Second Life for an Old Dresser

My mom had a matching set of bedroom furniture she bought in Mexico more than 20 years ago. Over the years, she has re-purposed or given away some of the items but one lone dresser remained.  This dresser had spent time in my childhood bedroom and even followed me to law school for 3 years.

I wish I had taken a "before" picture - I could kick myself for not having done so but this was in my pre-blog days, please forgive me ;).  The picture below is an indication of what the dresser looked like once upon a time:

Kinda rustic, solid pine wood. My mom had long outgrown this look and wanted to get rid of it.  The lone dresser sat in her garage waiting to be donated to charity, but  I saw potential. I needed furniture for my new house in Texas and so I decided to roll up sleeves and get to work!!

First, I took an old dishtowel and wiped off all the dust.  Then I painted it with a coat of oil based primer.

I let the primed dresser dry over night.  The next day I used two coats of semi-gloss Behr paint in cottage white.

Then I replaced the hardware with these cute knobs from Home Depot:

And voila!  A fresh new dresser.  I decided to place it in my kitchen nook to store my table linens, serving platters and extra candles.

A closer look at the details:

I use the top shelf to hold my serving platters:

Total cost for refurbishing the dresser: about $40 (primer, paint & supplies and hardware).  Total time: 2 hours priming and about 3 hours painting.  What do you think?

P.S. I replaced the hideous pendant that used to be in the kitchen nook with the cute chandelier shown above.  It's petite and the perfect size for the kitchen nook.