From Dresser to T.V. Console

Remember back when I posted my very first furniture project. It was a bedroom set makeover, and the catalyst that sent me from buying new matchy-matchy furniture into finding furniture that just needed a little lovin' and "elbow grease" (which is a term that has always sounded gross and unsanitary to me.) to look pretty again.

Anyway, that bedroom set had a good life after I made it over, but eventually I started making changes. The first change had to do with the mirrors, which I made into part of that Christmas wall gallery. After Christmas was over, I decided to transform them back into mirrors and use them for the mirrors on my makeup vanity and they are now living happily ever after on top of the vanity. I sold the nightstands because they were too low for the new mattress set we bought last year. I did keep the armoire for our bedroom TV and have so far left it alone, but as far as the dresser goes, I ended up deciding not to put it in our new bedroom. The space would have been too crowded between it and my vanity, so we moved it to our basement where it sat untouched for several months until I decided it would make a great TV console. Not a super unique idea, but I wanted something to fit our board games, along with space for the miscellaneous crap I hide when it's time to clean up for company, and I had already sold our existing entertainment armoire so we were using a shoe rack from Ikea as a replacement.

After I decided what I wanted to do with it, I got to work (after much procrastinating). Since I like that "eclecta-cottage" look (a term that I should really trademark...), I decided to chalk paint it and distress it, because what's more awesome than making pieces of furniture look like they have been through a war? I chose the same color as my dining table, Sherwin Williams, "Watery"

Here's some before shots, which you probably remember...

before makeover #1

before makeover #2

The first thing I did, of course, was paint it using the chalk paint. After I did that, I used an orbital sander to distress it so that the previous paint color would show through (Actually, I planned to sand the original paint off and then paint the areas I wanted to distress black, so that color would show through when I distressed it, but I was too lazy.) I had never used an electric sander before, but it turned out to be quite fun, so much fun that I got a little carried away on a few areas...

As you can see, I stayed with the original hardware, which I decided to spray paint flat white, to give it the "lighter-fresher" look that I'm going for in the house. Originally, I didn't think to distress the pulls, but I did drop a few of them so they kind of distressed themselves and it ended up working out.

Then, it was time to make a shelf for the electronics to sit on. At first, I wanted to take just the center drawer out, but the DVD player wouldn't quite fit, so I decided to take the other two top drawers out.Then, I took out the little drawer glide thingy's and sat some spare particle board on top so I could put all of the electronics on those. After the shelf was in, the mister used some weird attachment on his drill that looked like a big circle, cookie cutter, thingy to drill the holes in the back for the cords. He was just about finished when our drill started smoking before meeting it's demise, so he had to punch out the rest of the hole by hand.

probably should have had him drill those holes before I painted it to avoid the extra distressing...

I did plan on adding some whitewashing and a little bit of glaze, but I got too impatient so I didn't. I didn't put a protector on it either, which I may, or may not, regret some day. However, I think it works for now and I'm pretty okay with how it turned out (even though I need to fix it so the ugly cords don't piss me off every time I look at them).

So there you have it.