Please see How To Refinish A Dresser - Part 3 - Sandpaper, Grit and Power Sanders.

After sanding the dresser to the point where it was about ready to begin the stain and finish I decided to take a detour from the refinishing and “fix” up the dresser so that it was a decent piece of furniture again. This was an unplanned step when I first began, but the more I worked with the dresser, the more I found things that compromised the integrity of the piece as a working piece of furniture.

A typical dovetail joint on a drawer. These can loosen over long periods of time.

The first thing I did was inspect the dovetail joints of all the drawers. Some of them had been nailed together with finishing nails (clearly not original handiwork) and some of the joints were simply falling apart. I used some professional wood glue that was made for pressure points on the loose joints, putting in just enough glue to form a strong bond but not so much that it would ooze out all over the place. I used bricks wrapped in old towels to keep a constant weight on the drawers while the glue dried overnight.

While working on the dresser I also noticed that the drawers didn’t slide very straight and when they did they would fall right out of the dresser. This dresser was going to be in a baby’s room and the last thing I wanted was a toddler yanking drawers all the way out.

The dresser with new drawer stops (silver screws) and new drawer guides.

Stopping the drawers from coming out was a relatively easy fix. Most of the metal stops had been flattened years ago. At first I tried to find metal drawer stops like the originals, but after several weeks of visiting hardware stores and furniture sites I finally gave up and settled on putting in some heavy duty screws instead, making sure the heads stuck up enough to stop the drawers from sliding out. I also put a thin strip of wood along the back of each of the drawers to serve as an extra stop when the back of lip of the drawer hit the screws. After that even I had a hard time pulling the drawer all the way out.

The drawers were not coming out straight because some of the thin wooden drawer guides were split and chipped and one was even “repaired” at a slight angle. A few of the drawer guides were beyond repair, so found a thin strip of wood of equal thickness and width and just cut out little edges on both side so that they would fit in the dresser and replace the drawer guides. I essentially made my own drawer guides with just a few cuts. All I needed to do was drill a little screw hole and secure them with a little glue and a wood screw.

The rest of the cabinet was in pretty good condition. There were one or two tiny splits down around the feet of the dresser, but I put in some wood filler and just sanded over them. They were small enough that I figured I’d be the only one to ever notice them.

Finally, the dresser was ready to start staining!