la dresser de boutique distress

My favourite project with Mika the other week was the makeover of an older dresser she mentioned one day! I've been wanting to distress a dresser (I always see such great renditions on other people's blogs!) so I jumped at the chance! Remember our colour palette from last post?

Isn't it gorgeous?! We turned the top two drawer areas into shelves, and put wheels on the drawers to make them under-bed-storage (thanks Pinterest). Mika's deciding whether to put baskets or trays or scarves on the shelves. I think any combination of those would look so cool - scarfs all folded loosely on the bottom shelf with a tray on the top shelf for small items like jewelry - or baskets and tray, or baskets on one shelf and fun bottles like perfume and vintage glasses on the other shelf. So many options!

We did this project in just a couple days, working on it at random times when nothing else was going on. I took off the hardware and sanded the whole outside lightly (I don't think I had to do that, but I was being thorough :) ). Then I sanded down the whole top down to bare wood (I just used regular sandpaper, 60grit, then 120, then 220) and stained it my favourite brown (of course), dark walnut by Minwax (followed by a couple coats later of polyurethane for durability).

It was so nice of Laura, David's mum, to let us work in the kitchen! I did all the messy sanding
while people are at work. Since it was hand-sanding, it wasn't nearly as messy as it could have been!

We used the same colour as the middle shelf of our bookcase makeover - we bought a quart rather than a test pot, and maybe used half of it.

Those two wood planks to make the shelves we bought at Lowes and had them cut there in the store to avoid using tools! It worked like a charm. I just went around and caulked all the edges before my second coat of paint.

Then - the distressing! For this step we just went at it with sandpaper. At first I only did some edges, but it looked too timid and intentional. So we went back together (I love how Mika doesn't overthink things, she just tries them!) and sanded random patches as well.

So I had distressed wood before (the cabinets in our sunroom this summer) but this time I wanted to use a glaze for the first time, to give it a more unified aged look. The problem was when I googled around, everyone seems to have their own method, not usually well documented. How to know what to choose! I decided to trust one of my bloggery friends Korrie over at Red Hen Home, who I think renovates furniture as a side job.

She said she mixes Martha Stewart Glaze medium (which I found at Michaels) with a bit of dark walnut stain by Minwax (the bottle says to mix it with acrylic paint, but I decided to try Korrie's method).

It worked so well! I brushed it on with a foam brush, and Mika wiped it off with some paper towels after a minute or two. If you use a wet paper towel almost all of it will come off - so we could play around to get the amount that we wanted.

I love the look it gave to the finished product. Like a tea-wash, it gave more of a vintage depth to the paint, and darkened the parts that we'd sanded.

Because the room doesn't have any windows it's hard to show the true colours. The wall is more of a peach, and the blue has just a touch of green in it...It looks so fun with the chunky oil-rubbed bronze handles we bought from Lowe's, doesn't it!