New Dresser for Little Man

I am starting with a picture of the finished dresser because I am just about giddy with how it turned out.

Over a year ago I came across these two tall narrow dressers at a garage sale and snatched them up for $20 total.  Then they sat in the garage and collected junk on and around them until I finally got motivated to tackle this project.

Once I decided what we really needed for our family, furniture wise, I decided to sell one of the two dressers on craigslist.  This is the one I decided to keep for HB's room.

Yes, those are Winnie the Pooh handles, you are not seeing things.

If you can get beyond the paint job and the character hardware it has a wonderful shape to it.

I hauled the drawers outside and sanded, and sanded and sanded some more.  Let me tell you, had I known how hard it was going to be to remove every last bit of the paint in order to stain it, I probably would have chosen a different finish.  I also would not have taken this on in mid summer in Arizona. We'll chalk those decisions up to learning experiences.

Finally done sanding!

I used a Minwax dark walnut stain and love how they turned out.  The stain looks different on different parts of the drawers which turned out to be a happy surprise.

Now for the dresser body itself.  I knew I was going to be painting it so I wiped it down really good and then primed it with Kilz.

OK, I admit it, I forgot to take  a picture of the dresser during the painting process but you get the idea, paint, dry, sand with brown bag, paint, dry, sand edges to get that distressed look, finish with wipe on polyuerethane matte finish. I used Valspar, Ultra in Night View for the paint color.

Keep in mind that I painted the dresser for how the room is eventually going to look, not how it looks now.  In other words the next project for this room is new paint on the walls.

I also found some Spiderman wrapping paper and used spray adhesive to line all his drawers.  When shopping for liners I was drawn to the graphic print ones but this is for my three year old, not me so this is perfect for now and can always be changed later.

We got the hardware from Lowe's.

One final look because it makes me happy.

Jeannie