Campaign Dresser (finally!)

I FINALLY "finished" the campaign dresser for my office. I didn't even paint it - so you must be thinking what took so long??

When I originally got the dresser, it looked like this (sorry for the crappy photo):



The brass was old, dingy and almost black. It looked very much like this:

[ via Lonny ]

The dark patina on the hardware looks great on the Lonny piece because it's painted white. But I wanted to keep my piece in the original wood finish and I wanted that BRIGHT brass look.

I cleaned up the brass corners directly on the piece with Brasso. It worked well, as long as I made sure not to get the Brasso on the wood. It took a LOT of elbow grease but wasn't too difficult.



Then came the knobs. The knobs were in much worse shape. Each knob took about an hour to clean. To my disappointment, when I finally got the grime off I found the brass underneath to be scratched, dull, and just plain ugly. I kept going (why I don't know) and did almost all of the brass knobs. I sat back and thought - no, this won't do.

SO I decided to spray paint the knobs. Little did I know that not all gold spray paint is created equal.



Note how each cap on the bottles is the same color. I even brought my knob to the hardware store with me to match the cap. However, the paint in the first two bottles were night and day different than their caps (annoying!). They paint was dull with a brown-ish hue. Very similar to the gold on the label of the first can.

Luckily the last bottle was PERFECT. And in a matter of 5 minutes, I had perfect brass-y gold knobs.

And here is the final product!



You really can't tell (unless you look very close and examine) that the knobs were sprayed and the corners are original. Not bad for a $50 Craigslist purchase!

In case you are curious, I keep all my fabric remnants and memos in this piece.

ps - don't you LOVE how I styled it? (I'm so kidding).