Almost two years ago, I decided I needed a dresser. I was storing half my clothes in fabric bins which I found out Marie Kondo frowns upon so I bit the bullet and bought one. I wasn’t interested in spending a fortune so like many others searching for inexpensive furniture solutions, I headed to IKEA. I ended up buying a Songesand dresser, spent an afternoon deciphering pictograms in order to get it together, and my clothes had a new home! I wasn’t a fan of the hardware, so I switched out the pulls and that was that.

A couple months ago I realized since I was out of house projects, it might be time to tackle a little smaller project and make something out of this dresser.

The first step to making any IKEA piece look like a cuter, more expensive furniture piece? Add some feet! I headed to Lowes, found myself some tapered bun feet and secured them to the bottom of my dresser using a combination of screws and wood glue. I did three bun feet across the front and then did 2 x 2 poplar supports across the back where you can’t see.

Second step was filling the holes from the existing drawer pulls. They definitely need to be relocated. I also filled in the little gaps where the rails and stiles meet because I didn’t like them.

I’ve seen fluted trim all over the place lately and really wanted to put some in my house so I thought this would be the perfect place! I bought this trim from Lowe’s and cut it down into a million tiny pieces to glue in the drawer face inset. I ended up needing 10 – 8 ft. sections for all the drawers.

Once the drawers were all good and trimmed out, the only thing left to do was paint!

I went with Sherwin Williams Modern Gray for the color and added in some BB Frosch to help the paint it adhere to the super smooth factory finish. I also sanded the whole thing down with some 180 grit before painting to help the paint stick as well.

I ended up brushing on two coats of paint. The combination of urethane paint and the paint additive helped the paint to self level and hide most of the brush strokes. Last step was adding new hardware. I bought these vintage looking inexpensive teardrop pulls from Amazon to add to each drawer.

I love how it turned out SO much! What do you think? Would you ever guess this is an IKEA dresser?

Thanks for reading,