Monday, July 04, 2011

Dresser-parts 1, 2 & 3

So this was officially a bigger project than I first anticipated.

That being said, I'm pretty much done.  Waiting for the knobs I ordered to arrive, then I can get a finished picture up.  I ended up ordered the knobs from Amazon.  After browsing both Lowe's and Home Depot, they didn't have anything I just LOVED. Plus, even their standard knobs were over double the price of the same knobs on Amazon!! Plus, I get free shipping being a student and all.  So, I'm hoping to get them before we head out of town on Thursday.

On to the process.  First I needed to sand. I figured a pretty basic scratch up should do the trick, but it got detailed pretty quick.  As I said, the dresser is old, and it needed a good bit of TLC put into it for me to get the finish product I desired.  I also used some wood putty to fill in the holes, and gashes the dresser had as well as those country bumpkin-esk swirly things on the two top drawers.  Here are some pics of the sanding and wood filling.  Notice how bad the water stains were on the top, I thought sanding would help, but it only made them worse. 

 Water-marked galore, huh?
 Filling in the swirls was pretty easy.  I used Elmer's wood filler, and sanded after use.  I used two coats here.

 All the drawers.
 More pictures of the water-damaged top!! Most of these marks you couldn't even see before sanding!

Notice the deep gash up the side that I had to fill in with wood filler....



Yeah, like I said, the dresser was in pretty bad shape.

I was planning to hand sand, since I try to do these types of projects for as cheap as possible, but since the sanding got so intensive, I ended up buying a power sander.  I do like to build my tool set as I work on these, so I like to think of it as an investment. :)

Next up was the priming process.  I wavered over which primer to use, oil-based or not.  The oil-based dried quicker, but I was worried about the coverage, since I had so much I wanted to cover.  So I chose non-oil-based primer. 


I originally tried painting outside, since I figured I didn't want to breath in fumes for the few days that I'd be painting, but apparently, wet paint+outside=bug trap.  Yeah, I got lots of little friends to help me in my painting, maybe they thought I wanted some texture? Ha, so yeah, moved it inside, and didn't get any pictures of just the priming, since I had to do it in painting shifts.  Plus, I added an extra layer of primer to the top to hide any extra nicks or dings or water-marks. 

After I got it fully primed, I painted.  I usually wouldn't paint the inside of the drawers, however, they were really dingy inside, and I wanted it to look like a piece I would have bought already black at a store. 

Two coats of paint, to be sure I was getting even coverage and a good solid black.  The hardest part about the painting process was getting the brush strokes even.

Here are a couple of the dresser after it's been painted, and the top coat applied.  At first, I wasn't going to do a top coat, but I figured I wouldn't pay to get a manicure and not have them top of my nails with a top coat, so why would I put all of this time and effort into redoing the dresser to be just right and not protect my paint with a top coat?
I used a fast-drying polyurethane by minwax.  I know there are other kinds, and I looked for the rub-on kind, but didn't see any.  The top-coat required a natural bristle brush which was also a bit hard to find, but I did eventually find one. :) After cleaning with the top coat, I ran into a bit of a snag. You're supposed to clean this stuff off the brush with mineral spirits.  I hadn't planned for that, and didn't have any.  Luckily, they carry the stuff at wal-mart and my WONDERFUL husband ran out and bought a bottle for me.  At 10 o'clock at night.  Yeah, I love that man!

Yeah, there's wine in the background.  There might have been some wine involved in this project on a few phases. ;)

Now, all the protective coat has been fully applied, waiting for it to fully dry (dries in 3-4 hours for touch and 24 hours for light use) and for my hardware to come in. Here are a few pics of the dresser in it's final drying stages before the hardware comes in.
The top two drawers have fully dried, so they're back in the dresser to save on some space. :)

Here you can see the bigger drawers behind the dresser.
A close up of the interior of the bigger drawers.  Yeah, I primed, painted and top-coated those as well. Just for good measure. :)

And one of the whole sha-bang. Now if only I had my hardware to put it all back together!! Can't wait!!!

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