See How To Refinish A Dresser - Part 1 - Assessing the Project

My first real action step in refinishing my wife’s 80 year old dresser was removing the numerous layers of paint that had been applied in the past.

At first I was afraid a commercial paint solvent would hurt the wood, but scraping and scratching with a wire brush got me pretty much nowhere. I ended up hitting my local mega hardware store and scouting out the different types of paint removal chemicals available.

There are lots of options these days, but you generally want to make sure that …

Before - The 80 year old white painted dresser after some initial paint stripping.

One of the most rewarding and most time consuming home repairs I’ve ever accomplished was refinishing an 80 year old clothes dresser that my wife’s father used when he was a little boy. For the longest time this heavy wooden dresser was painted with several thick coats of white paint and used for storage in various bedrooms and basements in my wife’s family …

When I was refinishing an 80 year-old dresser one of the first things I did as I started to remove the paint was try to identify what type of wood it was made out of. I really only had a couple options based on the piece’s time period and style, but I didn’t really know very much about types of wood at the time.

Some people can just naturally look at a piece of wood and immediately identify what it is. It’s almost an inborn ability with them. I had worked with mostly different types of pine and …