A lady contacted me via my Facebook page and asked if I was interested in buying a set of drawers from her. I asked for some more details and a picture, and then found out she had not one, but two tallboys! Here they are pictured below after bringing them back to my workshop to begin their transformation.
Today I’ll be sharing what I did with the first set. I have yet to finish the second set. This first tall boy is slightly darker stained than the other one, but both are identical in make, with wooden knobs that seem to be screwed or glued in with no bolt on the back at all, so I just left them in. Even if they were screwed in, I didn’t want to mess with them getting them out as they were too tight to move when I tried “unscrewing them”.There was a deeply scratched pen drawing etched into the top. You can see I tried sanding it a tiny bit in this pic before taking my “before” photos. I intended sanding the entire top back to raw wood anyway.Side profile ‘before’ – such a  lovely solid piece of furniture!Side profile after one coat of Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint in the European colour, Bergere – a greyish blue. I mixed MMS Bonding Agent into the first coat of Bergere Milk Paint to make sure the paint adhered well to the varnished (but scuff sanded) surface.

See how nice the top sanded back? I started with a heavy grit to get rid of the varnish, then moved to a finer grade to smooth out the finish.

I mixed a stain wash using the MMSMP European colour, Schloss in 1 part Milk Paint powder to 3 parts water and brushed it over the surface along the grain in sections, wiping off the excess with a rag as I went.Then I waxed the entire top using Miss Mustard Seed’s Antiquing Wax, which gave the colour such a lovely richness as the dark wax took to the grain of the timber.I was super happy with the buffed result – so silky smooth with tinsy flecks of dark wax in the fine grains of the timber.After a gentle sanding down with a 400 grit pad on my Sandi Hands Sanding glove, I gave the rest of the unit a coat of MMSMP Furniture Wax, which is the ordinary clear wax. If you are wondering about the beautiful artwork print in the white frame on the tallboy (below), this is another lovely painting by my friend, Dana Jensen. You can see more of her art and purchase prints HERE. This print is called “Beyond The Shore” and as the artist describes, it is about “Faith…have the courage to step out into unknown waters. Be brave, courageous and do the things we are scared of. [God] calls us out beyond the shore into the waves. He will be right there with us.”