Dresser refinish

A few weeks ago we took a weekend trip to Parker to visit Kari and Jonathan. Kari had been bitten by the furniture refinishing bug right about the time they moved because new furniture is crazy expensive and generally has no personality, but their new home was significantly larger and would need plenty of new furniture! So she purchased and sanded and painted to her heart's content but when the house was done the projects continued - it's just so much fun to breath new life into an old piece! So while we were visiting I sanded and painted right alongside her, and had SUCH a good time. We agreed that we were both sad and glad this hadn't been a mania when she was our next door neighbors - we would have been able to do much more together, having unlimited time to do such cool finishes! But we also agree that Pueblo has no market for selling beautiful refinished furniture, and we would have ignored the kids SO much it's probably a very good thing it didn't happen here!

So the weekend finished, and back home I had a new critical eye of my own furniture. Specifically I looked at a dresser from my bedroom that I had previously loved but had been banished to the guest room until I could figure out what to do with it. It was purchased from (of all the random places) K-Mart, about 6 or 7 years ago. It was on clearance for super cheap ($20 or $30),  made primarily of particle board, had wood-on-wood drawer slides, finished with a cherry gel stain and pretty outdated drawers pulls...

But MAN it was functional! It was the perfect height for my nightstand, the 3 drawers were spacious but the piece was small enough and light enough to be useful in almost any room... So I was loathe to get rid of it, but the very basic slides had begun sticking like mad where it just made ME mad. Joe and I went furniture shopping and bought a lovely new 8-drawer dresser (seen in a previous post) and I figured I was done forever with the K-Mart blue light special.

 Until! Until the trip to Kari's. I dragged that dresser back out, stripped the cherry stain off, restained the top, painted the body, and Joe found some metal ball-bearing slides to remove the unbearable stickiness! The dresser would be saved! As with any project there were snafus... Like the drawers slides were actually 1/8th inch too wide, so he had to router out a channel into each drawer. Like the outdated drawer pulls were also cheap and 2 of them broke during re-installation. Like the drawers no longer stuck from bad drawer slides but they stuck because I'd painted around the edge of the drawer front. So more tweaks later, some sanding and some shopping, the drawers glide like a dream and I replaced the pulls with knobs that are to die for! They remind me of sailor buttons.

The dresser is now back in my bedroom (though not as my nightstand)