I Found A Dresser In The Alley | Furniture Restoration · Veneer · Refinishing

I found today's project for free in an alley and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I should have left it there well sometimes I have a hard time passing up free stuff even if it's in really bad shape like the stressor is I think this had been out in the rain and it's got some water damage the veneers peeling up in places the veneer is also coming up in that bottom corner there and there's a big piece missing here and it's uh not marked there's no brand name on it no maker but there is a date in the back stamped on the back panel it says 1962. I kind of like the white laminate top and the white handle usually if something has a laminate top I replace it with wood veneer but this is in pretty good shape and I kind of like the white so I think I'm going to keep it I think to fix this I'll glue it back down with some epoxy but I'll do this layer first and then I'll glue this down I think that'll be easier to do one at a time I noticed something interesting about these drawers if you look at the back of the drawer front it looks to me like it's Pine and multiple pieces of pine one two three and then you can follow that seam between the pieces around the edge here's the seam between the two pieces and you can kind of see it here it's more visible here in the center you can see the difference between the color but the interesting thing is that the grain is continuous between the multiple pieces and this isn't a veneer here you can see how this grain line just flows between the two different pieces so I'm wondering if maybe this grain is fake grain and it's just painted on I'm going to strip off this finish and see what happens see if the grain comes off with the Finish or not okay well I've got all the finish off the drawer front and yes the grain was fake although you can still faintly see some on there whatever they used for that was a pretty resilient and uh there's still a bunch on there but now I'm really wondering if I should have left this in the alley not sure what I'm going to do with this I guess first thing is to remove the Finish from the rest of the drawers one more thing to note about these drawers is that they don't use dovetail joints which is perfectly fine with me I think sometimes people make too much out of dovetail joints on drawers I've seen plenty of pieces of poorly constructed furniture and really well constructed furniture with dovetail joints it doesn't really indicate quality on a mid-century piece it's not like they're hand cut dovetails anyway they're just made with a machine in a factory so no dovetails here and it's perfectly strong joint it's in great shape it's not loose or anything and in the back corner of the drawers it uses box joints which are also perfectly fine by me and the ones on here are still strong looks like my epoxy glue UPS worked and it's a good thing that I didn't glue down this veneer yet because I've decided to re-venere the whole thing since the drawer fronts are just Pine and not very attractive and in bad shape and the grain was just painted on wasn't real I thought about it and I think the best way to go is to just uh put some new veneer on everything so before I do that I want to take this veneer off since it's so loose foreign I got all the veneer off and then I filled any low spots with wood filler and then sealed it with shellac and now I'm ready to apply the veneer and I got this veneer pretty cheap in a thrift store so that's why I'm using it instead of buying new veneer because veneer is not generally cheap if you buy it new so now I'm just going to apply some contact cement and get this on foreign [Music] whenever I use paperback veneer I always seem to get this backing kind of making a mess I think this is the paper backing on the edge and you can't really sand it off because it's kind of gummy so usually I'll go over it with chisel like this or maybe a utility knife blade and get it off like that kind of tedious but eventually it'll come off before I veneer this drawer I'm going to take this off just to make it a little easier so I've got the veneer on the sides of the dresser and now I need to put it on the drawer fronts and I was a little bit worried about this angled edge here I wasn't sure if the veneer would go over it but it appears that it's going to go over it really easily um I was afraid the grain might crack or something but it doesn't look like it's going to do that so I'm just gonna go for it and hope for the best foreign foreign with the router on this drawer front here it dug into the edge I hate routers by the way but sometimes it's the best tool for the job or one of the best tools for the job if you use it correctly but here the wood gets really thin on the drawer and the bearing on the bit had nothing to ride against so it dug into the wood there just a little bit could be worse so I think I'm going to fix that just by filling it with some hard fill stick I think that should look pretty good foreign this one should be a pretty good match well that didn't work so well I'll try it without the little Dam there trying to reuse the stuff that is stuck to this blade it's almost there just needs a tiny bit more on the edge well I just got a brilliant idea I should turn this over so that gravity is helping me rather than not helping me okay so this should work better I just need to build it up just a little bit more on the bottom here [Laughter] it's good no one will ever know it's there unless they watch this video so there's a slight problem with the veneer I was stripping the front edge of the dresser and in the process some water got on the side onto the new veneer and in some spots it turned it a little bit black that's a problem because up till now my plan was to keep the veneer light and either not stain it at all or staying at a really light color so of course can't do that if it's got some black in it so I'm gonna try some oxalic acid over the veneer see if that gets rid of the black and if it does great if not then I guess I'll have to change plants go with the dark stain or maybe even Ebony's the whole thing just turn the whole thing black I'm not sure but I'm going to try the oxalic acid and hopefully that works okay so it's not even fully dry yet but I can already tell that the oxalic acid worked black spots are gone so it's good I decided to put veneer on these exposed Pine surfaces I just think it's going to help tie everything together it's going to make it easier to make it all look cohesive and I have enough veneer left to do it thank you just trying to wipe away the remnants of the glue that sometimes squeezes out the edge I'm using naphtha seems to work pretty well I've decided for the finish I'm going to do a gel stain I could have left this veneer natural and it would have looked fine but I decided to have a little fun with this one and the stain I'm using is actually a white gel stain and uh my plan is to wipe it on wipe off the excess and then take a paper towel that has some mineral spirits on it and wipe off even more so it hopefully will be just kind of a subtle white color you'll still be able to see the grain pretty well so hopefully that works okay now the mineral spirits good okay I think that worked out it's probably very subtle in the camera here you can see the difference between the one with the gel stain and one that I haven't stained yet and again subtle but I like it foreign which is going to be a clear satin lacquer the lacquer is dried overnight and looks great but it feels a little bit fuzzy so I'm going to go over it with some brown paper shopping bag she kind of crumpled it up and go over it gently this usually does a good job of taking care of just light fuzziness or grittiness and it's pretty safe to use you can see a little bit of the white lacquer dust on there and that actually worked great sometimes you may need something a little more aggressive like steel wool something like that but a lot of times that works perfect it's always a good idea to check stuff like this corner block which is just barely hanging on probably yep just pull it off so I'm gonna glue that back on I'm gonna try and clean off the old glue it's not really much left there I got some new glue on there and it's just kind of sticking there by itself but I would like to clamp it although there's really no easy way to clamp it so I'm just going to try driving a nail or two in there all right got some glue squeeze out when I did that so I think it's pretty good fit when I first got this dresser it had both of these drawer pulls on it on the same drawer on the top drawer I was going to clean this one up paint it and put it back on with this one but then I realized why I don't need two drawer pulls on the same drawer so I'm going to not put that one back on I'm just going to put this one on so I'm going to clean this up and put it back on I don't think I'm going to put gel stain on it um I'll try just leaving it natural and see how that looks well I changed my mind I am going to try the gel stain on this if I don't like it I can always take it off it's the next day after I apply the gel stain on this drawer pull and it looked a little too white to me today and also it was uh so thick on there that it still hadn't really dried so I wiped off a lot of it with some mineral spirits just left a little bit of it just kind of like I did on the rest of the dresser and I think that looks good I'm gonna put this on it just screws on and I need to open up the screw holes on the veneer side so I can get those screws in [Music] all right so I think this is the last thing I have to do before I can wrap this up and um I want to try to clean up this top it's actually in pretty good shape it's not too bad but I have this compound lying around and this and I'm just wondering if maybe it will help clean it a bit it might not do anything but I don't think it'll hurt it this stuff is pretty tough so I'm going to give it a try okay so um doesn't look worse so that's a good thing it may have helped a little bit it does feel smoother but didn't hurt okay so now I think I can just put it all back together and be done so you may have noticed I left this Pine section unstained and I think I'm going to leave it like that I think I kind of like the just a little bit sticking out there a little bit of a contrast it's not going to show as much down here uh probably will just be just a hint of it but I don't know I'm going to leave it like that for now see how it looks and here it is all finished thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 64,028

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Id: 6pse00xDpYI

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023