So we picked up this old piece of furniture pictured below. The piece came from my Great Aunt's house. And yes, it screams 1970's. So we had the idea to try to revive the old lady and make it useful as we move into a bigger house. In a picture by picture slideshow below, I'll explain how we did it.
The before picture.
As you can see below, there were sweet 1970 like grooves that not only were stylish but also doubled as handles. Sadly enough, we had to pull out the grooves in order to make the drawers flat all the way across.
After removal of outer groove.
Next step was to fill in the holes in the drawers with puddy. Once the puddy dried, we sanded it down. This step was repeated a couple of time in order to make sure that the hole was completely filled and smooth all the way across the drawer.
Once the holes were puddied.
Before starting to paint, we sanded down the entire chest along with the drawers with an 80 grit sandpaper. This removed all of the original wood coating.
Furniture sanded down.
Our next step was to paint a base coat. This base coat would be the color that would come through when we later distressed the chest in order to give it an antique look. We used a bluish gray color and put on two coats. Below is a picture after the base coat was applied (along with a great shot of my knee).
Base coat.
We then painted the top coat which was an off white. We ended up using three coats of the white. Once it all dried, we then used a 120 grit sandpaper and slowly distressed certain parts of the chest. After we had distressed the piece to our (Emily's) heart's desire, we applied a glaze over everything to give it a smooth finish. We also went to Lowe's and picked up some handles that we thought would go along well with the style and color. Below is the finished product. It's kind of hard to really see the full look in the big picture. The first one will give you an idea of what it truly looks like.
Up close shot of the drawers, handles and distressing.
The whole piece...its not great lighting in this shot.We're no professionals, but hey, it was fun and we learned some interesting things in the process.
