Welcome back to another furniture flip! I picked up this nightstand dresser from Goodwill for just $25.
It's part solid wood, part veneer, and is in pretty decent shape, except there are some dings and scratches on the top, as well as the overall color needing a bit of an update. There's also a drawer that's not working quite so well, so we'll fix that up too.
Let's get right into it!
Prep & Stripping
Of course, we are starting with a bit of cleaning. I'm actually using a bit of powdered Tide in a bucket of hot water to wipe down any surface, followed by a rinse with water. I also came in with my vacuum to suck up all the dust and debris inside each of the drawers.
I am going for a neutral rustic farmhouse look, which I think is going to be a combination of a lighter paint color on the body with wood accents throughout. Once I got the handles off, I applied a stripper to start getting this top layer off.
I'm not a huge fan of using stripper; I do prefer sanding. I just really don't like using the chemicals, but there is no doubt that this stuff works well. I applied it with a chip brush and then put a layer of Saran wrap over it and came back in about half an hour.
Then I took a putty knife and started scraping, and the stuff just falls off; it's awesome. I am using CitriStrip, which is a bit more gentle and certainly less smelly than a lot of the other strippers out there. Stripper is also great when you're going on any kind of detailed edging or curves like this, as opposed to sanding, which might flatten those trim pieces down.
Once I've scraped off as much as I can, I'm going to grab some steel wool and some mineral spirits to start cleaning up any of the excess residue. And you can see this does a great job of wiping away all of the residue. The steel wool gets inside any curves and kind of helps scrape very gently, and the mineral spirits clean up the goopiness and the stickiness.
You do go through quite a lot of steel wool like this, so make sure you have a lot on hand. Theoretically, it is possible to get all the residue off, but I'm normally not so lucky, and that's okay because in this case, I do want to do a bit of sanding on this top part anyway.
I'm going to let this dry overnight so all the tackiness, stickiness, all that stuff is hard, and then I'm gonna come back with some sanding paper on a sanding sponge and get the rest of this stuff off as well as start to sand down any nicks or gouges so I can make my table top nice and smooth.
I'm also going to take this opportunity to do a scuff sanding on the entire body of my dresser, and this will be helpful to adhere the paint.
Staining
Before I mix up a color to paint the body, I want to get this wood stained. It's going to be easier to color match the paint rather than the stain if that makes sense.
After testing a few stain colors, I grabbed a medium brown, and that looked really nice, so I kept going with that. I stained the top around the edges as well as the two drawers with the same color. I used just a lint-free cloth and made sure to wipe back any excess as well. And honestly, I was really happy with this the way it is.
I know this color is very similar to where we started, but we have pulled off that really thick top coat now, so we're working with a bit more natural wood, and we'll get to sealing it in a minute. For now, I'm going to move on to painting the body, which I want to show you this trick that we can get our paint color to match perfectly in tone to our wood, so let's get into that.
Painting & Distressing
I started painting with Zen by Jolie, which is a chalk paint in an off-white color.
Chalk paint, as I'm sure many of you know, is a great paint for furniture. It applies really well and has great adherence, especially since we did that light sanding earlier on. It has really good coverage and the additional benefit of the ability to work in some texture, which is what I'm doing here.
I'm going to put my brush strokes in every which direction, and this is gonna build up a bit of a hand-painted feel. I did three total coats of this chalk paint to get a nice bright stark white, and I left about an hour in between for it all to dry and then a total of 24 hours overnight before I moved on to the next step.
I'm gonna jump right into distressing with a 120 grit sandpaper. I personally like a medium-heavy distressed look, especially since the wood here is going to be so clean. I'm going to go around all of the corners, edges, feet, anything that is raised to put some character and wear back into this piece. This creates a good amount of dust, so I'm going to grab a damp cloth and wipe that up as well.
Glazing
Now for that color trick I was mentioning. I know I could stop here, and this dresser would look great with the white matching the medium brown wood on top, but I want to take this a step further and tone the white-colored paint and make it more of a cream beige so that it's in the same family as the wood.
I'm going to do this with a technique called glazing, which is essentially taking the exact same stain that I used on the wood on top and applying it to my chalk paint. I'm gonna put it on generously with either a brush or a lint-free cloth, and then I'm gonna wipe up as much as I possibly can.
You can see that this stain soaks into the chalk paint, and then all of the excess I'm wiping back as much as possible so there's no residue left on top. It does take quite a few paper towels to get all of the additional stain off, and you can almost work it around in a way to make the color nice and uniform across the piece.
This does require a bit of patience, working back and forth to ensure the color is uniform not only on each part of the dresser but also across the entire dresser as a whole. But in my opinion, the results are totally worth it.
This is a really great way to highlight any of the features of the piece as well as that texture from the chalk paint that we applied. This paint is also now a great brown-beige color that matches the tone of our wood perfectly.
I really think this is the way to go if you're trying to do a two-tone wood paint combination. This technique is both time and cost-effective, whether you're just flipping one piece for yourself in your own home or you do furniture as a profit. All you need is that one can of white paint, and then any stain will do to get you this perfectly matching set.
Is it just me, or is this really cool?!
Black Details
One of the drawer sliders was loose, so I grabbed a screw and put it right back in position. Then I slid the drawers back in to see how this piece was shaping up.
I really liked it, but I thought the handles were a bit too black. They just didn't really go with anything. So I brought out some black chalk paint!
My plan was to add black as a highlight wherever I thought would be best, and on this piece, that is the routed piece of trim here at the bottom. So I brought out a small painter's artist brush and started putting that in place.
This was a little detailed and meticulous, but I wasn't too worried about the edges because I was going to come back through with the sandpaper and do some more distressing in this area. So it took a couple of minutes, and after that, I stood back and I felt like I wanted to do a little bit more. So I went on these side pieces; there's like this little angled beveled cutout here, and I started applying black in that area as well.
After that was all dried and distressed, I came back with the stain and went over top in the same glazing fashion just to smooth things out. And when I stood back, I realized it was too much; I went way too far with the black. But that's okay; these things happen.
I just grabbed some sandpaper, rubbed this down till it was blank wood, and then stained it as an addition to match the top and the fronts of the drawers. So now I have the black handles matching the black paint around the routed trim at the bottom. I have stained wood on the top as well as the front of the drawers and these little side beveled cutouts along the edge. So some details here and there, a nice theme throughout. This was the perfect place to stop and move on to sealing.
Sealing
I am going to be using Clear Furniture Wax by Jolie on this entire piece.
Wax is a really great natural alternative to something like a polyurethane. It's definitely not as durable, so I wouldn't use it on like a dinner table or anything like that, but it works really well with chalk paint, soaks right in, and it also works well on wood too.
You can use either a wax brush or a lint-free cloth to apply this. And I'm going to generously rub it on top of the entire surface and then come back with a lint-free cloth and buff it in as much as I can, almost like hand lotion.
Wax is oil-based in its nature, and if you get this stuff almost heated up with the friction of rubbing it in, it kind of forms this really glossy nice surface to it. You can tell with wax if you haven't gone far enough; it'll still be tacky. But once you get it buffed in really, really well, it gets this really soft, really nice sheen to it, and that's the perfect place to stop. So just keep on buffing until it's smooth as glass.
I'm going to do one coat on the entire body and then I'm coming back with a second coat on the top. And again, like I said, because this is oil-based, it is wax, it will repel water a certain amount, which is awesome. It soaks into the pores of the wood and creates this hydrophobic surface, which is perfect.
I'm also going to take the time to wax up the drawer slides. I don't want to put too much on to create interference in the sliding mechanism, but enough will get this really glossy, gliding feeling that'll help the drawer slide even better.
The Reveal
I think this piece turned out great. I know there were a few bumps along the road, but I think these colors work really well together. There's a nice interest when you look at it closely, but from afar, it has this cohesive tone-on-tone look that's really working for me.
If you saw anything you thought I should do differently, please let me know. I'm always open to improvement!
I'd also love to know what you think about this glazing technique. I've done this before with a few other pieces, but I'm curious whether you think this white paint combined with a stain is a strategy worth pursuing.
Thanks for sticking around, and I'll catch you in the next one!