We’ve had this thing kicking around my basement/workshop/lair for several years. It’s a cottage furniture dresser.

We bought it at a tent by the side of the road, out in the boonies. We used to raid it quite often for junque we could salvage and perch on to save money and collect splinters. It was cheap. How cheap? This cheap:

It was really dirty, but unlike the photos, the item itself is not out of focus. Two of the drawers were wonky. They all stuck and shrieked like a miser at tax time when you tried to operate them.

The term “cottage furniture” has been debased over the years. I oughta know, I helped debase it. Originally, cottage furniture referred to relatively inexpensive suites of mostly bedroom furniture, made from common grades of wood and painted in folk art style to mimic expensive veneers. Floral adornments were often added, or sometimes still life stuff or even the occasional seafaring illustration. They’re often pinstriped like ours is.

The term “cottage furniture” has morphed into painted casual furniture, usually a riff on shabby chic decorating. I used to make cottage furniture and sell it online. The original cottage furniture stuff is about 150 years old now. It was pretty common, so no one thought to save much of it, and now good examples of it are getting rare-ish and valuable-adjacent.

So why was it ten bucks? Because someone had butchered it. There was once an ornate mirror between the twin towers of the drawers, and someone wanted it, so they pried it off with force aplenty, and left the rest of the dresser as furniture carrion. The dresser, intact, was worth something. Separately, the two pieces it was wrenched into were basically worthless.

Our ten-dollar remnant used to look something like this:

Original vintage cottage furniture doesn’t get restored much, because few people know how to do faux bois (grain painting) anymore. You’d have to know how to fix handmade furniture, too. All the drawers in our dresser are hand dovetailed, including the backs. The frames are nailed into the chamfered corner posts with cut nails driven in from inside out. And when you were all done with all of that, you’d be required to be some form of at-least rudimentary artist, and a dab hand at pinstriping, too.

I made a drawer runner and some drawer stops out of scraps from the burn pile, and glued them in. The knobs (pulls, really) had all been scavenged off the thing, so we bought reproductions that were appropriate to the style. Those cost something like eight bucks apiece, so our sugar bowl didn’t escape totally unscathed. The new pulls had a walnut teardrop pull, which we disassembled, sprayed with clear lacquer, and put back together.

You have to be careful with finishes like these. I’ve done lots of faux painting, and researched it quite a bit. You can never tell what the fellows that did the original work might have been using to grain the exterior. It could be shellac, or various primitive water-based stuff. Casein was popular (milk paint). Hell, the really good guys used to be able to do it with stale beer as a medium.

I knew the usual panoply of nasties like acetone and paint thinner and toluene and lacquer thinner and denatured alcohol were just as likely to immediately dissolve the finish as clean it. So after banging all the nails it required, gluing in any missing pieces, and waxing the drawers so they’d slide in and out nicely, I simply took some disinfectant towelettes and wiped the thing down. When it was as clean as I could make it, I gave it a thin coat of water-borne clear finish, applied with a foam brush. The backplate on the pulls fit the craters on the drawer fronts perfectly, so I knew they were probably pretty much an exact substitute for the original.

And we ended up with this:

We have a pantry porch adjacent to the kitchen, and storage is storage. And I’ll bet an afternoon’s effort and some knobs catapulted the value of this ten dollar thing into the fifteen-dollar range, at least.