Day 103 - A New Look for an Old Dresser

We have had this dresser in our garage for over a year now . . .

Quinn's parents gave it to us and even though it didn't go with anything in our house I told him we could hang onto it and I would make a project of refinishing it.

Well tonight I finished it (I still need to polyurethane it tomorrow, but that will be the easy part). This is the first piece of furniture that I have ever redone and I am really pleased with the results (the wheels are already spinning in my brain on what I can redo next).

I am going to include a simple tutorial on how you can bring new life to an old piece of furniture too.

First I sanded it. I drug it out of the garage a couple of weeks ago on one of the first nice days of spring and did this part. (In my research online I learned that a lot of people skip this step and use Kilz primer.)

Then this weekend I drug it out and painted it. First I did a very light dry-brush coat rather than using a primer then I did 2 coats of paint. (I had this greenish color from when I was trying to buy a pint of paint to match our kitchen to give it a fresh coat and touch up, but the color was off so I set it aside for future use).

Tonight I did the antique glaze. I actually had a gallon of glaze from when I painted the walls in my dining room so tonight, after work, I picked up a sample of black paint (3.99) and a semi gloss polyurethane to seal it and give it a shine for the last step. For the glaze I combined about 1 part paint to 7 parts glaze (estimate) and mixed it well in a large plastic cup.

Applying the glaze was a bit scary. I had already put in about 5 hours of work painting and sanding and I really hopped this would work. Using a brush from my art supplies (about a 1.5 inch wide short bristle brush) I applied a coat of glaze.

Next I first used a dry paper towel to rub off the excess. The I used a lightly damp one to blend the glaze and remove any excess until the desired amount remained.

For the last step of the glaze I took the same paint brush with a very small amount of glaze on it and accented all the edges and corners. This took a little getting used to, but after a few attemps I figured out how to hold the brush and how much glaze I needed to get the desired look.


Here are all the drawers with the glaze before adding the polyurethane. As I worked on each drawer I kept comparing to the others so they would have the same look.

I repeated this process for the entire base of the dresser. Here is a close up of one of the sections of it, again this is with out the polyurethane.

I will let everything set up and dry over night tonight.

************ Updates & It's Complete 4.14.10 ************
I am just love how this looks! I am sure it's not perfect, but for my first time refinishing something using a black glaze antiquing technique I am pretty proud of myself :)

With a regular paint brush I applied 2 coats of polyurethane to the dresser and 3 coats to the top.

I was planning on relining the drawers with new, coordinating shelving paper - but the original Winnie the Pooh, is sweet and reminds me of how much of a transformation this dresser went through. Plus Quinn will be using this and he said he likes it - so it stays!

One last thing I want to add is - where should I put it? I know it will be in our bedroom and we have a master bathroom/closet project planned (hopefully in the very near future that will make a perfect location for this), but in the mean time what do you think? In front of our bed or on the wall?