Dresser Re-Vamp

Since last summer I have been interested in renovating furniture to make it look fresh and new. I'd saved images of ones I found online that I liked, tutorials I thought would be helpful... but never had an item to do anything with.

This summer has been all about finding furniture and other necessary items for my soon-to-be (less than a week!) new apartment. I already had most of my bedroom furniture from renting houses in college, but was missing the perfect dresser. I had been hoping to find a long dresser that I could use as a surface in my room (since I will have two closets in my room I didn't need specific numbers of drawers). When I found the perfect dresser on Craigslist (I've been using this site a lot this summer, it's so great!) I jumped at the opportunity to buy it and make it mine.

I apologize for not having more photos of the dresser in-progress... I didn't think I would be making a blog post of it! However, it was pretty simple to do. After looking at a lot of tutorials online, I went to work on it... cleaned it off really good, two coats of grey primer, and two coats of black acrylic latex paint. I was debating whether or not to sand it but my grandfather the handyman told me that it wasn't necessary. Also, the top of the dresser was laminate so sanding may have done more harm than good. After all the painting, I sprayed the top of the dresser with a polycrylic spray, since I wanted the top to be more permanent as I will be putting a lot of items on it and don't want it to get scratched or peel easily.

I also spray painted the hardware silver, after giving them good cleaning overnight in water and vinegar. I was originally planning on buying new hardware but after seeing the cost to replace them all (and the extra work in filling the current holes and drilling new ones) I stuck with the old hardware. Looking at it now, I'm happy I did.

I love this dresser now! The before dresser wasn't even in bad shape, it just wasn't my style. Now, this "new" dresser will match the other furniture in my room and I can feel proud of it because I did it myself!