quick dresser redo: before and after

These are the before pictures. As you can see, it's pretty blotchy in parts, and the drawer pulls are all missing. It looks like it had originally been stained in a dark color, and later painted over with a ghastly brownish pink, or maybe a ghastly brown, and then an even ghastlier pink--it's hard to tell. Then, when my mom got a hold of it, she attempted to strip it all the way back to the wood (it's a hobby of hers--I think she finds the scraping motion to be therapeutic), but the amount of detail in the carvings made this a serious task, and eventually she gave up and left the wood exposed and uneven and raw (indeed, many of her projects end up this way).

I spent the weekend giving it a few coats of white paint, which was what I had lying around the garage, and finding replacements for the knobs, which were also lying around in the garage, and here is the finished product:



Painting over all that detail took such a long time!--and there are parts where you can see a pinkish hue coming through from underneath, but I think this adds depth and to the carvings (it's part of the patina!). If you can ignore the little flecks of stuff that got stuck in the paint, and the fact that the knobs on the top two drawers don't match the rest (maybe I'll buy some new ones if I find some I like), I think I did a decent job.

This dresser will go to my sister's house, so that the new lodger might have a place to store her socks and stuff.