Last week I posted about my shiny new dresser! It ended up
being a beautiful reno, and well worth the amount of time I put into it.
A large portion of this work revolved around the drawers.
This was more than simply removing the hardware, slapping some paint on there,
and affixing new hardware. It was a process indeed.
The first step, of course, was to remove the hardware and
fill in those holes with wood filler. Pretty straight forward, if you ask me.
This is where it gets tricky. If you look closely at the top
three drawers in the before picture, you’ll notice that they each have a
decorative divide down the center, giving the illusion of six drawers, rather
than three.
This, I feel, contributed to the dated feel of the dresser
as a whole. I wanted a clean, smooth look, and these divides were not doing it
for me. So they got filled in! A Google
search of “how to fix large holes in wood” turned up this product:
This is an epoxy putty, found in the pluming section of
hardware stores. It is comprised of two compounds that, when mixed, create a
sticky, clay-like substance that you can mould into pretty much any shape.
When you mix those two compounds, the chemical reaction
produces heat, which I thought was pretty interesting (I did physics in high school…
chemistry is a magical mystery to me). Apparently it’s water-proof (hence the
pluming section location, I suppose), and when it dries, it looks and feels a
lot like cement, and is easily sandable and paintable.
So I mixed away, about a golf ball sized piece of putty at a
time. It too one and a half Fix It Sticks to fill in my three divides. Which
means I still have half a stick for all my future epoxy putty needs… yay?
I was not concerned with smoothing it out and making it
pretty, because I was going to be sanding it anyways. But if you use this stuff
for something else, you can use water to smooth it, the same way you did for
your clay sculptures in grade 9 art class.
I did, however, come across a problem after sanding the
epoxy:
Those dark spots are areas that I did not put enough putty
to be level with the wood. They’re dark because they’re too low for the sander
to get to. I tried filling these gaps in with wood filler, because they were
small and shallow. It looked like it worked, until I painted. Unfortunately, if
you look closely at the finished dresser, you can see the inconsistencies.
Moral of the story: Less is not always more.
Anyways, finally it was time to paint! I painted the entire
interior of the drawer with a foam brush, and the exterior with a foam roller.
I used the same lovely Annie Sloan chalk paint that I mentioned in last week’s
post.
And, of course, I had a few spots that needed to be touched
up where the old hardware used to be attached.
I then decided that the exterior sides of the drawers should
also be blue, rather than the graphite I had used first time around, so I
changed that. You can see the blue in the final pictures.
Then I applied polyurethane. This was my least favourite
step of the whole process. I do not like polyurethane. It smells, and it’s
runny, and I just don’t know how to properly work with it. But I did it
anyways.
Measuring out where the new holes for the hardware were to
go made my mathematical mind giddy (or maybe it was the residual polyurethane
fumes killing off one too many brain cells). Either way, this last step of
measuring, drilling, and affixing felt SOOO awesome.
I put the finished drawers back into the finished dresser,
Cleaned this mess off the floor (finally!),
And began my photo shoot with the greatest sense of
accomplishment.
It was when I started editing my photos that I remembered
this:
The labels that got me so pumped to start this project (read
about it here) lost their way in the hype of newness. I factored the labels in
to the equation when I was measuring for the placement for the drawer pulls, but
somewhere between drilling and affixing, the plan devolved. They can be added
quite easily, but that’s for another time. Right now, I’m just loving how this
big project turned out.
No comments:
Post a Comment