Furniture Feature Friday

Every Friday, we feature a beautiful Miss Mustard Seed’s® Milk Paint project in our Move Mountains With Milk Paint Facebook Group - a thriving and bustling online community where creative minds come together to inspire, help and encourage one another.

This week’s featured piece is a vintage dresser that belonged to the Grandmother of Jennifer Yates. Read on to see how she made this heirloom piece fit into a very narrow space in her home.

Depression Era Furniture

Jennifer inherited this lovely 2-over-2 vintage dresser from her Grandmother. (A 2-over-2 dresser is one that is built with 2 small drawers on top that sit over 2 larger drawers on the bottom.)

This particular style is known as Depression Era furniture. Pieces with this style range in ornateness and date between the late 1920’s and the beginning of the Great Depression to the 1940’s and the start of WWII.

During this time, money was tight, jobs were scarce and furniture needed to be manufactured in a cost-effective manner. To help reduce costs but keep the appearance of quality, companies mass-produced pieces overlain with wood veneer. This thin layer of real wood gave the impression that the entire piece was made from a high quality decorative wood (like mahogany) when in reality, most of the dresser was made from lesser quality wood like Tulip Poplar.

These furniture pieces are a physical reminder of one of the most financially strained times the U.S. has ever seen, and the grit of the people who lived through it.

Prepping the Vintage Dresser

Jennifer sanded the original finish from her Grandmother’s dresser with the intention to stain it.

Once she got it to this point, she had 2 problems. First, the piece was too big and it jutted out into the walkway of her home. The second problem was that she didn’t care for the different grain patterns across the piece due to the wood veneer construction.

To solve the first problem, she enlisted the help of her brother. To fix the second, she used MMS Milk Paint!

Cutting Grandmom’s Dresser in Half

Because Jennifer’s dresser was too deep, and it jutted out too far into the walkway of her home, she decided to cut some of it off. By enlisting the help of her brother, they took the back off, pulled the drawers out and chopped off 10 inches in depth using a circular saw!

Cutting the dresser down to size was the easy part. Putting it back together took some ingenuity, patience and trial and error. Not only did they need to find a way to reattach the back legs and back panel, they needed to cut the drawers down to size too.

Jennifer didn’t give details on how they did that part of the makeover because it took a little bit of this and some of that to get it to work. It’s not a process you can replicate on every piece of furniture, because they’re all constructed differently.

Painting Grandmom’s Dresser in Artissimo

Once the dresser was put back together, Jennifer chose our rich Artissimo to refinish her Grandmother’s piece.

Artissimo got its color inspiration from the fabric in the collage above. The name of the pattern is “Artissimo”, and this dreamy color is somewhere in between a navy and midnight blue.

She liked the coverage Artissimo offered, and mixed her batches using a hand blender. When you use this method of mixing, it’s important not to create a Milk Paint latte! Gently pounce the mixer up and down in a pulsing motion so you don’t create a lot of air bubbles. Another alternative is to shake your Milk Paint in a lidded jar.

If you want tips for mixing MMS Milk Paint, check out this blog post:

Jennifer applied 2 coats of Artissimo and distressed the edges with sandpaper.

Finishing With Hemp Oil

To bring out the richness and depth of Artissimo, Jennifer applied Hemp Oil as her topcoat. She wet sanded for a buttery soft finish. To learn how to wet sand, check out this tutorial:

In her notes she provided to us, Jennifer said, “[wet sanding] made a huge difference to the feel of the wood. I was really blown away how the blue changed when I added the oil, it became rich and darker. Not chalky at all.”

We recommend using Hemp Oil as your topcoat on our rich colors like Artissimo, Typewriter, Curio, Flow Blue, Tricycle and Boxwood. These colors “wake up” once Hemp Oil is applied, and as Jennifer testified, they don’t look chalky at all! If your piece requires a bit more protection, add a layer or two of our wax finishes. This will give you the depth Hemp Oil provides and the protection of a wax finish.

Learn more about applying our finishes/topcoats here:

A Perfect Fit!

Because of its slim new profile, Jennifer easily slid her Grandmother’s dresser into its new home.

She installed the original hardware and is now enjoying a family heirloom with a fresh new finish!

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Ready to begin a project of your own? Find a retailer easily using our Retailer Locator Map! This post shows you how it works: