Painted dresser with decoupage drawers

One of the pulls on this dresser had a rusted screw that was stripped out. My grandpa is usually the master at patiently figuring these types of things out for us. This time, however, he some how managed to break one of the brass pulls. Hmm? What to do? I have a bucket of old hardware, but not a single piece that matched these pulls. I don’t even know why I save old hardware, it never matches anything and just collects dust in the big plastic bucket it sits in. Oh, well. Time to get creative.

We decided to fill the holes on all of the top drawers and drill new ones. Filling holes and making them look good enough to paint is possible, but very time consuming and I usually lack patience for these things. I’m all about instant gratification and I wanted to finish this piece in one day, not two or three. Once the holes were filled instead of sanding, and sanding, and sanding to make them look perfect, we decided to decoupage them to just hide the holes all together.  While my mom covered the drawers with music sheets I painted the dresser and it’s remaining drawers.

My sister and her husband had their house painted recently. My sister tried about 30 different sample colors before deciding on her final choice, so I scored a bunch of sample paints. woop woop! Each one is just big enough to typically cover one piece of furnitrue. This color is from Behr and it is called Riviera Sand.

After the piece was painted I distressed the drawers, the top, and the edges of the dresser. Then I applied a really thin layer of Minwax on the top to protect the finish. The sample paints my sister gave me are all flat, matte finishes. I usually don’t like to use flat on furniture because every time you touch it it leaves hand prints and it doesn’t wipe up well like satin or gloss finishes do. So although I don’t typically put a clear coat on pieces I paint, this piece needed one. We used Shellac to seal the drawers.