Dresser Redo part 1

The girls have been needing a bigger dresser for a while now, actually their dresser wasn’t even a dresser it was a desk!  It had such tiny drawers and it was no longer cutting it.  I started searching for a cute girly (cheap) dresser on Craigslist and at garage sales.  I found this one and fell in LOVE with it, I wrote them about it and then I didn’t hear back and the listing was gone!  I was SO bummed!  I kept searching and a few weeks later it was back and I snatched it up!! 

I was planning on painting it white so the finish didn’t bother me… but what I couldn’t see was that the veneer was bubbling and cracking off!  It’s hard to tell, but if you look 2 pictures down you can see it better.  The good thing is that it was so dry I could pretty much just pop the veneer right off!  You can see that I already started before I took my before picture!  Oops!

The one drawer was warped shut and was full of stuff when we finally for it open! 

This is as far as I could get by just popping the veneer off, and oh man there is a lot to go still!

It was time to pull out the big guns… aka the heat gun.  Let me tell you, the heat gun isn’t a really fun tool when it is a BILLION degrees outside!  Ugh!

But it did the job, the veneer peeled off so nicely.

I felt a little guilty scraping off the detail off this drawer… but a girl has to do what a girl has to do!

After what seemed like forever I was finished!  (The pile in the picture is from part of the dresser, I had already thrown most of it out)

Time to sand.. I see the light at the end of the tunnel!  Woo-hoo!

I actually like the way it looks here.   I was tempted to keep it like this, but I knew it wouldn’t fit in the girls room like this so on to painting… but another time.

I cleaned everything up and was ready to go in then I saw this.  I forgot to strip and sand the mirror!  UGH, I hate when that happens!!

…to be continued