Having a “real” dining room for the first time meant finding furniture to fill it. We already had a bar height table in espresso finish from Scan Design (we are blessed to have a local outlet store!), and we could not find anything we liked, that we could afford, to match.  The easiest solution?  Finding a solid wood buffet we could refinish.  I spent countless hours on Craigslist and stopping in thrift stores, garage sales, and consignment shops before I stumbled across this beauty:

Sad Phoebe

If you can look past the old yellowed polyurethane and terrible hardware, she is a beauty. Also, she is solid wood, so I knew I could spruce her up with a much darker stain.  The Boy has grown very accustomed to random calls and texts saying, “Hey, wanna meet me at (random location) with the truck?”  He is a trooper.

After haggling over the price, I got the owner to knock the price down to $175.00, and it was a done deal.  I spent an entire weekend and several weeknights sanding Phoebe. That was by far the most time-consuming part.  I also searched the internet high and low for new hardware.  I knew I wanted brushed nickel with an antique look, and these were love at first sight:

However, at $7.98 per drawer pull times 6, plus two door pulls at $4.98 each, it was a bit pricey, so I procrastinated.  When I simply could not find anything I liked nearly as much, I pulled the trigger, and never looked back.  Unfortunately, the drawer pulls were not exactly the same size as the old ones, and I had to drill new holes in the drawers and putty the old holes.  I have tried several different types of putty over the  years, all of which claim to be “stainable,” but none seem to take stain as well as I would like.  The result of this is that the puttied area is very obvious, especially with a really dark stain.  Fortunately, though, thanks to the larger base of the new pulls, the old puttied holes were covered. Whew.  After sanding, staining, putting a second coat of stain on, a third coat of stain, and new hardware, she was dressed to impress:

Happy Phoebe

Phoebe Buffet is The Boy’s favorite furniture transformation to date.  I am still partial to Desk, but it is a close call.  Here is Phoebe Buffet hanging out in her new dining room (ignore the cement floors – that is a work in progress):

Welcome Home, Phoebe Buffet