Many of you reading this post know that I have refinished a dresser into a media center, but since this is my inaugural post, I thought I should blog about my inaugural project that really got my feet wet in DIY projects. I found a listing on Craiglist for a FREE dresser as long as we went and picked it up, It had been published maybe ten minutes, and by the time I heard back from the owner, he said he had already been contacts my multiple individuals interested in the dresser. As long as I could pick it up in the next few hours - it was mine! Enter me bribing Luke to go with me to get the dresser - it may or may not have involved ice cream!
We stored the dresser in the garage at our first place (~600 square feet total!) until we moved into our current location where we could actually put the dresser to use! Below is the unaltered first picture I took of said dresser. It was missing a few handles, had a few drawers that fit too wonky to actually work, and had a spot on top where the last owner had started to "refinish" it and gave up.
It screams refinish me right? I knew I wanted to repurpose it, and going from 600 square feet to over 1200, we were in desperate need of furniture to fill in spaces. Enter our TV, that had formerly sat on top of our built-in fireplace, but now sat on the floor in our living room.
To make a long story short, I converted the top three drawer spaces with some plywood to hold components (complete with holes cut out in the back with my Dremel), primed with Kilz and painted the dresser with Rustoleum.
I believe it was similar to this product?
I think I got my whole family a little "high" on the fumes, because I decided to tackle the project in early winter, so painting was taking place in our basement. I found it was much easier to roll on the paint with a roller than to try and use a paint brush. I finished the project with a couple of coats of polyurethane as a protector, which was probably overkill since I used oil-based enamel, but I wanted to be sure it wasn't going to scratch with the heavy use it was about to endure. I was excited about how it was all coming together, and the finishing touch came from changing out the handles (ordered from eBay at about 1/4 of the cost from big box stores and have held up well over the past 3 years!). Here's an amateur picture taken to send to my friends and family to show how well it turned out since I had been talking to everyone about how excited I was that my first project was turning out to not be a complete failure!
Now since I'm like my mom and my sister, since I've had the "media center" this color for almost three years, I'm itching to change out the color for a different look. What about a high gloss white? Or my favorite from Rustoleum - Heirloom White? Or maybe just changing out the drawer pulls?
Let me know your opinion in the comments!
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