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It’s the desk from every 1980s spare room: oak, a finish gone orange, and ornate pulls on every drawer. It still opens and closes perfectly. But it makes the whole room look stuck in another decade, and no new lamp or rug fixes that. Instead of keeping this ’80s oak desk orange, she painted it My London Flat teal-gray © Ryan McKeever The desk wasn’t the problem, the finish was. Furniture flipper Sheri Abernathy, who posts as @brasswalnut, found a desk exactly like that, with what she calls a “very dated finish.” For about $100, she turned it into a piece that could work as a vanity as easily as a desk. Why the orange finish dated the whole piece What dated this desk wasn’t the oak itself. It was the orange finish on top of it, plus the ornate pulls. Both can be changed without replacing anything, so Sheri started by scrubbing and sanding the old finish off. The same fix works on old brown desks too: a deep color like dark blue on the outside, and...

Grandfather built this small bedside dresser for his wife in the 1960s. Decades later, it ended up in a furniture painter’s workshop, covered in gray paint with decorative trim around the drawers and old metal handles. Its original construction had survived, but the finish was worn and needed work. @thelittlefurnitureroom When the painter asked her three-year-old daughter what she should do with it, the answer was simple: paint rainbows. Instead of painting traditional rainbow arches, she took that suggestion in another direction, combining 14 chalk paint colors across the entire dresser. Furniture artist @thelittlefurnitureroom shared the transformation after receiving several pieces from a woman whose grandfather had made them for her grandmother. What began as a child’s suggestion became a hand-painted cabinet with abstract brushstrokes, gold hardware, and a new set of legs. Gray Paint and Ornate Trim Covered the Original Dresser @thelittlefurnitureroom Pale gray p...