Last week, I promised you results. So today, I come bearing gifts: the outcome of four furniture refinishing projects completed over the course of a few months. The process introduced us to skills (and muscles) that we didn’t know we had; apparently, they were lying dormant, only to be revealed when our need for attractive home furnishings became too much to bear.

First on the project list was this cherry-colored mirror, which I thought would look more modern in a darker mahogany stain.

Before:

Little did we know that tackling this project might break us before we’d really gotten started. Unfortunately, the process of sanding and staining is much more onerous than sanding, priming and painting. As I advised last week, when you’re getting ready to paint a piece of furniture, you just need to sand it enough to rough up the surface for proper paint adhesion. When you want to stain a piece of furniture, however, you need to sand it first to the bare wood (see below). And that process, my friends, is no walk in the park.

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You might remember me grumbling under my breath somewhere in these pages, complaining about all our mismatched furniture. Sound familiar? If not, here’s a primer to bring you up to speed: poor twentysomethings rely on the generosity of parents to furnish starter apartments, compile collection of well-made but totally incongruous castoff wooden furniture from different parents’ houses.

There’s a happy ending to this story, though, in which the poor twentysomethings purchase paint and sandpaper, and with a little bit of elbow grease, start to turn things around style-wise. We’ve written this happy ending, word by painstaking word, over the past six months—and now I get to share the results with you!

Well, to be more accurate, today I’ll be sharing one of the results with you, whetting your appetites for a full reveal next week. And I’ll go through the step-by-step process we used to make over each of these lovely-but-tired pieces. Sound good? Then here’s the “before” photo for our first subject, the antique bureau I pilfered from my father’s house. It has some great history, having come originally from my grandfather’s home, but the years hadn’t been too kind to it (or its brass handles—read their story here). These pictures were taken after a light scrub with sandpaper, but paint a pretty accurate portrait of what we were dealing with.

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Decorating an apartment sounds like good, clean fun, but in reality, it involves a lot of sweat equity. There are walls to tape off and paint, furniture to refinish (more on that soon!), and—inevitably—way too many Ikea purchases to weld together.

In my opinion, the best part of the decorating process comes before the big move: picking out a color scheme! In our previous abode, I made the mistake of winging it when it came to the color palette, and those random stylistic decisions never came together as a cohesive whole. This time, I vowed to be more strategic about the whole process.

Here, my friends, is the result:

After living with blue walls that were just slightly too vivid in our old place, I knew I’d go for neutral paint this time. Enter: light gray, which is more fun than beige but just as low-key. A sane wall color would allow for pops of cheerful pigment elsewhere in red, gold, and navy—a modified primary color scheme. Against this palette, I figured that bright white trim and deep mahogany wood pieces would make for especially crisp accents.

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Moving day came and went—our fourth move in two and a half years!—and now we’re steadily building our nest together, twig by twig, in Chicago’s lakeside Edgewater neighborhood. We still look around slack-jawed on a daily basis, unable to believe that all this high-ceilinged glory is ours. We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill up the myriad closets and cabinets (three cheers for storage space!) and highly doubt that we ever will, given our minimalist tendencies. And while half of our belongings have yet to be unpacked, and the walls need a fresh coat of paint—Benjamin Moore’s Moonshine, if you were wondering—we already feel quite at home.

Want to take a look around?

I’ll lead you around from front to back. Above is our little dining nook, with its big south-facing windows.

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As much as I’d like my (future) apartment to look like a well-style Pottery Barn catalog, I know it’s not in the cards. My furniture comes from about, oh, eight different sources; a few pieces are all matchy-matchy and modern, from a childhood bedroom set; others are eighty-year-old antiques that have seen better days. There’s a set of four blond wooden chairs thrown in there, too, and a dining room table that doesn’t work with any of the above.

I’m a girl who appreciates good interior design, so something had to change. I imagine I’m not alone? Most of us don’t live in magazine or catalog pages, and can’t afford to buy our way in. But, as I’ve discovered recently, we can take matters into our own DIY-hungry hands and, well, fake it till we make it. I’m embarking on a journey to refinish or paint all these clashing pieces until they work as a team, a process that I’ll eventually chronicle on these pages.

But I decided to start slowly on the DIY front: by removing eighty years of tarnish from my dresser’s brass handles. (See below—not so pretty.) The eco-friendly, fume-free solution? Not your traditional, harsh metal polish, but rather a homemade batter of sorts, found here; the chemical reaction between the acidic, salty batter and the brass pretty much does all the polishing for you.

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I’ll admit, being a perfectionist can be a useful thing: my bills are always paid on time, I never miss a work deadline, and my meticulous measuring skills usually lead to successful batches of cookies and brownies. On the other hand, there are plenty of times when that perfectionism is problematic, such as when I refuse to buy furniture until I find exactly the right thing to complement the blue shade of the walls, and the other furniture I already have, and no no no, that chair is too boxy and that one’s seat is too deep!

Are you exhausted yet? Care to sit down on a comfortable reading couch? I am, finally. This oversized chair arrived today, and I’m so excited to sprawl out under a fleece blanket and just read. Here’s what’s on my must-read list right now.

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