Refinished Dresser With Chalk Paint

This dresser was stripped of old paint and given new life with chalk paint and wax. Let me show you step-by-step how to do it. *This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link.*

My friend had a dresser that had been in her family for a long time. But she needed a bigger dresser for her daughter and I happen to be getting rid of a dresser, so we swapped.

It was pretty cute already. She had pasted maps to the top and the beautiful leaf details were painted brown. In fact, my daughter told me that she liked what I had done with it before I had done anything!

The dresser had these amazing locks on them that I wanted to clean up really well.

I started by scraping the maps off with a razor blade on part of it, then I soaked the rest off. After I got that off I decided I’d better use paint remover on the rest of it. I would normally just paint over a piece, but I thought I would lose the leaf carvings in so many layers of paint.

I used Orange Stripper to start with. I found two great blogs to help explain paint stripping. The first one is from Brittany at ourhomemadeeasy.com and the second is from Kristi at addicted2decorating.com. Both were helpful with this process.

The orange stripper went on with a foam brush and I let it sit until it bubbled the paint and then scraped it off with a paint scraper. It took a lot longer to remove the paint than I thought but I’m really glad I went to the effort of it. I ended up using toothpicks to scrap all the paint out of the leaf details. I used an empty box to put the scraped off paint into.

Some parts took a couple of coats of stripper to get it all the way off.

To my surprise, the locks on the front were just wood. I thought they were going to be a whole separate piece but just the top pieces were made of metal.

My original plan was to sand the top and stain it brown and paint the rest white with brown in the details. But then I found this grey stain and decided to try it. You can order some here.

I also bought some unfinished knobs and stained them with Minwax grey stain.

I actually ended up using a spray chalk paint because I wanted a smooth finish. You can find that here. I painted the bars in between each drawer and the front of the locks with a Valspar grey. It would’ve been too hard to tape everything to use a spray paint on that part.

I used a white Annie Sloan wax to seal it. I then went in with a black Annie Sloan wax in the carved details. I ended up using toothpicks again on the vine part.

If I got black wax where I didn’t want it, I just used a different rag with white wax to wipe it off. Easy peasy.

I was super happy how it turned out! It now sits in my living room to hold books and puzzles.