White and Wood Makeover

The process of decorating the house has been moving pretty slowly (ultimate understatement.) One room is completely finished though, our guest room. I will post with pictures of the full room soon, but first I wanted to show you this simple update on the dresser and nightstands. These were my first major thrift store furniture purchase.

As you can tell, these needed a good cleaning before getting started, but they were actually in pretty good shape.

Once I cleaned everything up, I removed the drawers and sanded everything else using my  orbital sander, available here. The tops of each piece had some major deep scratches, which sanding took care of. I then used three coats of DecoArt Everlasting chalk paint on all of the white areas. I didn’t prime first and I didn’t sand so much as to remove all of the old dark stain, so three coats were necessary.

I used a stain marker to touch up minor scratches on the drawers. Once that was dry, I coated each drawer in two light coats of Shellac. I absolutely love the idea of just applying a little Shellac to the drawers instead of painting them…it’s kind of like cheating…it wipes on in a couple of minutes, makes the wood look shiny and beautiful, and you don’t risk paint chipping from use down the road.

For the nightstands, I also chose to leave out the bottom drawer to change up the look a little bit.

I found the new hardware on sale at Wickes. Any excuse to do a little shopping there is a good one in my book.

I’m really thrilled with how everything turned out, and this was a very painless makeover job. I think our guests will be very cozy in here.