Saving a Dresser from Evil

I recently moved into a great house!  Yay!  But now none of my furniture really fits or matches anything in any of these new rooms.  Soooo, you know what I'm going to do, right?  Repurpose and refurbish!  

I found an amazing and huge old dresser at my favorite "eclectic pieces" store, Rusty Glamour in Battle Ground, WA (shameless plug for my favorite store).  But some demon had rattle-canned it solid white.  Spray painted it!  Blasphemy.  So I saved it from evil and brought it home.  

First and once again, I'm sorry I stink at taking the "before" shots.  For some reason I just can't remember I'm going to document my projects until I've done something to them already. But you can see how this was just sprayed white.  It was sprayed over all of the hardware, too.  ugh 

So I removed the hardware with the intention of making it look like metal again somehow and decided on a worn copper look.  So first I put two coats of copper paint over all of it (the pic shows only the first coat).

After drying, the hardware got dabs of blue and green to make it look aged.  I adjusted with a couple more dabs of copper. They were all then sprayed 3-4 times with clear polyurethane so they won't chip.

Do you see the turquoise wall color behind the dresser?  I mixed that color with half white to cut the color down to a lighter blue and brushed the drawer/door insets with that color (except the bead board, which I wanted to see if I liked leaving it white). 

Then I did some dry brushing all over the dresser.  If you've never dry brushed, it's just dipping your brush barely into the paint, then dabbing it off on a paper towel, newspaper, or rag, and then barely touching the surface as you brush.  It will come out all streaky.  You can go over it as much as you like until you like it visually.  This is very individual.  You can experiment with adding water to your water-based paint and dry brushing with that to see the differences (it's much more subtle).  

For each of the next steps I did one per day:

1.  I dry brushed the whole thing the same blue color from the insets. 

2.  I pretty much solidly painted the whole thing taupe (kind of like painting badly, but a lot more solidly than dry brushing).

3.  I dry brushed a sage green color all over everything.  

4.  The next day, I watered down the sage green, dry brushed and used a rag to kind of smear it, like watercolors, over the top layer.  I also put a solid layer of sage over the blue on the insets (after the family voted the blue was too much).  Here's what it looks like with all the layers.

The reason I like lots of layers is so these come through when you sand it. With 100-grit sandpaper wrapped around a sponge, I sanded all of the edges, the corners, the sides and top of the dresser, and anywhere I though it would look cool and worn.  Sometimes I sanded down to sage, sometimes to blue, to taupe, and even to the original white or down to the wood.  You can see some of the sanding in the insets of the pics above.  

In order to make it look tea-stained, older, and to mellow the colors, I used a polyurethane to seal it that has stain in it.  I used two coats and actually coated the white bead board in the doors (that I hadn't touched yet) so they weren't so WHITE.  Everything looks so much better after this step.  

With the drawers slid back in and the hardware attached, this is how it turned out.  After sliding back up and looking at the original boring white dresser, I'm super happy with this.  And now we have storage we wouldn't normally have had!  

Now, if I could only have hardwood floors in this room....