My Summer Project

I'm one of those people that always has a list of "projects" I'd like to accomplish in my spare time. Some of them sit on that list for a long time because daily life and other things usually are a higher priority. This summer, I decided to tackle a project that's been on that list for about 5.5 years now. It was about that long ago that we acquired some old furniture from my parents' house, including a bedroom set consisting of 2 large chests of drawers and a nightstand. They had an oak finish which I do not prefer, and the hardware was in need of some updating. It took me about 6 weeks from start to finish to do all 3 pieces, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The worst part of it was stripping the old finish off. It was a messy, smelly job that was then followed by a light sanding. I used a gel stain (only because the color I liked best only came that way), and it took 10-12 hours to dry in between coats which was partly why it took me so long. I had to do 3 coats, but the difficulty was that the sides and top were a veneer and didn't absorb the stain as well. Most of the veneer took 4 coats.

Here's a before shot of one of the dressers.

Here's what the drawers looked like after just one coat. The bottom drawer is the bare wood.
And here's the finished product. It really looks much better in person - especially since our camera is not the greatest.

Here's the other dresser (sorry no before shot).

And here's the nightstand.

It certainly took much longer to do this than I originally anticipated, but I'm very pleased with the end result. And I'm happy to check this off my project list.