Before and After: Another long dresser

I love these long, low dressers. They can be so versatile, whether they're used for their traditional purpose to store clothing in a bedroom or somewhere else in the house like in a dining room as a buffet, in a nursery as a changing table or in a living room as a sideboard.

This french beauty was a great deal that I found on Craigslist.

The drawers are pretty and curvy, but the hardware it came with was a little too ornate and one of the handles was broken.

I loved that the top wasn't painted, though it was in pretty rough shape.

I had recently been looking back over my blog and came across this post about the dresser I was so excited to paint with my custom robin's egg blue and decided I'd do a similar treatment to this one.

I started by stripping the old finish off the top (always a very satisfying, if messy, job) and sanding off some of the imperfections. Then the body and drawers got painted with that lovely blue (with no primer this time).

I chose to leave the top unstained and just sealed it with wipe-on poly so that the natural wood color would show and the remaining imperfections could still be visible (though the wood isn't quite so yellow in person). I was going for a very rustic look here.

The body and drawers got a heavy distressing, then glazed brown.

These long handles came off of another dresser that's waiting to be worked on. I thought they were in the perfect state of weathered wear to go on this particular piece.

The row of center drawers got some smoked glass knobs from (our BRAND NEW!) Hobby Lobby.

I love how the original paint color shows through on this piece, but that the new blue is really the star now. It's currently in the shop, so if you're close by go have a look!