Home Improvement

PJO (and I, sort of) recently refurbished our bedroom furniture. We didn't want to buy a real bedroom set yet because we can't afford it and we're not living in the place we want to stay long enough to know what to get for a permanent set. So, I thought we could buy cheaper furniture and stain it all to match. He had bought a dresser when we moved out to California two years earlier from this place that is a discount store which makes pretty generic looking stuff from real wood. It's not the best craftsmanship, but so far it seems sturdy and looks decent. Plus, it is very reasonably priced. So I decided to get a dresser and nightstand in a matching style to his dresser.
PJO's dresser was finished in a fairly light stain and I wanted to end up with dark cherry or mahogany stain, so I ordered mine unfinished. That meant that we had to sand down PJO's dresser and then stain all three and put a protective coat on them. Needless to say, it was a lot more work than we anticipated.

Here are my nightstand and dresser before we started, and the little helper (Furious George) who had to crawl in EVERY drawer space after we pulled out the drawer from the dresser.








It ended up taking several coats of stain, plus two (or three? I can't remember) coats of polyurethane. It took a week to dry and even then, we were afraid to put it on the carpet, hence, the cardboard and plastic underneath the furniture once it was on the carpet.







Overall, I'm pretty proud of ourselves! They aren't perfect, but they look pretty good (especially without the light of the flash on them) and we didn't waste a ton of money on furniture that we don't really need. My husband is so handy! ;)