drawer – A Smith of All Trades

Fixing up a busted dresser

July 27, 2016July 27, 2016 Jessica Smith

Gosh, it’s been at least a year, if not more, since I fell in love with this antique dresser at a thrift store near my house.

Screen Shot 2016-07-27 at 4.08.20 PM

The zebra(ish) wood was to die for and the price was right, so I scooped it up and let it sit sit sit for a long while. Even though it didn’t work well (broken drawer pulls & drawers that slid too far in or sat unevenly), I still stored lots of goodies in it. Last night, I decided to take advantage of my break from grad school to fix up the piece. I almost died doing it (OK, not really… but take your time with mitre saws, people!).

The main issue with the dresser was with the top two drawers. Over the years, the center support had fallen out. This caused both drawers to lean into the dresser and into the drawer beneath when pushed all of the way in. You could get them to sit right, but one nudge would send both askew and all of the things you were storing crashing to the back of the drawer.

Nosupport

To fix this, I cut down some scrap wood to fill the gap from the front of the dresser to the back. I screwed in two support blocks, one at the front and one at the back, to nail this makeshift rail into. Then, I glued and nailed a thin piece of wood to act as the rail guide so one drawer couldn’t encroach on the other drawer’s space (my sisters and I could have used something like this in the back seat of mom’s car growing up!)

I let that dry overnight because I used WAY too much wood glue. This morning I put all of the drawers back and fixed some busted hardware, making for one beautiful, well-working dresser!

The dresser still isn’t perfect. There are nicks along the edges and a few chips in the top. But it’s GORGEOUS! I can look past the imperfections (OK, I love the imperfections) now that it’s working good as new.

I mean, just look at those curves! Ow owwww!

The one remaining thing to figure out is if I want to replace the top two drawer pulls. They don’t work the best and only one set had the decorative washers to hid the hardware — if you look close you can see dar circles around the top left drawer pull. Other than that, this dresser is good to go!

Furniture

Before & After: Run-Down End Table

March 9, 2014 Jessica Smith

My latest piece for A Slap of Paint was a doozy. It should have been an easy flip, but I botched it big time. Luckily I was able to fix my mistake.

I started with this end table that I picked up from Habitat Restore. I can’t tell you how much I love that place.

To fix this piece up, I removed the table top and sanded the heck out of it.

Table Top

Then I stained it using a black Varathane stain. I coated the top in poly and set it aside.

I painted the bottom of the piece in navy chalk paint. I mixed the paint myself using Paint Minerals. It turns any flat paint into chalk paint. The best part — you can paint your pieces without sanding them down first. Awesome!!

Two coats later and my piece was painted and beautiful. I wanted to do a layer of protective coating on the piece, and I should have used wax, but I didn’t. I coated the entire piece in polycrylic, effectively ruining the beautiful paint job. See, the polycrylic dried and bubbled and made the whole piece a hot mess.

Bummer.

Once everything was completely dry, I sanded the paint job so I could start fresh.

Thankfully, the second round of navy paint covered beautifully. I didn’t totally mess the whole thing up after all. Phew.

The second time around I waxed the painted portion of the end table down. Right choice.

Even though this was more work than I anticipated, it turned out beautifully.

The knobs were also from restore for $1 a piece. Woo!

Craft Projects, Home Improvement, Quick and Easy Crafts

Chip Clip Storage Solution

March 10, 2013 Jessica Smith

We’ve had amazingly beautiful weather this weekend and while I wanted to get outside and start on a few projects I’ve been planning, I had to do a little bit of spring cleaning first. I think we are going to have a yard sale this spring, so I spent my weekend going through clothes, shoes and stuff in general to start setting aside some goodies to get rid of.

I tackled my kitchen this morning, scrubbing it from head to toe. I also brought all of our cookbooks out of their home in the highest cabinet of our kitchen and found an easier-to-reach spot for yours truly. My hubby is 6’2″, but I’m only 5’5″ and can’t reach the tops of our cabinets too easily.

While I was tidying up our kitchen, I kept stumbling upon chip clips. Seriously, I think they are reproducing in our cabinets when we go to bed at night. We have a few that are magnets, but they fall off the fridge on a daily basis. We also have two sets of novelty clips — birds and moustaches 🙂 They are adorable, but they are ALWAYS in the way. So I took 10 minutes to create a creative solution to this ongoing problem that I am sure a lot of you have, too.

First of all, measure your cabinets from top to bottom.

Mine were about 27.5 inches tall. I wanted to make a a strip of fabric to clips the clips to, but I had to be careful to make it the right length — if it was too short, I’d drill through the thin part of the cabinet. That wouldn’t be good.

After measuring, I popped into my craft room to find a fabric to use. I chose a navy fabric with hints of the green in our kitchen.

I cut the fabric a few inches longer than I needed, then ironed out all of the creases.

Next, I folded each side into the middle, creasing the two edges I planned to “hem.”

Once my creases were good and firmly in the fabric, I used hem tape to secure booth flaps of fabric down.

I ironed the finished strip and headed back upstairs.

Next up — drilling holes! I was a little nervous about this since they are cabinets and would SUCK to mess up… but it worked great. I found four short screws and predrilled four holes in my cabinets.

Then I added the screws. I started at the top and when I got to the bottom I had a few inches of extra fabric.

I cut the fabric so it was about a half an inch from the edge of the cabinet. Then I secured it to the cabinet door with two screws.

Time to add our ever-growing stash of clips!

All in all, this took a whole ten minutes to do and will keep our cabinets shelves and drawers clear of clutter!

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this: