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 – The 80 year old white painted dresser after some initial paint stripping.
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 wood dresser I was going to refinish 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. The surface areas of the dresser were relatively flat, smooth and straight. 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.
Before going much further I had to first figure out what kind of wood was under the paint. A soft wood would get damaged and dented pretty easily if I wasn’t careful, while a hardwood might be a little more difficult to stain. To do this I pulled out one of the drawers and took it out into the light. The inside of the wooden drawers were not, in any way, finished.
That was good in older furniture the front drawer piece is almost always made of the same type of wood as the rest of the piece, so if I could figure out what this was then I was pretty safe in assuming the whole dresser was made of the same type of wood. I fingernail to the inside of the drawer pretty much confirmed it was a hardwood of some kind (no dent, difficult to scratch) but I’m not very good at identifying woods by grain.
So I took the drawer to the hardware store and stood in front of their lumber for a while, comparing the grain and general weight of the wood to other pieces. After a few minutes I made the declension that this drawer, and likely the whole dresser, was made out of a maple tree!
I even bought a small piece of walnut and brought it home so that I could use it to test different stain colors later in the project. I planned to get this all done pretty quickly, but I learned that refinishing wood furniture take a lot more time and effort than I originally thought!
[...] How To Refinish A Dresser – Part 2 – Stripping Old Paint 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. [...]
[...] Lesson #1 – Having the Right Tools Counts: Sometimes the tools you need are physical ones like the knob puller or the pipe wrench. But sometimes you also need the tool of experience to really do a job the right way. I’ve fumbled through plenty of jobs and most of them turned out okay, but in many cases I would have saved a lot of time (and even some materials) if I had gone in with the right tools initially. For the wood dresser that I refinished I ended up buying two different electric sanders and a variety of paints and varnishes. Now I have those tools so the next time I refinish a furniture piece I’ll have the experience and physical tools to do it better. Now that I’ve seen how to fix a shower knob, I’ll know what physical tools I’ll need to perform the job correctly next time. [...]
[...] Lesson #1 – Having the Right Tools Counts: Sometimes the tools you need are physical ones like the knob puller or the pipe wrench. But sometimes you also need the tool of experience to really do a job the right way. I’ve fumbled through plenty of jobs and most of them turned out okay, but in many cases I would have saved a lot of time (and even some materials) if I had gone in with the right tools initially. For the wood dresser that I refinished I ended up buying two different electric sanders and a variety of paints and varnishes. Now I have those tools so the next time I refinish a furniture piece I’ll have the experience and physical tools to do it better. Now that I’ve seen how to fix a shower knob, I’ll know what physical tools I’ll need to perform the job correctly next time. [...]
[...] I’ve had other refinishing projects before like when I completely refinished a maple bedroom dresser. That took me about three months with all the drawer fronts and minor repairs that had to be done. This chair was going to be quick sand and refinish job in my mind, but I ended up hitting a few obstacles. [...]
Great Article! I want to refinish a dresser I purchased from a yard sale. It looks like its been stripped and spray painted with black paint. The paint looks “chalky” though. I want the dresser to be black, but I want it to be a nice glossy wooden black. Could I just apply the stainer to achieve the look since the dresser has been stripped already, just spray painted black?
Shana,
You could probably try to paint or stain right over the existing spray paint, but you might end up with spots that are uneven or don’t adhere very well later. That spray paint may not be made for wood and may make applying a new paint a lot harder. I think you’d be better off stripping the spray paint off as much as possible before trying to apply anything else. Good luck!
Great job you’ve done with the restoration of that dresser, looks good as new. :)
Nice job! That 80 year old dresser probably looks better now than it did 80 years ago ;)