A New Finish!

Now that our little Bear is getting bigger and bigger and getting into more and more stuff, I knew it was time that we make a change to our entertainment center which although nice consisted of all open shelving and thus easy access to all kinds of electronics and cords that should be kept out of reach from the little Bear!! 
So after much discussion and persuasion of Husband Dearest, I finally convinced him that getting an old dresser and redoing it into an TV console would be ideal for us to do!

Off I set with little Bear in tow to scour the local second hand home goods store to see what I could find.  My mom came along too to offer her opinion and aid in the process.  

We were in luck when we got to the store as they had an overstock of dressers and side boards to pick from.  So many choices but when my eyes laid on this one, I fell in love and knew it was the one for me!! Now please keep an open mind and look beyond the hideous goldy/yellowy color of this thing.  I saw a beautiful piece that was was well constructed, all of the drawers worked, and the actual architecture of the piece was lovely!  

 After some haggling with the shop owner to convince her to split up this bedroom set so I could have this dresser, I won! And it was all mine!! :)

Thanks to my sweet Husband and a good friend/neighbor of ours, we got it home.  

At this point, EVERYONE (husband, neighbors, etc.) all think I have lost my mind in buying this piece because the color is so awful and it is a rather large piece, but I knew in the end it was exactly what we would want!

Now came the fun part of starting the process to redo this dresser into something fabulous! 

First, off came the hardware.  We debated if to get new hardware, but really, the original hardware was just too pretty to get rid of.  So we decided to hang onto it and just give it a fresh coat of pant which we did later on.  

As you can see by the marks left from where the hardware used to be, this dresser had a serious layer of grime on it, so some time was spent just scrubbing it down with soap and water before anything else could be done to it.  As you can see, little Bear readily accepted it as a new place to put all of his toys and claimed it as his own. ;)  

Next came the oh so fun part of sanding down the whole piece!!  We only roughed it up and smoothed out any major dings that it had so it wasn't too bad.  And dear Husband was so great about helping.  

Due to the fact that we didn't have somewhere to completely sand down this dresser to bare wood (since we were re-doing it in the middle of winter in our little apartment's dinning room), we found this great primer that goes right over old paint!  It wasn't even that expensive for just a quart of the stuff which covered the dresser thoroughly two times. 

As you can see, dear Husband was such a champ in helping to get this dresser done.  

 He even did a fantastic job of getting all the details and fine work on the dresser coated in primer.  

While I worked on getting the drawers and the top of the dresser coated.  

Once we had the whole thing thoroughly coated in primer and we could no longer see that awful awful gold color, I fell even more in love with the dresser and dear Husband was beginning to see me  as not quite so crazy.  We almost debated leaving it in the grey primer color, but I knew the color we had picked out would be just amazing!  Especially since the color we had picked was called "Jamaican Dream".  Can't go wrong with a name like that!! 

So off we set to coat the whole dresser in two thick layers of top coat paint.  And we paint and we painted and we painted!! 

 Husband Dearest snuck in a picture of me working away. ;)  

Don't you just love this color?  Wat until you see it with all the drawers put into it!!

But first, before I could put the drawers into the dresser and call it done, I had to baby proof it!!!  Otherwise, the whole point of having a piece of furniture that little Bear couldn't get into would all be for naught.  The little Bear decided he wanted to help me get that task done. 

And here it is!!!

Oh wait!  I'm still missing the hardware!  Oh what a chore that was to re-paint.  Since the hardware was so old and well used, we scrubbed the hardware down with mineral spirits and a wire brush to the gunk off of them.  Then we coated in Rustolium Primer, then a nice metallic black finish. 

After gaining some inspiration off of Pinterest and looking around to see what we had in our storage unit, I came up with a handy way to hold all of the hardware upright so I could finish each piece in its entirely in one shot!  This is what a pool noodle cut in half with golf tees stuck up through will get you: 

Now, its all done! TA-DA!!!

We love it and it holds all of our DVDs perfectly with two of the top drawers holding all the electronics (we cute 2 2" holes in the back for the cords to go out of).  

We did un-baby proof the bottom left drawer so that little Bear could have a drawer of his own which he loves to store books and puzzles in. :)