Before & After: A Boring and Brown Dresser Turns Cool and Clever

updated May 4, 2019
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(Image credit: Kristie Berky )

Have a heavy piece of furniture you just don’t use much anymore (and is possibly just taking up some space)? You’ll find inspiration in this surprising DIY that takes a forgotten-then-found old worn-out dresser and turns it into a cool and functional furniture piece for the kitchen!

(Image credit: Kristie Berky )

From Kristie:

Living in an apartment complex, you see lots of people moving out and leaving things behind. My boyfriend and I had seen this dresser sitting outside of our neighbor’s vacant apartment for a few days and had checked it out when after about four days, we decided to bring it into our home and give it some TLC. We don’t have that much storage space in our kitchen so we thought that giving this old dresser an update would turn it into the perfect hutch!

Our first step was to sand down (by hand!) all of the polyurethane and dark staining to get to the original wood… about 8 sandpaper sheets later. Then, Mike ran out to the hardware store to grab a hand saw and he removed all of the shelves for the drawers and plywood backing to create a more open feel. After all of the bottom drawers were removed, the bottom of the dresser was just plain plywood so we decided to give it a textured look by adding individual pieces of wood and securing them with wood glue to kind of make it look like a hardwood floor.


We gave it one last sanding before cleaning it off then I began to paint the hutch. We chose Valspar Reserve
Crystal Aqua in a semigloss finish to give our kitchen and dining room a fun pop of color. Mike added a wine rack intended for under kitchen cabinets which we purchased off of Amazon and then we ran to Lowe’s to get some new drawer pulls. We decided to go with the half moon pulls for the long bottom drawer and round pulls for the top three drawers to make it a little more unique and then tied it all together with the matte black finish for the pulls.


It took a lot of hard work but we are proud to say that we re-purposed it all on our own! It was our first experience at a DIY project and I think we would definitely do it again. Thank you Kristie!