Ombre Stained Dresser {Gray Wash}

As promised, we’re back with the reveal of the sa-weet dresser we’ve been working on! This dresser came to us by way of one of our readers… wanting to clean out her basement. We’re all about helping take things off people’s hands. Here’s the ‘Before’.

We had decided we wanted to do a little ‘Ombre’ staining on the drawers kinda like this that I pinned awhile back, but we didn’t care for the way each drawer was a little different… having hardware randomly placed, and random grooves.

We really wanted the drawers to be uniform. So we bought some wood to replace the drawer-fronts, and cut her to size! It’s called ‘Coffee Wood’ … how cool is that? LOVE the woodgrain.

Once all our drawer-fronts were cut, Nick rounded the edges ever-so-slightly with the router, and I sanded everything down till it was smoooooth as a baby’s back-side.

Then, using the router again, Nick made grooves that with slide perfectly onto the drawer!

Here’s my Beloved’s attempt at taking a super artsy photo. So cute.

Next was the fun part by FAR! We gathered our stains, organized them from lightest to darkest, and stained the drawer-fronts, one at a time! Notice one drawer didn’t get ANY stain, because it’ll be the ‘lightest’ in the Ombre progression!

Leaving us with this beautiful madness:

Then each drawer-front got slathered with wood glue.

And slid onto the drawers for a perfect fit!

Nick used his new fancy staple gun to make sure things were all nice and secure.

Next, we lined up all our drawers to admire them. And each drawer got not one, not two… ok I’ll just tell you: SIX coats of poly. The grain kept soaking it up, and I wanted it to be SUPER glossy. So every 4 hours, I’d head back out to the garage, lightly sand with 220, and slap on another coat!

Now that our drawers were FINALLY complete, we had the body of the dresser to deal with. You know we love the look of paint and exposed wood living in harmony, but we didn’t want to just paint the body. It just seemed too boring.

We wanted to do something that would REALLY contrast the sleek beautiful woodgrain of the drawers, so we decided to do a shabby ‘paint-wash’. We’ve never tried this before, so we just kinda winged it. I mixed equal parts primer and gray paint (leftover from this sweet china cabinet), and dumped in a little clear glaze to thin it out.

Then, we just went at it folks…

After Nick brushed it on, I immediately wiped it with a dry clean cloth in the direction of the woodgrain. There was a learning curve with this, because it was easy to wipe of too much or not enough.

This is such a fun technique, and has such a cool effect! SO Restoration Hardware… don’t you think?

And finally, after drilling hardware holes and replacing the original hardware (!!), we popped those drawers in and stood back to admire!

For some reason, the lighting in these pictures makes the first two drawers look very similar in color. So try to ignore that. 

We pretty much love how this bad boy turned out. And hope he finds a nice home soon.

And for good measure… a Before/After shot!