions please feel free to email.

Here is a before and after side by side:


Have a great day!  --Grover

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