A Dresser Changing Table for my Friends!

Original post by Sarah @ Renewed Upon a Dream, please visit her website for more great ideas!”

You saw last week the cute bubble wreath that I made as a decoration for my friends’ baby shower.  Today I’m going to show you the big gift I made for them.  It was even too big to bring it to the actual shower.  Yep, I made them a changing table!  They actually knew I was doing this for them, as I told them I would back on New Year’s Eve when they were talking about all of the things they still needed to get.  Of coarse I followed through on my promise, and I found a dresser at a nearby Salvation Army that was just perfect to refinish into a changing table!

Ta-da!  Why is it that I never take my before pictures until after I have removed some of the drawers?  Ah well.  Do you like it?  I bought this dresser because I liked the size, and I liked the feet on it.  The drawers were all very nicely made as well & clean inside.  Plus the hardware was all in tact & nice enough to just use a little spray paint on to spruce them up & reattach to the drawers.  AND, it was 30% off furniture day at the Salvation Army, so I picked up this little guy for just under $40.  The only other things I bought for this gift was the railing, and a sample sized light purple paint for the inner portion of the drawers.

I worked on this over at my parent’s house, because I went with them to the thrift store to get it, since they have a truck & this baby can’t fit in my little PT Cruiser.  It’s actually still over there, since they’ll have to bring it up to our friend’s house when we figure out a good time that’ll work for everyone.  My parents helped quite a bit on this one.  It was their first time refinishing furniture, so that was fun. 

So once we got this home, I cleaned it up & we primed everything.  While that was drying, we cut the railing to size.  This is just two pieces of railing that we got in the trim section of Home Depot.  It took us a while to find it, and it was the only ones of its kind that they had, but it worked perfectly.  We needed two lengths of it, & we just cut them to size & wood-glued then nailed them onto the top of our dresser.  I wasn’t originally going to do this, but my dad was afraid the baby would fall off   So we did it.

Then we painted the whole thing white.  It would have been so nice to have a sprayer at this point, because painting those railings with a brush was rough.  But it turned out ok.  Two coats of white later, we did the front of the drawers, just the section there inside the trim, in a very light purple, which I don’t know the name of because they put the little smudge of paint that they always put on the lid right over the name of the color.  Doh!

I used an easy satin poly on this one to seal it up.  Three coats, sanding between coats.  The hardware got a couple coats of oil rubbed bronze spray paint before being reattached.

I took a bunch of pictures of it once it was done.  The last coat of poly was still drying, but I had to get on the road to get home by that point.  I needed pictures though right away so that they could see what they were getting!

I do think they were pretty excited about it.  My dad’s bringing it to town tonight or tomorrow night to get it into their place.  I love that they can use this as a changing table or just a dresser if they prefer.  I love that I was able to create something personal that they needed for their new little one.  Here’s a close up of the drawers & hardware as well.

Yea pretty!

I did also make another gift for them that I could actually bring to the shower!  I will show you all that tomorrow.  It was a smaller gift, but actually took more time to complete!  Let me know what you think of the dresser!

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