Old into New

Repainting a piece of furniture and giving it an antique look isn't as hard as I thought. The wife and I decided to save a few bucks by re-purposing an old dresser as a changing table for the new baby. As we've pretty well committed to the jungle animal theme in the nursery, we decided we wanted to paint it elephant grey with green and orange drawers to match the other colors in the room. We also wanted it to have that lived-in look with the wood grain showing through at parts. Here are the easy steps that we took to turn this old, cheap, maple dresser into something new and exiting for our nursery:

Step 1: Remove all of the hardware.

Step 2: Sand everything down. You want the paint to have a rough surface to adhere to.

Step 3: Rub a candle's wax onto the edges or any part of the wood you'd like to have exposed later. After the wax is painted over you can flake it off easily. (There's some pretty sweet eye protection I didn't even realize I was wearing).

Step 4: Paint the dresser "Elephant Skin" grey.

Done!

 Then paint the drawers "Vintage Orange" and "Herbal Green."

 Step 5: Drink a Lone Star to celebrate Texas Independence Day!

Step 6: After the paint fully dries, use some instrument with a sharp edge (like this shelving bracket I found within arm's length) and scrape off all of the candle wax and paint to expose the wood underneath.

You'll end up with a really cool result.

And here's the finished product!