Before and After: A $25 Damaged Dresser Gets a Redo with Million-Dollar Style

When you’rebuying vintage furniture online, the piece in question doesn’t always look as good in person as it did in photos. That was the case for Katrina Taboas, who bought this dresser on OfferUp for just $25—and found when she went to pick it up that it was looking a little less polished than it had seemed.

“When I saw it in person it was in worse condition than it looked in the pictures,” Katrina says. “The veneer was peeling off in several places, the hardware was dirty and had years of dirt and grime, and the drawers were dirty.”

But Katrina says she saw potential, so went through with the purchase anyway. Then, she took it home to get a redo.

It took a few weeks for Katrina to finish the project, and she says taking off the old veneer took longer than expected. “It was something I had never done before, so it was a lot of trial and error,” she says.

While Katrina knew she’d need to paint the body of the piece because it was in such poor shape, she still wanted to have some contrast—so she sanded the legs back to the raw wood, which pops against the cream color she chose for the bulk of the piece (Fusion Mineral Paint’s Cathedral Taupe). “Due to all the detail in the legs, it took several hours of sanding to get it just right,” she says.

而硬件到达黑,卡特里娜飓风to uncover the treasure beneath after several different cleaning methods. “I saw they were actually brass and quite beautiful,” Katrina says, so she kept those on rather than buying new pulls.

The final touch: black-and-white floral drawer liner, which gives the inside of the piece a little surprise. “I love how a vision and hard work completely transformed something ugly and dated into something beautiful,” Katrina says.

Inspired?Submit your own project here.