When I was pregnant with my second daughter, I had to find a project to use up the restless energy that always accompanied my pregnancies.  I decided to refinish a dresser.  That’s right.  How hard could it be?  We had inherited a dresser from my mom and dad when we got married.  It had been made by my grandfather years before when he was a missionary in Kenya and helped run a woodworking shop where the students at the Bible school there earned a living.  It is huge and had been painted an antique sea-green color.  I bought some paint stripper at the hardware store, got a scraper and thought it would be a breeze.  You just strip off the old paint and put on new finish right?

It turned out to be a long, painstaking project.  Those chemical paint strippers help but they don’t remove all the paint for you.  You have to scrape and sand and scrape some more.  There are grooves in the front of the drawers and those were especially tricky – getting all the paint out of the cracks and crevices so there was no trace of that yucky green.  After the paint had been stripped, sanding had to be done and lots of it.  Then it all had to be wiped down so there was no leftover sawdust to mar the shiny surface when I applied the finish.

It was beautiful when it was done but there were several days I thought about throwing in the towel.  Good grief!  Continue reading →