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Today I am continuing the story of the wedding chest of drawers! For the previous installment, see here.

Sanding the chest of drawers was quite rewarding - the chipped dark varnish came off fairly easily and soon we could see the grain of the wood. We mostly used the electric sander, and then sanded the edges and curvy bits by hand. We used a coarse sandpaper and then a finer one. Some of the wood came up better than the rest. Below is the top of the chest, mid-sand:

And here is the front of one of the three little drawers:

 We thought these looked quite nice. No obvious bashes, and the wood (which we think is oak) was a nice colour. Same with the sides of the chest. The drawer fronts, however, were a different matter. They were a very thin laminate and we couldn't sand all of the varnish off without being worried that the laminate would split.

Remember I said that originally I wanted to paint the whole thing? Well, once we saw the lovely oak, I wasn't so sure. It seemed such a shame to cover it up again. But the big drawer fronts were definately not nice enough to remain uncovered. Dilemma. We decided to paint only the big drawer fronts, and see what it looked like with a kind of mixed-up wood-and-paint effect. I originally bought a can of white paint for this, but looking at the colour of the rest of the chest, we thought a creamier colour might be better.

Very happily, our landlord has left a whole shed full of what he terms 'household items', which we can use. Mostly they are not things that we would much want to use - massive bag of fishing rods and some mouldy camping chairs, anyone? Also in there however are many, many cans of paint. He must've loved painting. I rummaged around and found a few cans of satin (semi gloss) paint which I thought might be good. They were all Farrow & Ball. We are possibly paying too much rent!

After a few test patches, I decided to use one that was rather misleadingly named 'daffodil'. It was sort of yellowy white. I found the primer I had bought from Homebase, painted the fronts of two big drawers, watched as the primer ran down the sides of the drawers, felt silly, found some masking tape, masked the edges of the other two drawers, and primed them too. Then I painted on a couple of coats of the Farrow & Ball. Here we go:

Primed big drawers!

Apologies for my rubbash iphone pictures. I really must sort that out. The colour is terrible.

I am making this painting thing sound a lot more straightforward than it really was. The reality was, we were doing this in November in the UK, in a house with no garage. The room-of-many-uses was too small to hold the drawers and it was dark and rainy outside, so we were painting in our dining room. Rented house plus cans of paint plus wooden floorboards plus busy clumsy people = a bit terrifying! We were pirouetting around dustsheets and drying drawers for days, trying not to knock over paint cans or get stripes of drying drawer edges on our trousers. Finally, success! We put the drawers back into the chest! Then we looked at it. For quite a while. Should we paint the whole thing? Is it better like this? Do we think it's better like this because we can't face painting the whole thing and continuing the dance of terror with paint pots in the dining room?! This is what it looked like. What do you think?!