Our first refinishing project together was a vintage French Provincial dresser found locally at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. It was very shiny and well, ugly. I wish we had a "before" shot, but I wasn't good at documenting things back then. We decided to do the trendy thing with refinishing a dresser and paint the bottom white and stain the top. #hellopinterest. In fairness, we stripped the thing completely, opted out of using a chalk paint, and instead used a good quality oil-based paint for the base.
Once the dresser was refinished, we used it to stage our first flip. You may have noticed by now, but we have avoided sharing many photos of our first flip. Not because we're worried about the quality, but because our taste has significantly changed since then. WE HAVE EVOLVED. Anyways, here is a photo of the dresser in its natural French country-like habitat..
After staging that flip, we recently had acquired an antique booth at Pastimes and decided this would be the perfect first large piece to sell. It sold rather quickly. We weren't surprised because we think most of the Pastimes clientele enjoys refinished decor. That’s unfortunate for us as we HATE refinishing things. (Special place in heaven for those who have the patience to do it!) After selling this piece, we completely forgot about it for a few months.
As we were looking for another flip in Moore County, our realtor brought us by a potential comp in Pinehurst that recently went under contract. Lo and behold: there was our dresser used as a vanity in the master bath of this comp. We were amused that the person who bought this damn dresser didn't want to keep it for themselves.
Anyways, the moral of the story was this: we ultimately made money refinishing and flipping this piece to stage and then sell in our antique booth. And, we were always toying with converting a dresser into a vanity for one of our own flips and now we knew this was something local buyers could appreciate! Win-win.
Our preciously refinished dresser in its (final) resting place.
A dresser we then subsequently refinished into a vanity. Even though we knew converting dressers into vanities was a very popular thing, we weren't sure if local buyers would buy into it. We took seeing our old dresser in a flipped house as a sign.