New Drawers, anyone?

I used to have a dressing table in my bedroom. In fact I wrote about it here. 
It really was lovely, but... it had no room to put a chair at to sit down in front of it. And if I'm honest, I never actually do anything in front of the mirror long enough that I actually need to sit.  So I used to stand and sort of bend over and hunch a bit! Or I just knelt on the floor in front of it. It wasn't actually super practical.
So after a lot of thought, I decided to sell the dressing table ( which I managed to do in one morning!) and get a chest of drawers and just put a small mirror on it.
So, my "Derby Wife" - Desi, who just lives round the corner, had a small chest of drawers she was selling and it was perfect.

The day before yesterday I set to work with my trusty belt sander and got all the dark varnish off.

 None of us were sure what the wood was going to be, but now that the varnish is off we're pretty sure it's rimu. Which is lovely.

This is after the first sanding with fairly rough sandpaper, but it needs to be to get old varnish off. 

And after a couple more sands, with finer and finer paper. By this time it was very smooth.

So, time for painting! The other chest of drawers in the bedroom is done with a very thin whitewash, which was actually a stained wood varnish, that I did when we lived in Scotland. With this one I thought just a thin paint whitewash would do the trick. Unfortunately you can see down the left side that my first wash wasn't as thin as I wanted it to be!! So I got a jug of water and put in about 20ml of paint!! It was the consistency of milk and looked like it too. But it worked just like I wanted it to.
After the paint was dry I waxed it with some of my very precious orange wax. Precious because it's no longer made ( or allowed in NZ!) Which ever one it is, it's impossible to get now.

The most difficult part was the flipping handles! I took the handles off the dressing table to put on, but one set was simply impossible! The other 2 needed different sized holes drilled.  This was no problem, I went and got the electric drill and set to work. BUT! every time I drilled a hole the whole house fused! Twelve holes needed drillled and twelve times the house fused so I had to go and flick the switch each time. Man!!! What a palaver! Various bolts didn't fit and I also had to do a trip into town to find 3 more sets of handles. It probably took longer to fix the handles on than it took to sand the whole thing and paint it.

 You can see that the handles don't all match. That's ok. I actually like that!
Once it was finished I had to empty my clothes out of the dressing table drawers and organise them into the new ones. That was very therapeutic!

I love them!