Trash to Treasure!

I have been looking for a set of 3 drawer nightstands for a long time and have never been able to find anything at the kind of price I want --everyone wants more than $100 apiece!  So I was driving by Union Gospel Mission thrift store and saw this dresser in the parking lot and started thinking that, Hey I could make something out of that!  I got excited about it and came back the next week (after we got paid) and it was still there, at 1/2 price!  So I bought it. 



Original dresser.  I wish I had a better picture but it was raining and so it was in the garage, bad lighting and not much room to back up.

 

Rusty was pretty skeptical about it, but we decided to go ahead and go for it.  Plus we just bought a router (with table and bits) from a friend and were looking for a chance to try it out. 



On its back with the drawers out



Close up of the ugly drawers
 

 First we took the top off, all we had to do was unscrew it.  I had hoped it was solid wood, but turned out it was just laminate over pressboard.  Bummer.  But still usable.

 

 

Here we go with the trusty jigsaw!
 

And the next thing you know it was in two halves!  Rusty was still not a total believer at this point but was starting to get on board.

 

 

 

So we have a back, front, and one side, need to build a second side, top, and side front trim piece to hold in the drawers.

 

 

First thing we needed to do was to match the one trim piece left on the side.  We took all the other trim off, but this was part of the drawer frame so it couldn't come off.  This was where we got to try out the router. 

Its a little hard to see but it is a piece that is just has a curved cutout all around the face of it.  Luckily we had lots of scrap wood to practice on, because this part pretty much took us all day.

 

But when we finished, we had a pretty good match!

 

The drawers turned out to be amazingly easy. At first I thought we would have to run the fronts through the table saw and cut off all that carved stuff on the front to make them flat.

 

Hmm.. is that plastic I smell?
 

The next day we started the first pass and we both could smell melting plastic--turns out the drawer fronts were just plastic and they all just popped right off!

 

By this time Rusty was a believer

 

 

 

 

Naked drawers!

 

Next we added the sides.  We had some old plywood cabinet doors that we were able to cut down to fit.  We glued it up and used small blocks to screw it together.

Finally the top--we just cut down the old top from the original dresser, glued and screwed it back on.  Added a new board to the bottom front (the old one was just a large piece of the ornate trim, not re-usable) and Voila!

So I didn't take really any pictures of the painting process, I wish I had.  We decided to spray paint them white, which I'm not sure I would do again.  It took a LOT of spray paint.  We spent about as much in spray paint as we did on the dresser itself.  Mostly because it got cold and we were spraying in the garage (where it was colder than we realized) and we had a lot of problems with the paint cracking and then needing to be resanded and re-painted.

The knobs I got for .50 at the Restore.  None of them match, but they are all similar circles.  I spray painted them all a matte nickle.

The drawer fronts were from an idea off Pintrest (for once, one that actually worked).  It is the same paint with two different sheens.  The pin said to buy a can of matte and a can of high gloss in the same color, but I didn't want to spend $25 on that much paint.  So I bought a yellow matte and a green matte spray paint.  First I did 2 coats of the matte color (over a white primer).  Then I sprayed the fronts again with a clear high-gloss.  I charted out the diamond pattern on a piece of paper and used the blue painters tape to mask out the stripes.  Finally I sprayed it one more time with the matte.  I'm super happy how it turned out!

So all along, Rusty had been saying that he thought they were too big to fit beside our bed.  I measured it and thought it would be tight, but that it would work.  Well, he was right, there is not enough room for both of them. So after all that, we went back to the Restore, bought this small end kitchen cabinet, put a top on it and painted it. 




Restore nightstand.  I have to get some drawer screws long enough to put the knobs on.

So now we actually have THREE nightstands. This one from the Restore was so easy I wish we had done it that way from the first! Oh well, we learned a lot and had fun doing it.