The Blue Dresser - garage sale gold!

I spent a few weeks searching cragislist for a cheap or free dresser to refinish for my son's room.  I picked up this great find at a friend's garage sale for $10.  You can see it here in the best "before" picture I could find (also a before picture of my son's whole room).  It is cream-colored, on the right, and turned to the side.  When I got it the veneer was lifting up on the top and was missing in several places on the drawers, but other than that it was in great shape.  I had recently picked up a small can of navy blue paint off of the "oops" paint shelf at Home Depot and decided that it would look fantastic on this piece.  After the pink dresser fiasco (see previous post), I decided that there would be no skipping of the sanding step.  After removing the pulls, I busted out my little electric sander and went to work (so small task on a dresser with this much architectural detail).  Next, I worked on the veneer.  It was mostly lifting up at the edges.  I peeled off a bit that I deemed unsalvageable, glued down some, and then used wood filler on the rest.  After sanding that down I primed the entire piece with Kilz.  This is where I made my second furniture refinishing mistake.... I got too excited!  I applied 2 coats of the blue over the Kilz, but in my haste I did not wait quite long enough between coats... I mean it was dry to the touch....thats good enough right?  Not so much, especially when you are doing the work on your back porch in Florida in the summer, where the humidity and temperatures increase paint dry time.  Don't get me wrong.  It looked great! ...but after a month or so in my 7 year old son's bedroom it become apparent that the paint didn't really have the opportunity to harden well in between coats.  The top of the dresser is now covered in scratches from my son's rough style of play.  Boo.  I will need to do some more work to the top.  Luckily I have some more of the blue paint, but I have been busy with other projects for a while so it will have to wait.  I am thinking I may also put a few coats of polycrylic on just the top as well to protect this beautiful dresser from crashing cars, landing airplanes and exploding lego creations...  boys are rough on furniture.  sheesh. :)

The Pink Dresser - my first project

Recently my family of 5 purchased our first home.  For the first time I could paint walls on a whim and work on furniture projects without fear of getting paint on the landlord's property!  Yay!  I was so excited to get started! (so I excited that I didn't take several "before" pictures that I really should have. ah well.)  I started with my daughter's room.  Her dresser had been painted white some years before, but since then several pieces of veneer had broken off and various art supplies had been applied to the front and sides by my apparently under-supervised children :).  This was my first furniture project, and I was going to go big and bright, since that sort of thing seemed to be in style on Pinterest and I had spent the months prior (waiting for our house to close) loading up on Pinterest ideas for my new home.  I had pinned several pages that encouraged me to skip the sanding step by simply using stripper on the dresser.  This was when I learned that not everything works as well as it does on Pinterest :(.  What a fiasco!  Applying paint stripper made this job about 10 times harder then it had to be.  Not only did I still have to sand it (to even out all of the inconsistencies left by the stripper), but I also had to clean off gobs of glopping paint stripper and apply copious amounts of primer.  Luckily my mother-in-law (who is totally awesome) came over for a visit while my half finished project was sitting out on the back porch and helped me get it back to a paintable condition.  At any rate, after the veneer was repaired and the primer was applied I was finally able to use my watermelon colored high-gloss spray paint.  I left the pulls in their original condition because I decided the distressed white paint that was already on them looked good with the pink.  My daughter loves the result, but I could probably have done it much quicker and better if I had simply fixed the veneer, given the whole piece a light sanding, and then spray painted it without even using a primer.  5 months later it is standing up well to the abuse of being in my 10 year old daughter's room however, so I too am happy with the eventual result. :)