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 home.

With the planned birth of our first child, my wife and I thought it would be a good idea to save some money and try refinishing the old dresser instead of buying a new one. She was pregnant and couldn’t use a lot of the tools or chemicals needed for this project, so it became my mission this summer to completely refinish this dresser over the summer months. I figured I could get it done in a few week’s time, but as you’ll see, that was a gross underestimate.

Before embarking on any furniture restoration project you should really ask yourself if you have the skill and time to accomplish the project in a reasonable manner. You should also really consider if the furniture you’re working on is an antique that might actually have more value with a refinishing. If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow on PBS, you know that sometimes pieces lose tens of thousands of dollars in value by being refinished as opposed to keeping their original finish.

After - The 80 year old finished dresser.

The dresser I had to work with had two perfect selling points:

1. It was old, but not old enough to be “valuable” in a monetary sense. It was a fairly beat up piece of furniture with multiple coats of paint and broken pieces on the inside, so there was little chance of me making it any worse.

2. It was relatively flat and straight in most regards. This was crucially important when it came to taking off years of paint. Flat surfaces are wonderfully easy to work with compared to ornate carvings and curves in a piece of wood furniture.

I looked the piece over and took all the drawers out and came up with a general plan of attack:

1. Strip the paint and old finishes. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, was under the white paint.

2. Sand and prep the surface of the wood for a new finish, most likely some sort of stain.

3. Repair some of the drawer rails and replace some internal hardware.

4. Stain and coat the final product. This was going to be used in a kid’s room, so I knew I was going to have to use something that would protect the wood from, well, kids.

Little did I know that each step would be a mini project unto itself!