One of my projects is learning how to refurbish furniture or household items that we can customize to fit our space, look nice, and hopefully be more affordable (part of our house decorating goals). So we bought this old, worn out dresser in January or February of this year at a garage sale, with the intention of refinishing it. At times, it felt like this would be a never-ending project, and I still have a lot to learn and practice before becoming as good as I’d like, but we finally finished!
The dresser was an old style with wheels still on it, but solid wood and dovetail joints; much bigger than anything we were expecting to buy that day. Luckily, my uncle was available nearby with a large enough vehicle to help us drive it home. (Otherwise, we would have had to roll it up and down the hilly sidewalks all the way home.) Since then, we’ve slowly been stripping, sanding, staining, stripping and sanding again, then staining again, and finishing (and maybe even more iterations of that).
One of the things I’ve learned from our dresser project is that you should take your time at each step of the process – making sure that you strip and sand well will help the rest of the steps go easily. Cleaning between each step and having good light and patience to inspect everything helps ensure that you don’t need to go back and redo things. We had to go back and forth because we didn’t notice that we hadn’t sanded all of the old finish off so the stain did not hold, or because we missed a spot here or there.
As we worked, we found a lot of challenges along the way. I think the dresser had been refinished before, the top was veneered, and a bunch of spots had been dented. Also, the types of wood used were different – this cause the colors of different panels to be different, even after using the same stains. And because we’ve been socially distancing, we’ve had to make a lot of choices online rather than going into a stores to browse or pick out any colors, or ask an expert.
In the end, I was desperate to put my clothes in drawers (they had previously been in open box shelves) and get our multipurpose room a little more put together. I originally wanted to buy antique knobs, something we were waiting to go to a store for, but we were able to reuse the ones we had. I’ve come to terms with the fact that our dresser is far from perfect. But it works quite well, I think it looks fine in the space, and I’m ready to take on our next refurbishing project!
It does look absolutely lovely Karly! Well done to you both.
Now I am looking forward to see the bookshelf… 😉
Thank you! We are looking forward to the bookshelf too…almost done!!
NICE!!! did you have to refinish the insides of the drawers too?
There were a couple spots inside of the drawers that we did refinish a little bit but they were mostly in good shape so we didn’t do all of it – looks splotchy in a couple places if you inspect closely, but we never look at that part of the drawer anyways.