{Before & After} – dresser turned TV console

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For those of you that didn’t catch my guest post the other day @ I am Momma Hear Me Roar, I wanted to post it here too.  Thanks again Cheri for asking me to guest post – she was off to NYC to be on the Martha Show!  How awesome is that!!

My clients dresser wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either!  It was solid wood and in really good shape so they didn’t want to trash it.  They needed a tv console for their new flat screen and after seeing the one that i posted about here, they decided to have me re-purpose their dresser as well.

It started out like any normal dresser, but i needed to reconfigure it a little to be a functional tv console.  I started by taking out the three top drawers and then the middle one in the center.  I just used the jigsaw to remove that middle support between the 2 drawers.  My client wanted and open cubby in the middle so she can put a basket in there to store remotes/dvd’s/games.

The next thing i needed to do was make shelves – i just used a 4×8 sheet of 1/2″ MDF for this and cut it to fit.  Basically for the middle one, i built a back, 2 sides and a bottom.  The sides just got one bottom shelf.  Everything was glued and nailed so it will stay put.
This is when you gotta use those measuring skills so everything will fit just right!!
If you look at the before pic, you can see that the dresser had some type of wavy molding going across the bottom.  They wanted it to look more updated, so i popped that off and added a piece of baseboard trim.  I love how that changes the look of the dresser!
Then, to finish off where i added the shelving, i put a 1/2′ piece of trim around all the openings.
Last step was to fill all the nail holes and any gaps with some wood putty – as you can see my husband went to town with the wood putty – he is so fired!!
Now for the fun part!!  I primed it using a brown tinted primer from Valspar and then painted it Summer White by Sherwin Williams in a semi-gloss finish.  Then i distressed it and clear coated it in a gloss finish (Wood Classics poly by SW).  Then new hardware was added and it was ready to go!!

And there you have it!  An ordinary dresser that’s not being used can become a custom piece of furniture in no time!!