Roadside Repurposed Dresser

We found this beauty sitting on the side of the road outside a rental house. There wasn’t much I loved about the piece except that it had some great French Provincial hardware hiding under layers of paint but I just couldn’t leave it sitting on the curb waiting for heavy trash pick up.

We stopped and got the dresser along with this piece I am still thinking about what to do with it but I am thinking gray and creamy white.

After a month of the ugly lavender dresser sitting in our garage I decided that this was the weekend to get busy and do something with the piece. Because the piece was not real wood and had some areas that the fake wood had gotten wet and was swollen, I knew it would need a lot of sealing. First it all got primed with Zinzer primer then I made my own version of chalk paint for the second coat out of a grayish, greenish OOPS paint sitting in the garage that I thought would work for the piece. Here is a trick if you like the look and feel of latex paint with poly on top for durability but like the way that chalk paint will cover nasty surfaces, use one coat of chalk paint then sand lightly, then paint over it with the latex paint.

After painting the whole piece I could see it still needed additional help.
I decided to take the dresser in a whole different direction.

I took off the French Provincial hardware and added cedar fencing we picked up when our neighbors changed out their fence. One board covered the front of each dresser drawer, one to cover the bottom part and three to cover the top. Only one board needed to be cut down narrower on the table saw. After the boards were nailed on, I gave them a good sanding to bring out the color of the wood.

The hardware I decided to use out of my hoard was some shiny brass hardware that had been given to me by a neighbor. A coat of Rustoelum Flat spray paint designed for metal was just the ticket to getting the look I wanted. My math-minded husband figured out where the pulls needed to go on the dresser and drilled the holes so that they would line up vertically.