Dresser re-do

The project: re-paint and make this dresser cute!



 I had been keeping my eyes peeled for an awesome dresser find on craigslist, and I finally found one, so I snatched it up asap! Upon arriving to pick the dresser up, we found out that it had been living in a smoking home (SHOOT! I didn't ask this before buying it...) and I was less than thrilled. I let it air out for a while, hoping some of the smoke smell would dissipate, and luckily, a lot of it did. However it wasn't all gone, but I figured that through painting it and using lots of methods online that I researched, I could get the smell out!

When I first saw the dresser, I had thought of just painting it white but then I decided that a color instead of white for this dresser would be so cute! I took Ellie's quilt to Home Depot, and they matched the paint exactly to the blue on her quilt! The paint color I used is Behr's River's Edge. It's beautiful and we love it!

Because the dresser was painted black, I had to do 3 coats of paint to completely cover it. After painting most of the dresser, the smoke smell wasn't going away, so I thought I'd just paint the inside of the dresser to "seal" in the smoke smell. Well, it didn't make it any better. So after using my super sensitive sniffer, I sniffed out the big problem--the backing! It was made from that crappy paper-ish stuff, and was just holding on to the smoke smell!

My hard work painting the insides of the dresser, only to rip the backing off!

 

 

 

Nasty backing

So after spending a good 30 minutes ripping the backing off, the smell lessened on the actual dresser, but I could smell even more smoke coming from the backing. I took the old backing to Home Depot, and the cut me a piece of backing material to replace it with. I borrowed a staple gun to put it on but sadly the new backing is too hard for the staples to go through!

We decided to just move the dresser into Ellie's room anyway and put the backing on later since it's not adding any structural help to the dresser.

 Here is the finished product with new knobs and drawer pulls! Part of me wishes I would have just filled the holes on the bottom two drawers and put knobs on all of the drawers, but I don't think it looks too bad!

It's not perfect, but we'll take it! I don't think I'm going to do another project like this for a LONG time, though! It wore me out and I don't want to deal with another project for a while! Now I just need to put cute things on top of it!