Weekend Project #4: Dresser

Well, what started out as a weekend project has now turned into a week-long one. I got this great old dresser from my friend Nichole and, although it's green (which I love!), it's going to go between my two green chairs (that's right, I got the other one recovered compliments of the IRS) so I needed to repaint it.

Instead of just painting the dresser, I decided to strip and stain the top like several pieces I had seen on Miss Mustard Seed's blog and paint the rest a creamy white. She even has a great tutorial about staining and finishing furniture that was going to make the whole process super easy. Or, so I thought.

True to form, I forgot to take a before picture, and when I realized that fact, I had already pulled out all the drawers and put the first coat of stripper on the top. Plus, since I have been doing all the work with this guy:

on my foot for tendonitis (another story), I wasn't about to wrangle the drawers back over to the dresser. All that said, here's a close-to "before" picture:

Have you ever stripped a piece of furniture? It's HARD. I stopped counting after six applications of stripper, but I finally got to bare wood.

 After stripping the top of the piece, I sanded everything to prep for painting and staining:

Then came the stain....and that's where this story take a terrible turn. You see, when I first applied the stain, it didn't exactly absorb evenly. And in my stupidity, I decided it probably just needed more stain - three more layers in fact, all left on for 15 minutes before wiping. I bet you can guess where that got me. 

This picture of the final (not really) product is actually quite flattering because in person, the top actually looked black - far from the dark walnut it should have been. 

Of course, I was super bummed when I realized it wasn't at all what I had wanted the piece to look like - especially after all my stripping work. Levi suggested I just paint the whole piece, but I wasn't ready to give up yet. After all, I hope to have this dresser for awhile, so I want it to be what I envisioned. 

After researching stain strippers, I picked one up at Home Depot and started the whole stripping process over again, only this time it was even harder. I've gotten the wood back to a somewhat decent state (unfortunately, I don't think it will ever be as light as after I stripped the paint), and I'm hoping the stain does better after using a pre-stain conditioner this time. Phew. Here we go again...stay tuned.