I brought this dresser home way, way, way back last winter.

At that time I was considering using it to demo the Rachel Ashwell paint that I was giving a test run.  But the RA people only sent me one color, and although I chose a very lovely pale blue, I didn’t feel like pale blue was right for this one.

So I tucked this dresser out of the way and went in another direction with the Rachel Ashwell paint.  Then come spring, I shoved it into a corner of the workshop and there it sat all summer.  The poor neglected thing.

I think I kept putting it off because it needed more work than average.

First, the legs needed to be re-glued.  I’m not sure if you can see what’s going on in this photo, but the front legs must have been made from two pieces of wood that were glued together, and they had come unglued.

So I glued them back together again.

Next I attempted to re-glue this pretty trim back on the top drawer.

 And that didn’t quite work.  The pieces were rather warped and wouldn’t lay flat, so in the end no amount of re-gluing would do the trick.  Denied.

Finally I wasn’t sure how I wanted to address the significant veneer issues on the top of this one.

While you’re admiring that picture of the chipped veneer, also pay attention to all of that reddish looking staining.  Yep, I suspect that had I tried to paint this one a light color I would have ended up with bleed-thru.

You might be wondering at this point what exactly I was thinking when I purchased this dresser.  Trust me, I have been wondering the same.  I really overpaid for a piece with this many issues.  Live and learn.

So in order to save myself any further heartache over this piece, and in order to just get it done before my upcoming sale, I decided to paint it black to avoid stain bleed-thru issues, remove the decorative trim that wouldn’t stay glued and use my decoupaged book page method for the chipped veneer (I first used this method here).

If I’d had more time to futz with it, I think it would have been pretty painted a creamy white like the last book page dresser.  Maybe next time.

You may have noticed that I saved some gold details on those columns on either side of the dresser’s front.  The patina on that gold was really lovely, so I made sure to save it.

And I filled in the chipped veneer on the top with pages from an old Swedish bible.

It was fun staging this piece simply with stacks of books including some of the books I painted and stenciled a couple of years ago.

And all in all, I think it turned out quite lovely.

If you are local and you’re coming to my sale on October 8, you can be the judge of that yourself!