Look, a new project!

Since acquiring the new house in April, I've had a hard time justifying any time spent on non-house projects.  I have a number of furniture projects up my sleeve, both building and refinishing, but until the past few weeks I've not been able to make the time and/or energy to tackling one off my list.

I have been desperately needing a new dresser to replace the crappy particle-board, dorm-room style dresser I bought when I first moved away from home.  Basically, I trolled Craig's List for about a month, checking daily for new dresser listings and trying to find something just right that was also affordable.  I wanted something decently-sized and something I could fix up and make my own.  It took a lot of waiting, but eventually I scored a great deal.

I purchased this dresser for $100.  (The seller and I had originally agreed on $80, but somebody else offered $100 and I was determined to get it.)  It's way bigger than I had originally thought- about 5 feet wide and more than 4 feet tall.  I can't be sure, but I'm guessing it was built sometime in the early 1900's-- the workmanship is very nice and it's heavy, solid wood with nice dovetail joints and wooden drawer slides.  When I bought it, it had been covered in plastic but sitting outside in a yard so that the top panel was pretty badly warped and I knew that I'd have to replace that.  Otherwise, besides the three different kinds of hardware (who does that?) on the thing and a few layers of dirt, it was in good shape.

Josh helped me remove the top panel from the dresser, and the first thing I did was clean it down really well.  I hadn't made a plan on what color to paint it yet, but a quick browse through all of my extra paint cans revealed a pretty blue color that I had sampled for my kitchen cabinets but ended up not using in the end.  I decided to use this blue and save myself the expense of buying more paint.  I knew I was going to rough up the edges after I'd painted it, so I didn't bother to put on a primer or anything- I kind of prefer the rustic look and don't really mind if paints wears off naturally over time.

Because of the random, different pieces of hardware that had been on this dresser originally, all of the spacing for the screws on the drawers were different.  Some of the handles had 3-inch holes, some had 4-inch holes.  Quite inconvenient.  We patched up all of the non-3in holes and I drilled new ones so that everything would be the same size.  Then I ordered some new hardware.  I painted everything blue, added the hardware, and then roughed up the edges of everything a little bit with a hand sander.  Things were looking good!  Now, for the top...

We were unable to find a solid piece of wood that was big enough to cover the top of the dresser for a reasonable price, so I decided to make a large panel out of two boards.  I bought two nice boards of high-grade pine, and Josh helped me join them together.  After cutting them to size, I then drilled holes in both boards, inserted and glued pegs, and set everything up with clamps for 24 hours.  I was happy with the way that everything lined up, but the seam in the middle was slightly offset, so we purchased a hand planer and leveled out the surface of the seam (Hand planers are so easy!  How did I not know about this?).  Then, we finally got a chance to use the new router that Santa Claus bought us for Christmas last year!  It took a few trial runs to get it just right, but wow-- what a handy tool!  I will definitely be using the router more in the future.

Once the top panel was completely done, I gave it a good sanding, stained it with a couple of layers of 'Golden Oak' color, and then sealed it with two layers of polyurethane (you can still see the seam between the two boards because some of the wood glue seeped through and did not soak up the stain... oh well!).  I decided to keep the top a natural wood color rather than painting it, and I'm super happy with how it turned out- the stained wood color is really fantastic.  Josh reattached the top panel for me, and there she is!

One of my favorite quirky aspects of this dresser is that is has this funny little corbel on one side.  The matching corbel on the other side was missing when I purchased the dresser and I definitely was not going to find anything to match it without making up my own, so I decided to leave it as it was and just embrace the lopsidedness.  Sometimes symmetry is overrated.

I'm getting pretty good at this Craig's List thing.  And I'm really getting the hang of this furniture re-doing thing too.  Good thing I still have lots of space to fill in my house.