Destroyed and Falling Apart Antique Buffet Finds A New Life With a Stunning Bleached Wood Style

on today's video you are going to see me and my husband transform this completely destroyed antique buffet into something beautiful [Music] do [Music] [Music] hello and welcome back to desert diy if you are new here my name is corey today is the day we are doing the ugly duckling challenge i have so many people that have put their blood sweat and tears into these projects and i will have the playlist with all of their projects linked down below i will be picking a winner out of all of these projects for the biggest transformation and i will feature them next week on my community tab here on youtube now the first piece that i was going to do for this project is this one right here here it is it has a door on top an old school pencil sharpener which i'm tempted to test that out maybe keep it if it works but i just have a feeling that this is lead paint so i bought this lead test off amazon red means lead so let's check it out yeah to squeeze here oh that worked oh i can't squeeze that one oh no no ah there it goes shake it and then squeeze it until the yellow yellow stuff comes out sorry there's flies everywhere oh there we go there we go it's happening all right let's do right here actually let's do it on the front kind of flies all over me supposed to do it for 30 seconds well that is red and it says red means lead here is the little checker confirmation just in case you have a piece that is already red painted you know you wouldn't be able to see the red but confirmed definitely is lead paint i can still keep those cute handles though so that's good the piece that i ended up doing was actually this buffet and i nicknamed it the honda civic because it is just about as big as a honda civic and it had it had so much damage it was left in a carport for probably many years and exposed to the weather and elements here in the desert and it was completely destroyed i was honestly worried that i wasn't going to be able to give this piece any purpose but sometimes those are the best befores and afters because they're so bad to start with that you can't believe how they turn out in the end and this one is exactly like that here we go [Music] a little bit of history on this piece that i discovered as i was looking around was that it's probably made during the great depression the reason that i think this is because furniture that was made during the great depression was made in a different way that was more cost effective and this piece is showing signs that it was done that way instead of having wood carvings glued on you can tell there were areas where there was something painted on like a little design and before that it would have actually been an applique of some sort that was more high quality and then i saw a maker's mark on the back but i could not find anything about this maker mark other than it's from tennessee here is where that painting would have been and all of the different layers of the veneer and the little details here that are coming off and missing kind of give me more of the history of the piece and what it would have looked like originally it would have been a really beautiful piece but since it is so far gone and so damaged i'm going to have to go with a completely different look than what the original would have had although the veneer looks really horrible right now it is actually a good thing that it was on here in the first place because had it not had all these layers of veneer then the weather would have destroyed the solid wood makings of the piece on the inside the first thing that we're going to work on is that brace underneath the piece i always start my pieces upside down and this is no different i'm starting it upside down and we are removing that brace that's on the bottom and fixing this back broken leg here i have all my supplies ready to go in this cute little bag that a company called molly ali sent to me it is a felt bag which i think is really neat so that it's not made of anything that's toxic and you know me trying to avoid anything toxic at the moment since i am pregnant but it fits a ridiculous amount of my tools in it and right now i'm going to go ahead and start working with my glue and fixing that back leg but i will have this cute little bag linked in my description box down below it is a mother owned business if you want to support them [Music] [Music] do [Music] now that i've gotten the leg all glued and screwed back together thanks to my husband i go in and put the wheel back in i was so lucky to find that the original wheel that was missing on this piece was in one of the drawers so i just softly hammer it down into the leg and the glue helps to hold it in there as well so i wanted to make sure that i hammered it back down into its original hole while i still had that fresh glue in there to hold it and keep it strong the next thing that we start working on is the rest of the bracing the glue that was originally on all these dowels has completely dried up and disappeared and we are using the super professional method of banging it off using a screwdriver and then sanding each of the dowels before gluing them and putting them back together [Music] a neat carpenter's trick that i've picked up along the way is to use toothpicks inside board out holes so when the holes for the screws get too big you can just throw a little piece of a toothpick in there and break it off and then it will make the new hole much smaller and the old screw will screw back in like a dream [Music] once everything was dried the next day we flipped the piece right side up again and then my husband worked his tail off getting all of the veneered pieces off of this piece like i mentioned before although the veneer is in such horrible condition it was kind of a blessing in disguise because it saved the wood underneath from the weathering that the veneer took for it and the fronts of these drawers were so far gone that i thought that we were going to just have to scrap them and just have open shelving right there in the middle which still would have looked neat but thankfully we ended up trying and trying again to get all of the yucky veneer pieces off and eventually i had to off camera spend two days covering it in wet towels to soften up the veneer that was on there to get it all the way off including those moldings that you can see going all the way around the bottom and the sides of the drawer [Music] the tool you see my husband using here is a hand planer and the reason he's using that is because the water damage created some peaks and valleys in the finish of the wood on the top so he's just hand planing it down to a level surface so that way it's nice and smooth and flat before i fill in those cracks using dixie bell's mud [Music] in order to get the rest of the stain off of these ornate legs we used a twenty dollar soda blaster gun from harbor freight and we were using instead of baking soda walnut shells since they were out of the soda but i would prefer to use soda had they had it [Music] since the top was so many different colors and looked like a hot mess i'm going to create a new wood finish on the top using reticut liquid wood which i got off of amazon you can water it down which i realized later on so it's a little thick here in the beginning but i did my first coat over the really dark areas let that dry and then did a full coat over the entire top and then let that dry before the next step while i'm waiting for it to dry i'm going to use some limiting wax to give a bleached wood effect on this piece the woman that i am giving this piece to is like family to me she was my childhood best friend's mother and we still stay in touch and i think she's just the greatest woman ever and she wanted this bleach would look like a woman on instagram who is called vintage porch she is known for this finish so i'm just trying to recreate that without actually having to smell bleach throughout this whole project [Music] those first two coats are dry i'm going to be using this wood graining tool these paper towels and the reticut that i have since watered down a little bit to do another coat and then create a new wood grain finish on the top since i am using the same color liquid wood over the same color again it won't show up as drastic of a wood grain as if you were to use two different colors over each other but i wanted to have that bleached wood effect so a subtle wood grain is perfect for the application that i'm trying to do [Music] another blessing that this piece gave to us is that it had all the original hardware in excellent condition my husband washed it for me using a wire brush and some soap and water and they turned out beautifully brass almost as if they were new but better than new and i like to call that good as old [Music] i'm going to put some more of that liming wax on the top and then follow that up using big mama's butter from dixie bell to do a ceiling coat big mama's butter is like vaseline for furniture it hydrates it it gives it a little bit of a sheen and it seals everything in the rest of this piece i'm going to leave raw with just the limiting wax on it so that it can age and continue to look even more beautiful with the new patina that it gets from its new home at my friend's mom's house [Music] voila here is the finished antique buffet when you have pieces that have been through a lot i like to make sure that i show its story i'm not trying to hide what it's been through or make it look as though it were brand new all of these cracks and chips and dents and marks are part of what it's been through the places that it's lived in and what it has survived and i think that is a beautiful metaphor for everything that we go through in life and who we are as people and so reflecting that in my projects is very important to me [Music] thank you so much for watching if you like what you saw today don't forget to hit subscribe and if you want to see more of the projects that are in this playlist click this link right here

Channel: Desert DIY

Views: 83,948

Rating: 4.8479409 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: gDqfBcFCdUo

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021