How To Fix Veneer on Furniture - DIY Tutorial

hi YouTube It's Bethany from Madeline Jean Antiques and Restoration in this video I'm going to attempt I say attempt to salvage lifting veneer on a dresser the dresser matches this gorgeous lady behind me um if you are a returning subscriber you know that I just shared a video the one before this one on how I refinish this piece from start to finish so thank you to those that are returning to my channel if you are new here I teach everything under the umbrella when it comes to refinishing restoring upcycling painting furniture and I dabble in I sprinkle in a little home DIY projects as well my name is Bethany and I own this little company called Madeline Jean Antiques and restoration and I've been doing this for a little over 10 years so welcome welcome welcome so we're gonna get to the other side of my workshop and we're gonna attempt to salvage the top of this dresser if I can't do that then you're gonna watch me or how I remove veneer because sometimes it's not salvageable so enough of my yakin let's start walking let's get to the other side okay guys we are on the other side of my workshop this is where all the magic happens or at least I like to think it does but first we gotta say hi to Tom my good little good luck charm there that's Tom I found him in a dresser not too long ago it was lining a dresser drawer and I thought you know what Magnum PI you need some wall space and you need to be looking at me and I need to be looking at you so hello Tom all right you guys this is the dresser behind me she's a beaut she's sturdy she's got some good bones the drawers are in fantastic condition there's just some little chipping veneer on the side here and on the other side as well it's the top that has me concerned uh the veneer is definitely lifting here what makes veneer lift veneer has a tendency over time either the adhesive has gotten loose or it's old it's just not sticking as well or there's been moisture damage it's usually moisture damage sometimes you can fix it by taking a syringe filled with wood glue getting underneath there squirting the glue in and then clamping it or do what I do I put heavy bricks on the top of it sometimes I can flatten it and you can salvage it this one I'll show you a close-up video of what I'm dealing with because you can't see it from here but it's really lifting along the seams of the veneer so I will attempt to flatten it I don't how about this I'm a realist it doesn't look promising so if I can't do that I'm gonna have to end up stripping the entire top of the veneer what's underneath your guess as good as mine so we will find out together how I'm gonna proceed with this so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to clean the top it's super Dusty so I'm going to get out my crud cutter love this stuff I am a big big proponent of prepping your pieces of furniture I just never totally just dive in I want to clean it yes even before I sand this I'm going to clean it because it's just Dusty and it's probably got crud and oils and who knows what else so I'm going to use this product you're going to see me in a Time Lapse video spray it down and then I'm going to give you a close-up look of exactly what I'm dealing with here with this veneer [Music] okay here is said top of said dresser so you can see the veneer I hope this comes across can you guys see the strips of veneer that they laid down you can see the seams so there's one here that's a section here is a section here is a section and so on and so forth so remember veneer is just a thin overlay they glue it right there do you see how thin it is they just glue it on top of the dresser so what I'm noticing I got some extreme bubbling here where it's lifting up that's what gets me nervous it's not on the seam and it's it's really hard so I don't know if I can flatten that so there's my issue that's my big trouble spot and it's pretty long same with this one here this one's on the seam this one might be a little more promising here um when I run my hands across it those are the most trouble spots right there there's a good look at them so I'm going to sand first I want to see if I can get that to flatten it all with sanding and just kind of see what I'm dealing with other than that well I say other than that it's in pretty decent condition so I try my best when I can to salvage wood to salvage veneer and give it a second life sometimes it's beyond repair um I'm noticing down here we got some chips out all this stuff is relatively easy for me to fill in and fix this one we got a big section on this drawer do you see that there that one's going to be interesting I think I can do it I think I can I think again again you guys go watch my other video my last one that I just posted because I do show some veneer repair on the sister dresser to this one so let's get started you're going to see me sand the top on a Time Lapse video [Music] okay you guys I wanted to stop my time lapse video really quick so from what I can see my early assessment at this point I think I can salvature I think I think okay so from what I'm noticing when I run the sander over those areas that were bubbled it's almost like the bubbles kind of popped under the pressure of the sander so now it's it's got like a split um that's more noticeable but what's good about that is I can get that syringe under there fill it with glue those areas and flatten it and hopefully I can fix this veneer and we can keep this top because I would say the majority of the top is in decent condition the veneer it's just got some bad spots so I'm hoping I can fix some camouflage them and make it look like it never happens so I'm going to give you a close-up view of what I'm looking at right here that area that was really bubbled it now kind of just split okay here's that area so almost looks like looks like I have a little canyon going on okay do you see it right there so there there we go so now it's flatter but now I have like this Gap here so I'm hoping I can get it glued down we can fill that with some wood putty and when I stain it and I can draw on some wood grain and we can make it look like this never had an issue so I'm going to continue to sand the next time you're going to see me is this top is going to be completely sanded oh my gosh my breaker just went you guys like my whole my whole basement just went dark there's my ring light there's my outside window oh my gosh so I have an issue one of my Breakers keeps tripping just spontaneously and I looked it up and I got it figured out I just I have to replace the breaker this weekend so a 15 amp one so yeah so it it cuts this whole section of my workshop off this is where I do all of my work you can see I don't have anything overpowering over here oh my gosh that's so funny that happened while I was recording okay so I'm gonna finish sanding because my out my Outlets work they're fine it's just my lights my lights have gone so day in the life of a small business owner okay so the next time you see me the Top's gonna be sanded and then I'll take you step by step on how I'm gonna repair this veneer okay I have the entire top sanded and what I did overnight is I placed some bricks on the areas that were most bubbled and I wanted to flatten them as much as I could overnight before I start gluing down this veneer so you're gonna see me in this next part I'm going to do a close-up um you're just gonna see um I'm gonna have a syringe looks like this you can get these on Amazon they're very cool uh they're woodworking specifically for glue and what I'm going to do is I just put my tight Bond glue in here and you'll see me lift up the veneer I'm going to to get the needle part of the syringe in as far as I can without damaging the veneer further get that glue really in there and then securing it once again with bricks and then we'll see how flat we can get this veneer to lay so that's what you're going to see next okay this is the area that I'm going to be repairing first just it's very delicate so you can see I'm lifting it just slightly here getting that syringe the needle part in there carefully and then I'm just moving it just a little bit by little bit squeezing just a little dollop of glue under there and I just keep going along where it'll allow me to get that needle head in there without ripping more of the veneer so you can see see the glues right there coming out okay so I'm going to go up further this way do the same thing just squirt a little bit of glue reposition it s very tedious work takes a long time to repair veneer it's why a lot of people don't do it and a lot of people just paint over it but I'm determined to learn just a little more of The Craft of how to repair it okay that looks pretty good if I go on the other side here yeah there's a little bit on the adjacent side here I'm going to squirt some more over here and then I'm going to lay my bricks on top of it and let this dry and see how well I did with getting this little canyon fixed fixed I've got two more areas on the top here where the veneer has split where I'm going to try and glue it and flatten it down so I'm squeezing all the excess glue out there with my finger and I think I got an ample amount in there okay now I'm going to take a wet wipe I love having wet wipes in the workshop I am cleaning up the excess glue around that area as much as I can all right brick is going on top okay guys I am back after filling those areas on the top of this dresser with glue with the syringe if you remember and I laid bricks on them because again I'm trying to get those areas as flat as possible so my next step here and I say that with a little hesitant hesitancy in my voice because I'm trying to salvage this top I'm not sure it's going to be successful but I have to try and this is how you learn and my channel is all about learning and making mistakes and I'm letting you have a peek into how I work and how I learn and I don't know everything and really nobody on YouTube does um and you try these things and you hope you have some success so I'm gonna take the bricks off and from what I can see I've got a crater here which I think will be successful there's one in the middle here that I'm just a little nervous about because once I get it filled getting it sanded down flat I'm just a little nervous about it gonna be honest with you so what I'm gonna try and do next is I'm going to use Quick wood I love this stuff it's a wood putty and epoxy together you gotta wear gloves when working with this so you open it up and you just slice off what you want to use you mix it with your hands until you have a consistency um and then you put it on your project and it sets really fast so you're going to see me do a close-up video of what I'm actually filling in on the top I'm sure you can't see from where I'm filming right now so I'm gonna get this out of the tube here I say I'm gonna get it out of the tube and we're going to cut off what I need to use and we're going to close this back up as soon as possible so when I say mix it with a consistency in the middle there part of that's epoxy part of that's wood wood putty so we want to mix that together completely so I'm going to get to doing that and then we're going to do a close-up shot exactly what I'm filling here so you can have an idea okay I'm reading a little bit more off the label for you guys this quick wood the strength is 900 PSI the set time is 15 25 minutes it cures in one hour and this cure color is light tan that's what I'm going to be going for because you know I'm going to be staining this a a colonial Maple color so I just use this I'm going to pinch off a bit I'm going to get it back in that tube because I do not want it drying out at all get that top back on so it looks like this it looks like chewing gum the best way I can describe it and I just mix it together like that and then we're going to get it in where we need to place it and then you guys can see what I'm doing here we go okay here's the first little crater I'm putting it in right here you see that with my pinky I'm gonna get it in there this guy kind of stinks I'm gonna be honest let's get a little bit of the potent smell to it it's not that Pleasant I like the smell of Bondo better tell you that much all right she's going in there just fine yeah it's a bit of a split there so I'm finding this veneer once it you know split open it's like it's so dry again I'm gonna stand over that it looks awful then I got a big section right here where it's split trying to push it right get it really in there and I guess my decision will be made once I see how this sounds flat or not and we'll just take it from there because sometimes it's just what you got to do you got to try something see if it works and if it doesn't hopefully you learned something from it each Furniture project I work on I usually get something out of it sometimes a headache sometimes a nice paycheck but something all right I'm gonna keep doing this you guys and then I'll show you the final look of my Picasso Masterpiece here I'm working on okay you guys let's get sanding those areas that I applied the quick wood too so I'm going to be using my Festool stand sander I love this one this is the RTS 400 it's a rectangular one phenomenal sander love this thing I have it hooked up to my dust extractor let's get her fired up thank you foreign [Music] okay I'm going to show you a close-up of what this looks like I'm pretty excited okay it's not bad okay so this wood on the top already has this a lot of variation in the Grain and some of these lighter spots which I think once I get this stained I can camouflage these areas so look how flat those bubbles got it is completely flat now when I run my hands over it and I filled those gaps in with the quick wood and there's a little area there and then I went around there was another little area there that I filled in so okay now I'm going to give this one light sanding oh this was 150 grit that I was just using on the top here I still have to be very very careful this is thin veneer I'm probably going to take 180 grit now to the entire top here give it one final sanding before I do wood conditioner and stain it [Music] thank you [Music] okay everyone I'm at the tail end of fixing this veneer on top of this antique dresser this has been a drawn out project because it takes a while to fix veneer and I've also been doing a couple other projects in between this one so I was able to save the top I got the veneer flat we put that epoxy um that resin wood putty on the top but you'll see when I do a close-up of the top the putty did not take the stain as much as I would like it to so I have been dabbling with some new products I'm really trying to up my game here with woodworking so I am using a product line by Mohawk if you're not familiar with them go Google them and everything that I'm listing throughout this video I will post links beneath the video description so if you're interested in dabbling in this yourself you can go order some all this stuff can be found online through Amazon so the first thing um that I'm going to mention is some of these products are a little toxic especially this one here this one's by Mohawk this is their two minute touch up brushing liquid so this you have about like a two minute open time frame to work this what do you use this with you use this with their Mohawk powder stains they have powder stains in a wide range of colors the colors come in the kit they have from white to black a couple yellow Shades a red shade and a ton of brown Shades everyone Under the Sun so I bought I I believe this is like an intermediate kit there are one two three four eight there's 12 in this kit and I have the lids open these are the colors that they have what you do is you dip a fine tip brush in that brushing liquid now remember there's like a two minute open Period here that you can work this you dip it into the powder swirl it around on a glass plate on in a glass jar and then you transfer that onto the wood putty and you try your best to make it blend in and make it look like that oopsie never happened now did I do a little bit of it last night I did for the first time so I am all new to this I'm going to tell you up front I am learning as I go there's not many videos out there that I found on YouTube that talk about these blending um stain powders so I'm all self-taught here on my channel and I'm letting you in letting you into my world up I'm a little frustrated with this because I like a good challenge but I like to learn something fast and I want to master it as quick as possible so I'm a little hard on myself so I have to let myself I have to give myself a little slack here this is new for me and I can tell the more I practice this I will get better at it but right now I'm not the best at it I will tell you that up front so in the putty when the putty has dried you have to go in and create some grain look to that putty because right now that putty's flat has no character to it so that's when um an exacto knife is going to come into play here I'm going to show you in real time we're going to do the top of this dresser and I say that with a chuckle because if this works fabulous I got it on film and if it doesn't work like yeah I'm gonna be a little bummed out but um we're gonna give a go of it I'm gonna show you guys how I do it I already made a video this morning or last night I don't know I only got like three hours of sleep so I'm trying to remember when I did it um where I showed a close-up of what I did on one of the drawers this dresser has had a lot of missing veneer on it and I thought okay this is a great piece for me to practice on I got the dresser for free and this is how I learn this is how I've always learned in the last 10 years with Woodworking and refinishing Furniture is I gotta make a lot of mistakes before I learn so remember that you too I need to take my own advice but you out there as well don't beat yourself up too hard it's a learning process and through our mistakes that's how we learn and that's how we get skilled and that's how we Master something so I'm gonna quit chatting and you're gonna see me on the top of this dresser here I'm gonna take my X-Acto Knife and you're gonna see me um put in lines that will emulate a wood grain and then we can get to mixing and I can kind of find the rate the right shade here of what I want to put on here you can blend these powder stains but I'm finding um I'm not blending them as much right now I'm kind of just like layering them maybe that's not right the right way to go with this so please anybody out there that's watching this video if you made it this far please give me a comment suggestions on how you work with these because I'm new to this so let's get going okay guys I'm gonna go in here gotta take my glasses off yeah I'm not old and I'm just gonna start to put some little little lines in you don't want to do anything too repetitive like an exact pattern remember a grain is usually random you get some little strokes in there with longer ones and that's all I'm doing is I'm edging in some fake wood grain in this wood putty because once we put these blending stains on you'll see how it takes into these lines that I'm making okay what I'm first starting to do is kind of do a tester of blending two colors so the two colors that work the best for these areas to try to match up with the rest of the veneer on the top of the stressor this color here has a nice light brown color to it this is extra dark walnut and if I add a hint just a smidge just a touch of the burnt sienna you can see we do have some orange in here some redness and that's what I get when I mix those two together it might be just a tad too dark I'm not sure so what I'm going to do is I think I'm just going to brush in the light brown and see where that gets me and then if I need to add a little of the burnt sienna I'm gonna go from there so that's where I'm at um always do a tester from what I like to always tell people never just go at something blindly do a little prep work here and that's what I'm just trying to do here is just get a color match as best as I can okay here we go all right so you dip it in the brushing liquid like that use fine tip brushes and you just get it right on the tip there and then you dip it in the powder pigment and then I like bring it back here dab It Off see how opaque it is I'm just going to bring a little more over I didn't get much on that dip it really grabs to the brush as soon as you dip it if you've been to a nail salon you'll know what I mean when I say that if you've ever had acrylic nails done it's kind of like that all right I'm going to come in here wish me luck here we go okay I'm just gonna bring it in it's looking a little too dark but I'm not certain it's going to bring it all the way down and then I might just take a feather brush because I don't like how it lays sometimes that is not looking the best so I'm gonna take a feather brush in here I find that it gets clumpy in areas and I don't like that this is like a gel that liquid is like a gel and it can lay heavy in certain spots and if I find if I bring that brush in just camouflage it a little bit better [Music] um we're getting there okay mistake from me see I'm learning these brushes even though they're considered fine they are not fine enough even this is too big of a tip you guys we want extra extra extra fine look at the difference I'm having much success with a very very small tipped brush so for example I can get into this one better than I did this one my borders got kind of all wonky on that one because I use the thicker brush so definitely use a very very very thin brush okay from afar not too bad close up not so good uh there's one that I'm really not liking this one here looks awful this one not too bad there's one that I do like that I did look at that I'm looking for it oh this one right here this it's not bad not bad not bad for my first go-round this one's terrible and this one's so-so so I don't know you guys I need more practice yeah look from like right here they're so noticeable I need to get better at blending them in and camouflaging and working on my colors you guys I'm getting better I'm getting better okay so I went over now with those areas with a graining pencil to soften it up a bit and I used a kind of like a burnt red color oh my gosh it helped soften up that one my big one I'm still working on that and then that other one is rate here okay it's looking better not very streaky look like it's blending okay okay I'm seeing some promise here these graining pencils are also by Mohawk I will put the link under the video description I would say for sure you gotta get these okay everyone this concludes this long video on how I was able to salvage the veneer on top of that dresser and I'm so glad that I was able to because it's the sister dresser to this taller one here and now they match now they both are stained they look gorgeous and I was able to modernize this pair of dressers but also highlight that natural beautiful veneer on both pieces so I'm very happy uh my repair looks pretty good I'm gonna give it like an eight out of a ten not too shabby for my first time using some of those Mohawk powdered stains so like I said earlier in the video I will list all the products that I use used in this video it'll be below the video description and until I see you guys again little biscuit and I we are going to say toodaloo here from Madeline Jean Antiques and restoration and please please like this video share it the more exposure I get online better for me and my small business and I truly do hope that I'm teaching others that are dabbling in refinishing furniture and finding some reprieve from the craziness of life I find it therapeutic so I hope other people do as well so if you have any questions on the text techniques that I used or the products in this video just drop me a comment in the comment section uh below the video and I'm happy to help so until we see you again Biscuit Goes shut up mom you talk too much I'm like I know we say toodaloo right buddy oh [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Madeline Jean Antiques & Restoration, LLC

Views: 27,518

Keywords: diy, howtofixveneer, repairingveneer, furniturerestoration, refinishedfurniture, antiquedresser, mohawkrefinishingproducts, homedecor, madelinejeanantiques

Id: 1wyuRyVz7yA

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023