Beautiful REFINISHING of mahogany dresser - Restoring Vintage Furniture

hello everybody welcome back to another video this is another one of those ugly duckling challenges this one is hosted by corey from desert diy super talented lady super awesome person she has tons of videos of amazing furniture flips and thrifting tips if you end up liking what you see feel free to subscribe and hit that little notification bell this is going to make sure you get a notification every time she posts something this is a piece i found on marketplace for 25 bucks and to be honest the only reason i paid anything for it was the hardware looking at the outside of the piece it's obviously in horrible horrible condition this thing has been used and abused it has several layers of paint this is some sort of layer wallpaper but this hardware the hardware is what made me buy this piece [Music] i can't really see how the drawers are constructed yet there's wallpaper in the way there's no back on the piece and it's a little strange here on the bottom i don't know if this used to be another drawer they took out or if it was built this way i'm not sure i'm thinking i might cut it off right about here and add a base but before i do anything i have a feeling about this paint this looks to be a fairly old piece my money is on this being lead paint so these lead test kits you can order on amazon they're super easy to use all you do is dip the little q-tip looking thing into some vinegar it turns mustard yellow and you rub it on the surface of the paint or finish that you're testing for 30 seconds now generally if there's any color change at all i assume it's lead this color it's a little bit hard to read so i'm going to do it again in another spot sure enough there is lead paint on this piece it's not the end of the world i've dealt with lead before but it is kind of a bummer but i'm going to take this hardware off first to get this out of the way because no matter what happens with the piece that hardware i'm keeping i absolutely love the patina on this even the rusty bits it's just got so much character to it i have to figure out a way to preserve that look without allowing the rust to eat away more at the metal do you know what i mean some of these old flathead screws can be a little bit hard to get off the grooves are often fairly shallow so sometimes you have to use a little more muscle to get them out i'm gonna pull out the drawers and get to work on peeling back some of this i don't know if it's wallpaper or some sort of con it's probably contact paper like stuff you would put on a shelf whatever it is it's sticky and it's ugly and it's gotta go so i was hoping to find dovetail joints or nap joinery something here on the drawer to give me a better indication of the age but all i found were nails and i'm kind of getting a better picture of this piece now i'm fairly certain this is a homemade job the wood quality is poor the construction is poor the finish is horrible it's going to take a lot of work to get rid of this contact paper and then the lead paint to boot it's not an easy decision and i love a challenge but i have to consider this challenge a fail so now what do i do my name is angie and i refinish furniture sometimes i paint and sometimes i don't but i always do what i can disable pieces from trash welcome to my workroom so after about 12 hours of stress and feeling sorry for myself because i wasn't able to flip that little piece that i wanted to i started to take a look at what was left in my work room now i'm doing a work room update half of my stuff is already in a truck i don't have very many options here but i did have this mahogany dresser i picked up the other day tons of water damage it honestly looks like it had been left out in the rain or near a window maybe where rain was splattering off the sill onto the side of it there's a broken leg on the bottom that needs to be fixed is this an ugly duckling no this is a beautiful piece of furniture that desperately needs to be refinished but i don't have time to find another piece before this challenge video is supposed to air so this is the piece i'm going to be working on this piece is a perfect example of a classic happy white design and george huppel white was actually born in the 1700s a lot of makers in the late 1800s and even into the 1900s borrowed from his designs and this is a very classic look normally these have bowed fronts or serpentine fronts with straight legs or slightly fluted legs which this one has and it also falls in the federal period for furniture this hardware is fairly typical of that era as well this has split the whole length of this foot as well as on the side of the foot there's a couple of glue blocks here that have one has split and the other one has come apart from the side i'm going to unscrew all of this take it all apart clean up the joints re-glue them and hopefully stabilize this leg as much as i can you can see here that someone has driven a couple small finish nails into the leg to try to hold that broken piece on please don't do that don't use nails in furniture legs and in dovetail joints on drawers glue is your friend nails are not your friend i'm going to be re-gluing these glue blocks in this side was tight so i just left it alone and i'll just glue it from the other side i need to pop that nail out as well i want to sand down a bit of the crud and old glue that was on this leg assembly here i don't want to sand so much that i ruined the integrity of the fibers because i need these to fit together as tightly as possible and if i were to stand them flat there's a good chance that it wouldn't line up as perfectly as it would otherwise and there's a tiny bit of movement in this crack not a whole lot i am going to put some glue in it but i'm not too worried about that so once i have that cleaned up a bit i'm adding some wood glue all over the joint i want this to cover every square inch i'm going to press these two pieces together i'm just trying to push a little bit of extra glue in that crack there wasn't very much movement there but i'm still going to put some in and clamp it and see if i can get it to close a little bit more whipping off a bit of the excess glue before i put the clamps on and i will wipe as i go along [Music] [Music] i got this partially glued up and then i realized i forgot to put the sideways pressure on that crack so i'm just changing up my clamping arrangement here making sure that there is pressure on all sides i took this little chunk off by accident when i was pulling off the leg assembly so i'm just going to give that a little dab of wood glue and then use some painters tape actually to tape it in place it's obviously too small to clamp [Music] [Music] once that has had a chance to dry i'm going to pull the tape off i want to keep the clamps on the leg assembly a little bit longer so i'm going to start scraping off this old finish i'm using a carbide tipped scraper for this the finish because it's so damaged honestly is coming off really easily it would be a waste of time money and would be a mess to use a chemical stripper on it i don't need to i can just scrape it i got down to the edge of this leg and i noticed another repair and there was a tiny bit of movement there i wasn't comfortable with leaving it that way so i actually tried to pry off any parts that weren't perfectly glued down and you'll see that a little piece pops off not the whole thing so basically this section on the right side the glue had held really well not so much on the left so i'm re-gluing that side it's going to make it nice and strong it's not like it would fall off but i just i couldn't redo this piece and not address that movement and back to scraping this piece is constructed of several different types of wood and the mahogany sections themselves there's actually a couple of different types of mahogany which is interesting this outer band that i'm scraping right now is actually a piece of solid mahogany these middle sections that i'm scraping in this clip are not mahogany at all the feet are not mahogany at all and everything else is mahogany veneer but not the same mahogany veneer the top is slightly different from the sides and both are slightly different from the mahogany veneer on the drawer front so we're gonna have a lot of different wood tones going on here and it was actually because of this and at this point because of the repairs on the feet i did make the decision to paint part of this piece so don't freak out i'm not painting the whole thing it's going to be beautiful it's going to be classic looking but this old gal has some more rooms and definitely want to keep the integrity of the piece and save as much of the wood as i possibly can paint is not always the enemy for furniture in some cases paint actually preserves the wood that's why they've been doing it for hundreds of years painting furniture is not a new thing but that said i personally my own opinion i personally don't believe every piece needs to be painted or should be painted so i don't take these decisions lightly when i do decide to paint a piece or part of a piece i know there are wood purists out there who don't believe there should be paint on any type of wood furniture and i don't entirely agree with that not all wood is created equally and sometimes painting a piece can really enhance sections of the piece this channel falls into sort of a strange category because i'm not entirely a wood purist and i'm not entirely a furniture painter i do both and i base each decision entirely on the piece in front of me the joint here at the top on both sides head leaves so i applied some wood glue there left this clamped up for an entire day i didn't have clamps long enough so i did my favorite little trick where i put them back to back [Music] while those were drawing i went ahead and started to scrape and sand the rest of the dresser [Music] i found this odd little spot at the bottom it was actually a dowel so someone must have made a repair at one point a different type of wood it's like archaeology some of these furniture makeovers i love that i love learning about the history of each piece by taking it apart [Music] i decided to just straight up sand the top rather than scraping it the finish was so thin anyway you can see quite a bit of discoloration from the water stains and then this strange white mark right here i'm gonna get a better look at that here in a minute and i couldn't figure it at first exactly what that was so i put some mineral spirits on give it a very light scrub and i think i know what's going on here so i think what happened here is that at some point it was a very dark stain maybe a burn i don't know but somebody tried to fix it by sanding it and they sanded through the mahogany veneer on the top into the next layer that's unfortunate i don't have any mahogany veneer that would match this so i'm gonna have to do a little bit of art to try to camouflage that as much as possible i gave the outsides of the drawers of fresh sand as well as the runners on the bottom i like to do that it just makes them nice and smooth and ready to go because these drawers are curved on the front i didn't want to use a power sander so i'm choosing to hand sand [Music] it was a little piece of the trim on the side of this drawer that was extremely loose so i just popped it off it was barely hanging on trust me and i just added some glue and taped it in place with some red artist tape so that it would stay still while i clamped it [Music] i'm using fusion mineral paint in the color kohl black to do this little section at the top base the middle sections in between the drawers as well as that little decorative trim around the drawer faces themselves that's all that's getting painted everything else is going to be wood grain i'm using odi's safer solvent which is kind of an alternative to mineral spirits and it smells delicious by the way just like all the other odis products but i'm using this to number one clean the sanding dust off the piece but also so that i can have a fresh surface to try and blend this previous repair in the first thing i tried and i tried about 15 things was some gel stain and the color just wasn't quite right so i used a little bit more of the safer solvent to wipe it off and i tried a different type of stain and color there were sections that looked promising here but neither stain was absorbing into that middle substrate layer which is usually saturated with glue so that's not overly surprising i did however use some of that first gel stain on the edge here it's at the front the top is actually a different type of wood with mahogany veneer over top of that so i needed that middle section to match the top which i'm only going to be using odie's oil on so my third attempt at dealing with this patch this would be so much easier by the way if i just had mahogany veneer but i don't so these are pre-mixed furniture pigments kind of like paints and this first color i'm using is actually the mahogany and it's i don't like it it's way too dark so i end up switching over to the walnut one which is a little bit closer to the wood tone on here and i'm trying a couple of different blends of colors trying to feather it out some but what happens a lot when you're trying to fill a big area like this it becomes very opaque and very dense whereas the wood has a lot of depth and clarity to it so it's not easy to do and i went in with a little bit of black to try to mimic the wood grain and the flecks that you see in the rest of the wood and in this shot here it actually doesn't look too bad but you'll see in a minute it's bad i've actually done this before with these exact products and had great luck it honestly just depends on the piece so before i get upset and just wipe that off which i do um i decided to go ahead and apply the otis oil just to see how it looks with it like obviously against the bare wood it looks extremely dark and terrible the odis oil is non-toxic it's food safe it smells great it's an amazing product that goes on like an oil but dries as a hard wax it's not a typical oil finish but even with the extra richness that the odis gives this little painted area is way too dark it looks terrible terrible i decide to walk away for a short bit from the top start taping up the drawers like i said i wanted to paint that little trim around the outside in black and then i'm applying the otis oil to the mahogany on the front as i mentioned in the beginning the mahogany veneer on these drawer fronts are different than the mahogany on the top and also on the sides of the piece they're all slightly different species slightly different colors and combined with the black paint it's going to give this piece a really unique look i'm using fusion mineral paints beeswax hemp oil combo to seal the paint and it does give it a little extra protection the fusion mineral paint does have a built-in top coat but i like to use it because it adds a little bit more depth and luster and if you look at the section that's painted just above the base here you can see there is a huge difference in the color once you apply this stuff i'm also adding odi's oil to the sides of the piece [Music] and there was one little section of missing trim right there that i forgot to do before i painted so i sanded off underneath added some wood epoxy i'm just shaping it here and once it's dry i'll sand it down paint it and then seal that too i do like some patina on brass i just want to shine this up a little bit so i'm using a bit of bar keeper's friend and i'm not trying to polish this to the point it looks brand new all i want to do is make it look a little less dingy so that looks a bit better and our lightly polished one here is on the right i also decided to give the inside of these drawers a little refresh so i'm just doing a really light hand sanding and then wiping that off with a damp towel and then using some hemp oil the drawers were pretty dull and thirsty and this is just going to make them look absolutely beautiful and nourish them i get asked a lot if this will stain clothes basically what i do is i wipe this all on let it soak in and then i wipe all of the excess off with a rag or shop towel and i have never had any issues with residual oil it basically cures dry to the touch and isn't going to affect your clothes [Music] now between the last attempt at that terrible spot on the top and the one i'm about to show you i think i went through about 15 different processes with different stains and paints i even tried here mixing my own custom sort of burnt sienna color and again this is kind of where having an art background comes in handy so what i opted to do this time around was go for a light tone first and because i am a professional artist and have been for years i have professional art markers and i decided to pull them out i wasn't having much luck with the pre-mixed colors so i basically used my art markers to create new wood grain and again it's not perfect i think it's about as good as i'm gonna get with the situation i have here i just really really did not want to paint this top so even if this isn't perfect it's still way better than painting it in my opinion so i guess in short i failed my initial ugly duckling challenge with that green piece it was honestly just it was too far gone the quality of workmanship wasn't there the quality of materials was not there and like i said in the beginning if you're doing this for a living sometimes you just you have to know when to walk away and unfortunately i did have to walk away from that one thankfully i did have this other piece in my work room which is currently a mess because i'm in the middle of renovating it so even though i didn't complete the initial challenge i did i think turn something into a beautiful swan is poor water damaged peace now has a new life and i'm excited to show it to you brace yourselves it's quite a transformation thank you so much for watching i will see you in the next video [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Transcend Furniture Gallery

Views: 147,865

Keywords: furniture, furniture flipping, painted furniture, furniture painting, diy, diy furniture, repurposed, refinished furniture

Id: 3Ro6s3rFnRE

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2022