Credenza Makeover Tutorial: Part 2

After reading through part 1 of how to refurbish a large piece of furniture, here is a step by step guide on how to complete the project... 

4. Sand (If needed)

If your piece has a finish on it you will need to sand it. You can usually tell if the piece needs to be sanded by the look and feel of it. If the piece is a bit glossy looking and is smooth to the touch that usually means it has a finish that needs to be sanded off. I sanded my piece by hand, which took a lot of time, but because there was so much detail I preferred it. If you have an electric sander by all means use that, but you will probably need some sheets of sand paper as well to get to some of the hard-to-reach places.

I decided to use two different drop cloths. One for sanding and one for painting. When sanding you are looking to strip the finish from the piece and you'll end up having a "weathered" look to the wood like so:

5. Paint

After you've sanded your piece the most important thing to do is clean all of the sawdust. When you start to paint you don't want any sawdust mixed in there. To be thorough I swept my patio and wiped each part of the piece down with a damp wash cloth.

Once you are sure that there is no sawdust floating around, make your final decisions on how you are going to paint the piece. Here is a piece of advice: let the piece itself determine how you will paint it. What I mean by that is that you should use the natural features of the furniture like borders, lips, etc. to decide what color you want where. I did yellow as my primary color and so I used that for the face of the drawers and the main sections of the body. I wanted a white top so I used white on the top surface, the borders of the drawers, the flower details on the top drawers, and the bottom border. 

Painting the bottom border was by far the most difficult because I had go in with a small paint brush and make the lines myself. Some people might want to just tape it off to make it easier, but I was lazy and impatient :) The bottom border is definitely not perfect just because the yellow and white bumped right up against each other, but you can't tell unless you look closely...

6. And Paint Some More...

Here is an important thing to note: the quality of the paint will definitely impact how much time it takes to complete the project. I decided to go with a bit of a cheaper brand this time and I wish I had just gone with the expensive stuff (Shermin Williams). I had to paint 7 coats on this baby! It took me several weeks almost working on it every week day for a few hours a day! All of the hard work and time it took is part of the reason why I'm so proud of it :) Here is a picture of like 3 or 4 coats in. Definitely not enough...

When choosing your colors, consider how dark the piece is and how light your colors are. That is another thing that impacted how many coats I had to do. White and yellow are about as light as you can get and the color of the wood was fairly dark. Ideally you'd only have to do 3 or so coats so that it looks completely solid. Usually paint cans have labels on them that have instructions on how much time you should wait for a coat to dry before you start painting again. I just used my best judgement, usually waiting at least an hour or less for smaller areas.

Finally.... Put the piece back together, (put hardware back on, drawers back in, etc.) move it to the desired location, and you're done!

Make sure to keep the original paint swatches or write the paint color down somewhere so that if you need to buy more later to do touch ups you can. 

Take a step back and take it all in! It was a lot of work and you just added a beautiful new piece of character to your home. Nice job! Hopefully you are as happy with the outcome as I was with my project. 

Do you have any furniture refurbishing or just general DIY success stories? Tell me about it in the comments below!