Salvage

I am slowly decorating for Christmas. As usual, our big splurge is for a real live Christmas tree; for several years, we lived in an apartment where even live wreaths were banned. (We joked about setting up a small tree in our car.)

One of the many things that we trashpicked back then was a large pine dresser, with shelves like a hutch, dark finish. It became a child's dresser, and we painted it in the apartment kitchen with free paint leftovers from the hazardous waste site. The child insisted on painting the undersides of the drawers as well.

Several years and a couple of moves later, we still have the dresser. The drawer guides kept falling out, and I gave up on trying to fix them. One drawer was broken beyond repair and thrown away. Child now prefers to use the lower part of the dresser as one large bin. Which leaves me with two drawers of medium quality, that are not the right shape to keep around as storage boxes, but...they do have painted undersides in exactly the color I want for my Christmas decorating.

Step one:  remove hardware. I kept the mounts for the drawer pulls, but not the handles, and pried off the metal drawer guides with a flat bar (handy deconstruction tool, looks like a short, flat, wide crowbar).

Step two will be to disassemble the drawers themselves. I want a side piece or two for making a rack of coat hooks, and then the bottoms for some sort of Christmas sign.