I’ve got a lot of used furniture coming my way. My grandmother is moving out of the house she’s lived in for almost 30 years, which means she needs to get rid of a whole lotta furniture. Meanwhile, my step-father’s mother passed away and he hauled a dresser from Florida to Connecticut for reasons none of us are quite sure of. I have been looking for a long dresser for quite some time, but I was planning on just taking one from my grandmother when she moves. But once it was here, there was no turning it away. So I decided to go all DIY on it.

That’s a lot of blue.

The weird thing about the dresser was that it had a veneer on the top that didn’t match the rest of the piece. So I consulted Pinterest, headed to the Home Depot, and got all sorts of crafty on this beast. I sanded it down, first with a medium grit and then with a finer grit. I wiped it down, and let it dry for all of 45 seconds, since I was doing all this work on a warm day in the blaring sun.

I used a roller to paint the frame with a black semi-gloss, but I used a Rustoleum spray paint on the drawers, which I was originally trying to match to a shade of blue that appears in my bedspread. I also used spray paint on the handles which came apart in three pieces. 

The blue was a bit bluer than I’d hoped, but I didn’t hate how it turned out. It was, however, much more modern looking than I had anticipated, and looked more like office furniture than something I wanted in my bedroom. Luckily, I have a home office and most of my supplies were stuffed into those little fabric crates and sat out on an open wire shelf. I tucked it behind the door and left it wide open so I didn’t have to look at it, and had long been mulling over possible solutions without ever deciding on one. So, this dresser I had magically turned into a credenza with a little bit of paint ended up finding a home in the office instead of my bedroom. 

Stay tuned for more completely amateur, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants makeovers.