Makeover | Mini chest of drawers

This is what it looked like when I first got it. I picked it up for a dollar at a garage sale a while back. I thought it was a cute little chest, but I wasn’t wild about the orange-toned stain, which is why I decided to paint it.

Before painting, I wanted to distress the chest a bit to give it some character, so I added a few “wormholes” and scratches with a hammer and nails and then worked a little dark stain into them.

I painted the chest with some white (technically, the color is called “Petticoat”) Folk Art milk paint. Milk paint is supposed to flake off if you don’t apply any bonding agent or primer, giving the piece a chippy/aged sort of look. Unfortunately, my milk paint didn’t flake. At all.

After one coat of milk paint, the chest just looked streaky. And sad. In a non-chippy sort of way.

So I applied a few more coats. The extra paint made the chest look better, but it also filled in all the wormholes and scratches that I had made.

To make the holes and scratches stand out again, I traced over them with a pencil. I also sanded the corners of the chest (and a few other spots) and worked some stain into those areas.

Then I Mod Podged some newspaper onto the bottoms of the drawers.

I brushed some watered down white paint over the newspaper to give it a faded, washed out kind of look and then added another coat of Mod Podge over the top to seal it.

I liked how the bottoms looked so much that I decided to add newspaper to the sides of the drawers, too.

Next, I dug through my stash of craft supplies until I found some label holders for the fronts of the drawers. The ones I had were the right size, but the wrong color.

So I painted them with some black chalk paint.

I nailed the label holders onto the fronts of the drawers and printed out some labels to go inside of them.

Then I filled the drawers with office supplies and called the project done.

I didn’t get quite the chippy look I was hoping for, but I’m happy with how it turned out. I definitely prefer the white paint to the orange stain.

And the labels are a great addition. No more blindly opening and closing each drawer when I’m looking for ink or tacks or a thumb drive.

The newspaper sides are a sweet little detail, too.