Antique Dresser Refinish

I admit that I helped on this project, but it was all my wife's idea. She wanted badly to paint an old, unique dresser white and use it as the media stand for our TV in our living room. After a few weeks of perusing Craigslist for such a piece, we came across a beautiful 9-drawer dresser in perfect condition.

Then it sat in our garage for at least a month while we convinced ourselves to strip the stain off the dresser. The wood was immaculate, so if you're a wood furniture purist, you should probably stop here. This is the original dresser:

My job was to strip the wood of the stain. I used Klean-Strip brand aerosol spray stripper from Home Depot. It required only one application to sit for 15 minutes before I could use a plastic putty knife to scrape the stain right off. It still took a long time because of the drawers, but also because I had to do the main body in sections so the stripper wouldn't set too long and dry.

After all of the stain was stripped, we did two coats of nearly-white latex paint. My wife wanted a more modern look to the dresser, so she replaced the old-fashioned hardware to give it a new look.

If you compare the before and after pictures, you'll notice that the center drawers in the before picture have hardware that requires two holes, while the after picture shows hardware for a single hole. We couldn't find two-hole hardware that would fit the center drawers (probably because of the age of the dresser), but my wife found some black and white single-hole hardware that she really liked. So, we filled the holes on the center drawers with wood filler and drilled a single hole for the new hardware before we painted.

 Here's the finished product in our living room.

A word of warning: We have friends that did a similar project, and they topped off their last coat of paint with some clear-coat paint. When they woke up in the morning, they found their white dresser had turned yellow because of the clear-coat paint. So, we haven't done our clear-coat layer yet because we want to wait and make sure we get something that won't make all our hard work go for naught.

This was what I like to refer to as a "burn-out project." It's large and time consuming enough to deter us from any more projects for at least two months. :)