Mid Century for This Century

My husbands taste is very clean and modern, while I have a bit more vintage inspired style, so we felt mid-century modern was the perfect style for us to land on. We have very little storage in our closet aside from hanging space, making it difficult to keep things like bathing suits, socks, etc organized and orderly. After searching for months for the perfect dressers around town, we decided we would need to go another route to find what we were looking for.

I started searching the web for mid-century modern furniture from places like Ikea, West Elm, Crate and Barrel, etc. and all the pretty dressers I fell in love with were much more than I was willing to part with. Etsy even had some gems to be found, but still nothing under $400 each, and I wasn’t ready to drop nearly $1000+ on a box to hold my socks…

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So, we scoured Craigslist for weeks waiting on the perfect dressers to come up, which were unfinished (cost effective) and in our budget. Patience is the key to Craigslist, and after several misses, we found these beauties and snagged them up for under $200, total. What a blessing!

They were honey colored with some minor scuffs, but other than that in perfect condition and I knew they would be perfect for what we were wanting for our master bedroom. The only issue, and partially how we got them so cheap, was they were not all real wood, but covered with laminate making them difficult to sand and stain as we normally would with real wood furniture.

After scouring the web for inspiration, we chose to go with a style like shown above, mixing white with the dark wood that is found elsewhere in our home. The white portions would be simple, we simply built a little spray booth inside our garage and primed then sprayed them white with a high gloss oil base paint. They came out beautifully and the finish is so firm and durable!

The drawers were a bit more challenging, since we couldn’t sand them down we had to find a product that would allow us to stain over what is currently there, yet be translucent enough to still see the wood grain of the laminate. Then we found this stuff on amazon! After searching the MinWax website to see what shade we needed, we decided on Tudor, the dark brown shade with subtle gray tones, to finish the drawers with. We tested one drawer by simply painting it on with a foam brush and after a couple of coats it looked fantastic and just as we had hoped. Because we had so many drawers we sprayed the rest to save some time, and let it all dry for about a week so the white sections could completely harden before moving it back inside our home.

We are completely floored by how great they turned out, especially for not even being real wood. No one would be able to tell and I think they look just as great as the expensive options on the web.

Categories DIY, Home