When Clay and I decided to refinish his dresser it was in pretty sad shape. There were dents and scratches all over and, as you can see in the picture below, one of the handles was missing and one was mysteriously upside down. Strange.
After our attempt to stain the beat up dresser failed, we decided to hide all of our mistake with paint–but first we wanted to challenge ourselves in one more way. The pulls that Clay found to replace his old ones required holes that were wider apart than the originals. Instead of searching for pulls that fit the preexisting holes, we decided to patch the old ones using Elmer’s Wood Filler. The process was simple. Fill the holes with putty and let them dry for 2-8 hours (huge window, I know). We left them overnight just to be on the safe side. After the putty dries, you sand off the excess until only a smooth surface remains.
We also did this with some of the major scratches and dents on the outside of the dresser.
After two quick coats of paint and the not-so-quick process of re-drilling holes appropriately sized for the hardware, Clay’s dresser had a brand new look.
I think the handles were meant to go on the other way but Clay preferred having them look like they pointed at one another. Overall, we’re really pleased with the way that it turned out. The dark color balances the curves of the wood making it feel more masculine. It’s definitely more suited for a guy’s room.
This weekend I flew to Lubbock, TX to visit Clay. Clay has owned the same dresser–a hand me down from his older brother–since before I met him five year ago. I never knew the dresser to be without dents or scratches or even to posses all six of its handles.
So Friday I turned to Clay and said, “You know we could replace the hardware on your dresser this weekend.”
He shrugged, “We could…”
I started getting excited, “We could also paint it!”
More shrugging followed by, “We could–or we could stain it.”
Neither of us had ever stained anything before but we were confident in our ability to figure it out. We called around for advice, bought the necessary supplies, and got to work.
Everyone that we talked to seemed to disagree on how much you should sand a piece of furniture before staining it. Feeling lazy, Clay and I opted to go with the school of thought that preached lightly sanding rather than completely sanding down to the bare wood.
Unfortunately, for our project, I think we chose wrong. The thing to remember about staining is that any imperfections that result in areas with more exposed wood will absorb the stain at a different rate that the rest of the surface area.
If we had spent the time sanding the wood to a more uniform state, then the stain would not have highlighted the imperfections in the way that this attempt did. In the end we opted to paint over our mistakes. Comeback tomorrow to see how it all turned out. Have you ever stained anything before? Tell me it turned out better than this!
Special thanks to Clay for understanding my weird definition of a vacation.
