The first and last time I ever stain anything ever

A few weeks ago, Jon and I were at the Goodwill Outlet in Hillsboro and when I saw this little guy I just about died:

And the best part is that he had a friend that was 3 drawers...exactly what we needed!

Two perfect campaign dressers with all of the original hardware, for only $5 each!  The inside of the top drawer on both dressers was stamped with a Dixie Campaigner stamp, and all of the drawers had dovetailing on the sides...ahh!  For a frame of reference, this is the dresser we found, minus the white lacquer finish.

We decided to bring both home...in our Corolla : )  Jon is amazing.

The frame of this larger dresser was solid, but all kinds of beat up.  You can see all of the scratches and dings to the original finish, which stood out even more when we removed the hardware.  Poor little guy.

Normally I'm a huge fan of painting furniture with high gloss paint in the happiest color I can get my hands on : )  But Jon and I decided that with this kind of dresser we loved the idea of restoring it to it's original glory with a dark stain.  

The very first thing that we did (that I forgot to take pictures of) was remove and polish all of the hardware.  Next was the hardest part...stripping the old chipped stain and sanding this guy down. It started out kind of like this, all glossy and chipped.

Then I started putting on the stain stripper.  It's funny clear slime that you have to put on over the old stain and then scrape off.  This is what I used:

And here's how it looked on the dresser:

I spread the stain stripper around and let it sit for a few minutes, and when I scraped it off it looked like this!

After a few rounds of stain stripper and some sanding, the dresser was ready for some new stain.

I loved how dark the stain was!  I did a few rounds of putting on stain and wiping off the excess in order to get the darkest finish I could.

The final product came out looking like this...I LOVE it! (But at this point, didn't see that much of a difference between this and the original stain...)

A few coats of clear sealer later, and he was ready to come inside!  Here is what it looked like while I was putting the hardware back together:

And here is the final product!

Pretty cute, huh? : ) At least, a pretty big jump from this...

It did feel like a TON of work though, just to make something look clean and restored, but not transformed.  Not nearly as exciting as paint...and a ton more work...so I'd recommend the stain stripper and re-staining route ONLY for pieces like this that are quality/valuable/you want to keep it forever.