I had seen this project around the internet recently and decided to dive in the day I got the keys to my new apartment! It went ridiculously quickly – and had little to no screw-ups, which allowed me to continue dragging furniture out of the house annnnd finish this in about five hours!
Once you gather all of your materials (see below)
Materials List:
4-drawer dresser (if you don’t have an extra lying around, I recommend Craigslist — thrift store dressers were pricey! Don’t forget to measure the space under your bed!! (Spoiler: I didn’t)
medium course sandpaper
paint – 2 cans of Valspar “Riviera Dune” Spraypaint & 1 can of Valspar “Silver Fox” Spraypaint
primer, if necessary
16 castors
8 drawer pulls
liquid nails
and a disposable putty knife
1. Remove the drawers from the dresser and remove the knobs from the drawers
2. If your dresser has a laquer or varnish, sand that baby down!
3. That was easy. Now it’s time to paint. I painted the sides white and the fronts blue (mostly because Lowe’s was out of the blue) I also chose not to paint the inside of the drawers because I’m going to be using them for shoes and frankly, I don’t care very much. If you do want to paint the insides, I’d recommend another two cans of paint. Because my paint had a built in primer, I also skipped that step, but if the paint you choose doesn’t, don’t forget to do that first! Make sure to follow the instructions on the paint can! Remember, smooth strokes 12in away from the object and doing many many coats makes a better paint job than holding the can super close! (I speak from experience here)
4. Let that dry. Go have a margarita or whatever suits your fancy.
5. Next up is LIQUID NAILS! I put that in all caps because you have to be quick on this step! Especially if you have a lot of drawers. As I’m sure many of you know, one tube of liquid nails will only last once (it hardens fairly quickly) so WAIT for all of your drawers to be dry! (Patience is a Virtue)
I went around and filled in the outer-drawer-handle holes because I was replacing the handles with knobs. Use the putty knife to spread it out.
You can skip this if it doesn’t apply to you. Then, I put a huge blob on the castor and stuck it to the bottom of the drawer. Helpful Hint: remove all the castors from the plastic before you puncture the Liquid Nails. The cheapskate in me did not do that; because maybe I wouldn’t needall of them! I might have to return one! No. Open them all so you aren’t constantly having to set down the putty gun to rip open one piece of plastic. Let that dry. More margs. (You can also totally obliterate the Liquid Nails and just use regular nails – or screws – but that will involve drilling holes and all that. LN should do just fine since there’s not much pulling the drawers from the castors.)
6. Once the Liquid Nails was dry, I went and sprayed the little holes I filled with blue paint again. This was also a good time to look for any splotches that needed to be touched up. Let that dry. Maybe slow down on the drinks.
7. That’s it! Once everything is dry you can flip those drawers over and fill ’em up! How easy was that?
I’m happy with how they turned out – although you can see the one major snag I had was that they don’t fit next to each other under my bed (Lesson Learned here: MEASURE) So now I have them laid out in a sort of square shape similar to this: