Furniture Remodel - Part 1

So it's been QUITE a while since i've posted... my apologies.  I'm going to try a post in the style of my mother and her blog The Cottage in the sense that it's about a furniture re-do.  or something like that.  Point blank - my vanity is getting a face lift! One that i've been dying to do for almost a year, but have somehow just not had the time.

Here's the vanity:

She's a beaut, idn't she?!

She was my mom's for 20 some years before i received her.  My mom found her in an antique shop on Clinton St. in Binghamton, New York, shortly after i was born.  She bought it after my dad added on to our home in New York to give them a nice big new master bedroom so she had room for it.  She paid around $50 for it.

Last May when I moved home from school my mom informed me that she planned on selling/getting rid of her vanity, unless I wanted it.  I thought it over not claiming it right away because I used to have a vanity that I have since gotten rid of because I didn't like it.  So i didn't want to claim this one only to not like it again... but i thought about it and realized it was the specific vanity i had that i did not like, not the idea of a vanity as a whole.  And i love this vanity of my mom's, so i decided to take her up on her offer.  Right after taking it i asked if it was okay if i painted it... (the dark wood wasn't really my style).  She said she didn't care so i began dreaming... and kept dreaming for about a year until this weekend.  I finally had 3 days off in a row with NO PLANS (or work!)! And the weather was nice and my room was clean enough to handle taking on the contents of my vanity drawers for a few days.

So alas, Saturday afternoon, I emptied the drawers of my vanity and my mom helped me move it out to the garage.  From there my dad helped me remove all of the hardware and the mirror.

drawer pulls and mirror hardware

mirror-less vanity ready to be made-over

My dad then also provided me with some brief sanding lessons and i sanded the vanity, the mirror frames, and the drawer fronts - which was extremely time consuming (probably more so for me that it would have been for anyone else because i'm a bit obsessive compulsive).

Then my dad helped me use some wood filler to fill in the tiny nail holes on the drawers as well as the indented circles from the drawer pulls (because i bought new ones several months ago)

drawers with wood filler :)

Then came Sunday afternoon - (after observing Mike run the Med City Half Marathon!) my wonderful mother helped me to prime the whole thing.  And let me tell you something about primer - it is STICKY. i felt as though i was painting with elmer's glue! and that vanity has more freakin nooks and crannies than i ever realized (which make it VERY difficult to prime! - especially for an inexperienced primer/painter like me!) I had to head into work at 5 so my very kind mother finished priming the half of the vanity that we had left (thanks again mom!)

Today (Monday) my mom and i worked together to get 2 coats of paint onto the vanity which went very well! (no pictures of this step!) And tomorrow we'll do the final steps and hopefully tomorrow night or wednesday i'll get a post up here with the final reveal! (No promises though, it may not happen til this weekend, or a week from now!)

That's all for now folks! thanks for reading my super long post!