Refinishing Ikea Furniture

I love Ikea! Fantastic, cheap furniture that you get to put together yourself- who wouldn't love that. Unfortunately, we are about 6 hours away from a store, and I don't like to pay for shipping. Our spare bedroom is all from Ikea, it was my bedroom set and my husband was not a huge fan of it. Apparently, he thought the bed was too low. Oh well, his loss. Meanwhile, any one who visits us get to sleep on a great looking piece of furniture.



At my old job, my boss bought me a spare desk because the giant desk I had did not fit through the door. He let me pick out anything I wanted, and if you know me, I'm cheap- even if I am spending someone else's money. I found this great expedit desk from Ikea that I thought looked great and had him pick it up when he went to Minneapolis. I loved that desk, and awhile back, he offered it to me since they had no use for it anymore. Of course, I jumped at the offer and used it in my "office" until I found out that we were pregnant. It did take up a lot of space so I wasn't sure what we were going to do with it, and then I saw this blog about repainting Ikea furniture.

Originally, this piece was in the birch color but our baby's room was going to be in white. We got rid of the desk part of the piece (maybe you'll see it in our garage someday) and we kept the cubby shelf for her room. The first thing we needed to do was to prime the unit and then we could spray paint it.

Here's what the piece looked like to begin with:



We moved this out into the garage to work on it. Always make sure you do this in a well ventilated area. Also, wear a mask. The primer and spray paint are pretty potent- protect your lungs. Because it's not real wood on the outside, we did not have to sand this down. All we did was wipe it down to get the dust off of it. Once it was ready to go, we primed the piece with this:


And, here is what it looked like once it was primed. It took us roughly 2-3 cans. I really didn't think it was going to take that much, but when you think every cubby hole had four sides to cover, it makes sense. You can see some of the birch color still showing- that's okay. It gets better!


I let this set for awhile (a week). This is not totally necessary. This is dry to the touch after half an hour, and can be painted after two hours. We only let it go that long because of the fumes- I didn't want to smell it anymore that day so we waited until the next weekend to do the spray painting part. For spray paint we used this:

It took us 2 cans of this paint to get it covered. Once again, it dries to the touch after a half an hour, and is ready in 2 hours, although they do suggest 24 hours. We still had to paint the baby's room before we moved it, so that was about another weekend. Once it was ready to go, we placed it in her room, added some fabric drawers and voila! We have great new piece for the baby room.



Looks good doesn't it. Here it is in its full glory.



We couldn't be more excited for our baby to get here! And, now that we have most of the nursery done it makes me a little bit more relaxed. Maybe I'll put on the rest of the baby room photos on when we have the rocker chair and all of the decorations on the wall. I have another great pinterest pin to use for her room!