Unbelievable Two-Toned Dresser Makeover

Hello friends! I picked up this cute little set of vintage dressers from Facebook Marketplace a couple of weeks ago and I've been trying to figure out what I want to do and I think I'm going to refinish them as a pair and I'm going to try to do them both together in a day or less. These really neat handles might look familiar if you recall I had this piece a while back with the same exact handle. These dresses are notorious for being overlooked because of this horrible sort of plastic coating they put on it. You're not going to believe this transformation. My name is Angie and I refinish furniture. Sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't, but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom! Okay, so diving right into this pair. Hour one is going to be removing the hardware, disassembling the piece, vacuuming it out, and then taking it outside for a really good vinegar and sunshine treatment. These handles are really neat because they actually are in three parts. There's a little middle section that's made of metal and then these two solid wood sections on the outside that actually use normal wood screw to attach. Refinishing two dressers in one day is not unheard of but it's definitely not easy, especially if you're not using a spray gun for the paint, which I'm not going to be using. I'm going to be brushing all of my paint on. There was a tiny bit of mildew in the bottom of this, nothing serious, but I want to sort of correct that before I go any further so I'm taking this out in the very hot sun and giving it a good vinegar rub down and just letting it sit out there for a while while I work on other parts of the piece. These pieces weren't terribly stinky or anything like that. I just really want to make sure that I'm using vinegar on basically every square inch so I'm also doing the underside of the drawers, all the surfaces inside and outside and leaving this to bake for a little while in the sun. It has been extremely hot here this week so this dried up pretty quickly so we're back in the garage and we're going to be doing a scuff sand on basically the entire exterior of the piece. I'm using a 150 grit sand pad and I'm not trying to sand through this plasticky coating, I'm just trying to rough it up a little bit. The top, the sides and most of the trim are going to be painted black but these little pieces here on the sides are solid wood so I am sanding this down. I'm going to be staining it along with the drawer that fits into that slot. Everything else is being painted black and as is the case with most dressers from this period with this same sort of material, the drawer fronts on these pieces are solid wood but I'm not going to be sanding all of them down. Sad, I know, but hear me out. I am sanding down these wood handles. I'm going to refinish them and stain them and I just think that it would be a really nice contrast to have the wood against the black painted drawers. I definitely don't want to take off too much of wood here so I'm actually sanding these handles with a 220 grit. I'm going to be using a 150 grit sand pad to do the wood on the legs. These metal caps are so tarnished there is no way to polish these back to beautiful so I'm going to be spray painting them but I need to get that rust and crud off there so I just gave them a little hand sand and now I can move forward and sand the wood part. You definitely want to keep these pieces turning while you're sanding them with a power sander otherwise you're going to have strange flat areas and you definitely don't want that. As mentioned, I am going to be spray painting these really tarnished metal caps in a gold spray paint. It's one of my favorite brands or metallic paint. I just find it adheres really well and it just looks fantastic but I don't want to be getting paint where it's not supposed to be so it can be hard to wrap tape around these tapered legs. Tearing them off in small bits makes it easier to get a perfect fit. One common problem with spraying any kind of paint but especially metallic spray paint is spraying it on too thick and going for full coverage on your first spray. You want to do a couple of thin coats and you're going to end up with a much better finish in the long run. I let this coat dry on both the metal caps and these handles and came back probably about an hour and a half later and did another coat. I'm using a black spray-on primer here. I'm not really worried about adhesion but I find when painting black over these pieces, especially cold black from Fusion, you pretty much always have to do three coats unless you prime first so I'm using a black primer which will allow me to use only two coats of the paint. I am spraying this on a little bit of an angle facing toward the front which will keep the paint from overspraying onto the front. All of the drawers that had the wooden handle are getting spray primed and painted black and I've put all these drawers together just to minimize any overspray that might go into the drawer and you'll see once I reach the end here I'm actually going to turn and face the other direction to get that last spray so that it doesn't spray onto the bottom of the drawer. Now the long dresser had two drawers with just the metal handles and these ones I'm going to be doing completely wood and there's one on the tall just drawers as well. It's important to note that this is not a wood veneer coating it's a plastic sort of laminate coating so I just used 120 grit to burn through that. It's the fastest way to get it off and here I'm using a 220 grit to refine everything. Now you see the white streak in the middle that's a pretty common thing that you run into when you strip that plastic coating off these drawers. It's just where the manufacturer has filled it with something gel stain is going to take care of that. So my primer has now dried I'm using a 320 grit pad to just lightly sand it. I'm barely using any pressure all I'm doing is making sure I have a nice smooth surface to start painting on. By this point I believe I'm approaching hour six of this project. That's not necessarily six hours of full working time because that does include the dry time so I cleaned both pieces which took about an hour. They sat out in the sun to dry for about an hour. It was about another hour to scuff sand and prime both pieces and the drawers. Approximately maybe half an hour or so to sand the handles and the legs and spray paint them and then dry time for that as well. I ended up doing two coats of fusion mineral paint in the color cold black which you see here. It took about half an hour for each coat to do both pieces and the drawers. I gave the final coat of paint a good six hours before moving on to this step. I'm using Big Mama's Butter by Dixie Belle to seal the paint and I'm also using it in the drawers as well. It's kind of like a wax alternative and it makes the drawers smell delicious which I love. Also leaves the paint with a nice sheen that's not too dull and not too shiny. General Furnish's gel stain in the color nutmeg is one of my favorite stains to use especially on mid-century pieces. It has such a warm rich tone to it. Now this wood is fairly light. I find nutmeg looks a little bit more vibrant on something like walnut but I still am excited to see the contrast of these wood pieces with the beautiful rich black of the paint. While the legs and handles were drying I moved on to the drawers and you'll see again on the second drawer there the white streak. Watch how this gel stain just covers that up like it wasn't even there. I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to seal everything but at this point I have opted to go with the Big Mama's Butter again. It's fine on paint, it's fine on wood, you can use it on pretty much anything and again I just I really like the sheen that it gives. This gel stain has been drying up for about 12 hours which is kind of on the lower side of what it should be. Ideally it's 12 to 24 hours but it is a really warm day here and I'm not at all worried about it not being dry. I'm pretty much in the home stretch now with all of the dry times. I'm closing in on about 18 hours. Now I didn't work that all in one day. This is actually shot over two days but when I say trying to do this in less than a day I really mean 24 hours. As far as actual hands-on working time for both of these pieces I would say probably in the six to eight hour range. Most of the time on pieces like this is literally just waiting for things to dry. Have a quick revisit of what these pieces look like when I started and see what they look like now.