Going back in time... An Old Dresser Redo

In a few of my previous posts, there are some photo's of my entertainment console...

Well... that thing started out as this:

(Is it just me or does the dust bother you too?)

After searching and searching for a TV console that would fit the space, I realized I was going to have to buy an old piece of furniture and perform a little magic on it to get what I was looking for.  I couldn't find anything  in my measly price range that wide enough to fill the expanse of wall the way I wanted.  So the DIY project began with a hunt for the right piece of furniture.  I was excited when I found this little guy for $70 at Goodwill because not only was it wide enough, it also had the perfect spot for the dvd player inside the two doors. Believe it or not, I actually don't have cable!  So no there's no cable box now, but there's room for one in the future if I ever get up to speed and join the masses in front of the boob tube.  Anyway... I took it home and went to work!

With drop cloth down, hardware removed, drawers out, and doors taken off it was almost ready to be sanded. I had to remove the drawer guides in the two bottom middle slots with a screw driver and hammer (there were previously drawers that pulled out from inside the doors).  I also filled in all of the holes from the hardware since the old pulls were much wider than the hardware I was going to replace them with.

After that, I borrowed an orbital sander from a carpenter friend and sanded the crap out of it! Carpenter friend also had some nifty little rubber tools similar to these for sanding around the trim, which helped tremendously.  (I don't have any photos of this part... my apologies.)  All of that took up the better part of my Saturday, so it was time for a break.

Sunday morning... back to work!  I primed the whole thing with a few coats of RustOleum Primer. Once that was dry, I layered on a few coats of Semi-Gloss White, sanding lightly between coats.  I made sure to paint the inside of the bottom two slots since this would be left open for the dvd player and other tv gadgets.  Thanks to the many example's on the internet, I made sure to buy a spray paint handle to do all of this. I'm pretty sure I would have lost a finger had I not.

Next I taped off the trim with blue painters tape and paper and spray painted it Metallic Finish Silver to give this ho-hum piece of furniture a bit of sparkle and class.

For the media shelves I bought the cheapest wood I could find, had it cut to size at Home Depot, and spray painted it white. For a while I left the shelves sitting in their place without fastening them down in anyway because I forgot to buy trim to finish of the front edges and wanted to make sure it would fit flush with the front of the piece  As you can see below, the wood had a lot of ugly texture, which I eventually covered up with some white contact paper that I had.

I finished the whole thing of with some Minwax Wipe On Poly for to give the whole thing a fresh shine and the hard part was done.  

After a weekend of hard work, we (and by we I mean Frank and a friend that is a mover... thanks guys!) brought the new entertainment console upstairs and it sat in the living room without hardware for the next few months. (This is pretty much how most projects go for me as a busy/poor student).

Finally, one day during a school break (having a little extra spending money without tuition and school supplies expenses), I headed to Home Depot and picked up these pretty little pulls and some trim to give the shelves a finished look.

And there ya have it!