Refinishing Dressers - Part 1

It's time to talk about it - our never-ending project. The refinishing of our master bedroom furniture. Here's a little back story . . . I inherited this furniture from my great-grandfather. Since I was a young girl these dressers have been in my bedroom, and now they are in our master bedroom. The problem with them is that when I was in 7th grade my mom and I "distressed" them. Yes, distressed is in quotes for a reason. They looked wonky. Like dalmation dressers. At the time, we thought they were fabulous but they were truly way too distressed and I wasn't a huge fan of the white color either.


Justin and I attacked them so quickly that we forgot to take a before picture. The first thing we needed to do was scrape off all that old white paint.  We used this handy-dandy scraping tool and a lot of elbow grease. 

It took us about a week of scraping to get all the paint off. Granted we were only scraping in the evenings after work, but it still took a tremendous amount of time. Then we were left with dressers that looked like this.

See that residual paint left in the corners and along the edges? We had to scrape that off using a putty knife and, again, a lot of elbow grease.


Once the dressers were all free of their spotty white paint, they looked like this. (I don't have a picture of the other dresser, so this is the smaller one)

Well, we actually kept scraping until all the paint in the corners was off, but you get the idea ;)

At this point I was saying "Okay Justin, let's prime and paint them. They'll be ready by the weekend for sure. No worries."

So naive. 

While we continued to tackle issue after issue with these dressers, our bedroom looked like this. For weeks.

Oh and trust me, clothes are just thrown everywhere willy nilly. Let's all cross our fingers and pray that order returns soon. Although it has been super easy to put the laundry away :)

Anyone else start what you thought would be a quick project only to run in to several issues?