Rescue & Renew – Furniture Fix up

We found this little chest of drawers at our local Goodwill store. It definitely needed some love, but had a nice shape. The small size would be the perfect piece to experiment on. I wanted to try and give it a beachy cottage type style. The kind of distressed, weathered look furniture in a vacation cottage might have after it has been re-painted and really lived with over the years.
First step was to peel off all the stickers and give it a good scrubbing. Then I used a palm sander to smooth off some rough spots.

Now the fun part, painting! I like to experiment with paint so I often buy the small sample sizes. Also, I  look for quarts and gallons of paint that were mistakes when mixing and are being sold super cheap. You can get really high quality paint this way for less than half the price.
To achieve the shabby cottage look I was going for I used two different shades of white. Don’t try and cover perfectly if you want the piece to look tattered and full of character.
It can be fun to try different techniques to distress the paint. I used a rag to rub paint on and off as well as sand paper.
Another trick to give the piece an aged feel is tint polyurethane with brown acrylic paint. Mix this up in a separate container and brush on. You may only want to use the tinted polyurethane glaze for one coat and then follow up with a clear coat depending on how dark you want the piece to be.

The final touch was to line the drawers with some old National Geographic maps.
This little chest of drawers needed to be rescued and renewed in a big way!  It came out really cute and has the aged summer cottage look I was trying to achieve. I’m happy to report that it has found a new home and the lady who bought it said it is going in their lakeside guest cottage!