Chic & Unique: Upgrading a Dresser with New Legs

Welcome everybody to another video! Today I'm going to be taking this little hardwood dresser that was saved from the trash, adding legs to it, giving it a full refinish on the top, and painting part of the base. I'm actually going to be reusing the drawer handles on this one, just because they're kind of cool and they're a different size so they would be a little bit hard to replace. I'm going to be leaving the top wood but I'm going to be doing a white wax treatment on the top and also on the drawer fronts, which is going to give this piece a nice bright, light, modern look. And as you can see here, there aren't any legs on this piece. I'm going to be adding some legs. You can tell by the discoloration in the wood along the corners that there would have been legs at one point, but they're gone. But without any further ado, let's get into this piece! My name is Angie and I'm the one behind Transcend Furniture Gallery, a business created from a love of vintage furniture and the desire to take broken, dated, and unloved things and turn them into modern treasures that people would love to have in their homes. 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 I'm getting into this piece by starting with the top. I'm using, I believe, an 80 grit sandpaper to cut through this top finish, which was actually a little bit harder than I expected. Often when they're scratched and dinged up like this, the finish comes off a lot easier, but for some reason I had a hard time with this one. Once I got through this first layer, I was able to switch up my sanding pad to a 150 grit to help smooth out that first sanding, and after this I'll be switching to a 220 for my final sanding. The top and the sides here are actually wood veneers, so I'm being very gentle with the sander here. Some people like to sand the edges by hand. I'm fairly good with the orbital now, so I can handle it, but you just want to be careful that you're not sanding through that So now I'm just going to pull out all of the drawers, remove the hardware, and spray it. I unfortunately didn't get a clip of me spraying the hardware, but I used my favorite champagne gold colored metal spray to give them a nice light refresh. Now that the drawers are all out of the way, I'm going to be using a 150 grit sand pad to just scuff sand the sides. Now this looks like really bad sanding. All I'm doing is scuff sanding, so I just want to disturb that top finish a little bit so that my paint will adhere. If I was refinishing the sides, it would look very different. And just scuff sanding the front here a little bit as well, and then I'm on to the drawer fronts. The drawers as well as the top are going to be left wood, so I'm just taking my time and giving them a good sanding. It's the same process as the top, I'll be starting with lower grit and working my way up to 220 grit for my final sanding. And of course after all that sanding and dust, it's time to give this piece a good vacuuming out and a wipe down. It always feels like it takes so long to get to the point where I'm ready to start painting, but I'm ready to start painting! This is another one of my custom blended colors, but it is made of fusion mineral paint, which is pretty much the only paint I'm using at the moment. Just getting that first layer on, it doesn't have to be perfect, I'm going to be going for full full coverage on my second coat. Once my first layer has dried for about an hour and a half to two hours, I'm going to go in with my paintbrush and do my second coat. I'm getting pretty good coverage with this paint color, so I'm only going to be doing two coats except for little spot touch-ups anywhere I see that the paint didn't cover entirely in the second coat. And it's time now finally for the white wax. I'm going to be rubbing it on, immediately wiping it back off. If you let it sit too long, it gets sticky and hard to remove. I just love using this white wax on natural wood, it just makes it so light and fresh and airy, and I just love the look of it. One thing to be careful of when you're using any kind of wax, whether it's white wax or antique wax or clear wax, is that it should be the last thing you put on a piece. Paint won't stick to wax and most, well pretty much all finishes won't stick to wax, so if you're doing a different type of top coat like polycrylic, you want to do that first before you put the wax on. I'm just doing one last wipe over with a dry lint-free cloth just to make sure that I've got all of the excess wax off and I'm left with a nice smooth finish. And I'm repeating the process on the drawers. White wax on, white wax off. And it's finally time to put the hardware on. I absolutely love doing this, it's almost like icing on the cake. One of the things I like to do is scrounge up old furniture legs wherever I can find them. So in this case I've got four of these legs. I wouldn't recommend sanding on your leg like this, this is just easy for me but it's definitely not a how-to. I'm also doing these sort of back and forth rocking motions, that's just so I don't leave flat areas when I'm sanding and I'm also turning a leg while I'm sanding because I don't want lines or flat areas. I want the legs to stay nice and round. So what I'm doing to add the legs, I had a board that I added some pocket holes to and here I'm just measuring where I need that board to go so that I can make it the same on both sides for the legs. I'm going to drill a pilot hole first and attach one of the screws just to make things a little easier for when I'm drilling and screwing the rest of the board on. Now that the board is a little bit more secure because of that first screw I can go ahead and drill out my second pilot hole, screw that in and then do the top. And I'm using these salvaged angled leg plates from another piece because I want the legs to sort of be on an angle rather than straight up and down. Putting these legs on is super exciting because it means that I'm almost done. All I have to do now is just white wax the legs like I did the top and the drawers and we're done this piece.