Lovely 1920’s Dresser Makeover…Pretty Girl Greta

Meet Greta. Greta got her name because according to her Facebook Marketplace ad, she is from the 1920’s so I wanted a name that fit that decade. I feel like there were good intentions for her at one time but she wasn’t living her best life for sure. This piece wasn’t free, but was only $20 so I snatched her up. These are my favorite kind of pieces to refinish. The kind you can’t mess up…you really can only improve them. She had chippy paint, ring marks and was basically a mess but had pretty good bones. The mirror was missing but the frame pieces for it were still in tact so I had to decide whether to leave them off entirely or get creative with them.

The first step was removing the old paint to see what the wood looked like underneath. I had some ideas in mind on how I wanted to refinish the piece, but until I see what I’m dealing with I never really know what my options are. Because I had a lot of paint to remove, I decided to use a stripper which was a first for me, but I did a little research and read some reviews and decided on this one from Amazon.

After reading the directions I applied it to the first area (the front of one of the drawers) let it it and then using a putty knife started “sliding” off the paint. It came off easy and I could immediately see pretty wood underneath but there was a catch. The paint that was scraping off was sticky and gooey. I realized that whoever painted this piece applied paint on top of what seemed to be varnish. The more I tried to remove the varnish, the messier and stickier it seemed to get.

I did my best but ended up doing a lot of sanding to get the final sticky film off. Because there was so much sanding to do I used my belt sander for most of it which helped me decide to paint everything but the top of the piece since there were imperfections in the grain of the drawers when I was done. The top cleaned up nicely though and had BEAUTIFUL grain.

I used this Rust-oleum Chalk Paint for the body.

A few coats of dark walnut stain and a couple coats of poly and the top was beautiful!

Next I went to Hobby Lobby and found these PERFECT knobs and the beaded garland to string across the mirror frame and that was it! Perfect little dresser for our guest bedroom!