Pinterest Challenge Reveal: The Dresser!

Meet my new friend:

When YHL and Bower Power announced the Spring Pinterest Challenge last week, I immediately knew what I wanted to tackle: my dresser. Although my desk has been on the “to DIY” docket for quite some time, it will be a bigger project than one week allows – so my dresser was the clear winner.

I picked up this dresser at the Habitat for Humanity Restore a couple of years ago when I still lived in Ontario. It was $40. It has amazing lines but was in rough shape. Time/money/space hadn’t allowed for me to refinish it before now, but I thought this challenge was the perfect motivation to finally get it done. 

Here's what it looked like before:

First, I had to figure out how exactly I wanted to fix it up. I scrolled through my Pinterest inspiration images and was immediately drawn to these two images:

I just love how the bright white contrasts with the rich wood tone.

After reading through Amy’s comments on Design Sponge and Kate’s furniture painting tutorial, I headed off to Home Depot in search of supplies. I picked up Behr high gloss interior paint in Ultra Pure White (the default) and Minwax oil-based stain in Jacobean (plus wood pre-conditioner and polyurethane – same as this post). I would definitely advocate for using a water-based stain if you can – clean-up following oil-based stain is the worst. Unfortunately, none of the water-based colours were quite right for what I had in mind.

Next, I lugged my dresser out onto the back deck, removed the drawers, unscrewed the legs, and laid everything out on garbage bags. 

I used a sanding block to sand the groove on the front of the doors – this was the worst part of the whole project. SO time consuming with very little pay off. Really, I probably should have sanded everything more than I did but I just got so sick of sanding, haha.

Left is sanded; Right is not.

Once I had sanded most of the previous finish off of the drawer grooves, I broke out my dad’s electric sander and sanded down the rest of the drawer fronts, the legs, and the dresser frame. 

Then, the frame got one coat of white primer (Zinnser’s Cover Stain) – although I probably should have given it two, followed by three coats of high gloss white paint.

Post-Primer.

The drawers and legs got a coat of preconditioner, two coats of stain, and a top coat of polyurethane (following the instructions on the cans). This whole process took from noon on Saturday to Monday before work, counting drying time (and living my life time).

Then, Monday night I put it all together! And here’s how it looks in my space:

I can’t stop looking at it. You can see it from the hall and I just love the high-contrast when I pass by. It has serious impact. One thing I don’t love is how visible the brush strokes are in the high gloss paint. I may go back later and put a white lacquer over top of the white paint – but that will require a bit more time and effort than I’m able to devote right now. So for now, it’s good as is!

What do you think? This project is definitely inspiring me to make a few little changes to my bedroom. I’ll be sharing those soon!

Thanks to Sherry & John, Katie, Emily, and Renee for hosting the challenge! 
(You can check out their super creative projects by clicking on their names)

You can check out my past Pinterest Challenge projects here and here.

(And if you’ve clicked over from the challenge, thanks for stopping by! If you’d like to see more projects like this, you can follow me on Bloglovin’ or on Google Friend Connect on the left sidebar.)