JAW DROPPING Damaged Art Deco Buffet Makeover

this video is sponsored by care of I picked up this cabinet from Facebook Marketplace almost a year ago and it was listed at 300 or 350 I don't really remember but it was a bit out of my budget so I knew this seller I'd bought from him before I just threw $200 out there just to see what would happen and he actually agreed to it this does need a fair bit of work so I felt that was a fair price it was a bit big to fit in my Jeep so I looked to a local who runs a business delivering all kinds of things she delivers by Julie and Julie came and helped me load it got it in her van and then brought it home this old art deco gal needs some work inside and out so grab your snacks and stay tuned my name is Angie and I refinish furniture sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash welcome to my work room okay so having a good look at this piece from afar it doesn't look too bad but it's once you get up close that you really see everything that needs to be done here this is a very old shellac finish and in many parts you can see that it's actually alligatored there are areas where the Finish is scratched and missing there's some pretty bad staining here on this one [Music] side the sides have actually at some point lost their veneer there would have been a walnut veneer panel over top of this solid wood substrate and what probably happened is over time the solid wood expanded and cracked which you're going to see all throughout this cabinet but it probably split the Veneer at that point you can actually still see some of the adhesive and at some point someone peeled it off and just tried to stain it to kind of match a couple of the doors are a bit sticky you can see this one here is actually wearing quite a bit here on this bottom panel and that is because the bottom panel itself has also shifted the floor of this cabinet is made up of several solidwood pieces that have again split over time and here on the left side of the cabinet the veneer is missing as well this is the issue with solid wood where I live it's just not the most stable product it moves with the weather you can see a lot of the alligatoring here on the Finish that sometimes also has to do with heat and humidity and damage from sunlight but this is still a really cool piece these handles are phenomenal and I love these little Bagel light knobs it still has the original Caster so I'm going to be keeping all of the original Hardware making any repairs that need to be made to the piece which are numerous actually and then addressing the Finish itself having a look at the construction here of these curved doors is actually actually two sets of curved doors doors are made up of panels of solid wood glued together with this beautiful bural Walnut veneer on the outside and just a plain veneer on the inside a little veneer sandwich if you will this is very typical of these older pieces and 99% of the time when you see a beautiful burled piece like this it's a veneer sheet so in terms of this alligator finish um which is also called crazing it doesn't always need to be repaired sometimes these cracks are so large that it actually goes down and exposes the raw wood that's a problem you definitely want to reconstitute it if that's the case or refinish it there are definitely people that love that look and I can understand why it definitely looks cool but technically it is finish damage and I was specifically saving this piece to show you guys how to reconstitute an old shellac finish but more about that [Music] later [Music] these OU doors are much different in construction to the inner doors these are basically just wood trim pieces with two layers of veneer that's it there's no solid wood in between someone were to kick this or hit it really hard you'd probably punch a hole right through [Music] it [Music] bite was first invented in about 1907 and was widely used up until about the 50s where it started to kind of phase out a little bit in favor of more modern plastics it's often regarded as one of the first synthetic Plastics and certain balite items like vintage radios some furniture hardware phones that sort of thing some of them can be quite valuable so if you ever are refinishing a piece that has B aite Pools and you don't want to use them don't toss them either keep them for for another piece or try selling them online like on eBay or something like that because you probably will get a few bucks for [Music] them so while this piece is full of cracks there are a few cracks that are supposed to be here this bottom leg assembly is actually made up of three chunks of wood and is held together with these little Fasteners as well as the screws that attach it to the bottom panel now what happened here on this side is that the bottom panel has cracked in several spots and shifted everything up so basically this piece has to move down and get reglued and just to kind of show you if I give this a little tap and kind of push these two together you see that it all just fits nicely but this really needs to be repaired properly this is another spot where it is cracked and yeah there's I think four or five good splits along this whole bottom panel so I'm actually going to remove the entire bottom and glue it back [Music] [Music] together once the screw from the bottom are all out I'm just giving these a little tap to release them from these doos and pulling this off piece by piece which I will then glue back [Music] together so let me just say first of all I do not have the right type of clamps or work a to be doing glue-ups like this but I'm doing the best I can I ended up cutting some scrap boards to helped support this because a lot of times when you're gluing up these old panels not only are they split but they tend to have copped or warped over time and unless your plan is to rejoint them and plan them down to get them perfect to glue up again it's just something that you're going to have to accept so I'm doing the best I can here with what I have to work with I just want wanted to take a quick moment to say a huge thank you to today's sponsor sponsors like care of are the reason that I'm able to do some of these longer videos I'm very selective about the companies I choose to work with I've actually been using carab for over a year now I will not work with a brand if I don't believe in the products what kov is is essentially a personalized and curated set of products like vitamins and protein powders probiotics and more that are all recommended for you based on their online quiz I love that their Vitamin Pack pack s are easy to take with you on the go and are compostable and although your first order comes with this little dispenser if you want to reuse that you can order your packs just in a box to save some packaging I've tried out most of their products in the last year and one of my favorites is the plant protein and today I feel like chocolate so that's what I'm going to use I'm just adding a scoop to some water sometimes I'll add it to some soy milk shake it up and it's creamy and smooth every time my life can be a little bit hectic so I like that care of sort of takes the guess workor out of this portion of my life and also as things change I can totally switch up my order and get something different that might work better for me one thing that I've struggled with my entire life is self-care and as I get older and I just turned 44 a few days ago um I'm starting to realize there are some reasons for that but I'm getting a handle on that and I find systems like this really helpful so this is something you've also struggled with just go online fill out the quiz and see what results you get and if you want to take the plunge and try something like this use my code to save 50% off your first order [Music] cheers [Music] [Music] I let this glue dry overnight and then removed all the clamps and it was time to clean up this side of it now I didn't have to refinish this side but it had a lot of scratches and was pretty dingy so I initially started to see if I could just sand through this old finish but if you look here this is basically what the shellock turns into with the stripper it's just a gooey mess and I would have gone through a million pieces of sandpaper trying to do that so some stripper with a putty knife and then some steel wool and then a light sanding was all that this really [Music] needed there was this one section here and this was a manufacturer's defect you can see it here it's just character as they would say but I'm opting to try and plane just that one section down and it finally gives me the opportunity to use this hand planer and this was actually a gift from a viewer from a long time ago um there was no note in the box with it so I have no idea who sent it but it was you thank you so much I did a couple of very very light passes here just to clean that up a little bit so it would look smooth on the inside my initial goal with this was to reconstitute this old shellac so the first thing you want to do is clean it up completely to get off any old durage Prime and old polishes shellac is alcohol based and to get rid of this alligator finish often what you would do is just brush on a little bit of alcohol sometimes this takes a couple of tries if it's really deep cracking you can also take some steel wool or fine sandpaper and kind of lightly sand some of that texture off and then you can add a couple of coats of fresh shac if you want to this was what I was going to do with the entire piece initially but once I did this I realized I didn't really like the original color and that's something that happens quite often for me with art deco pieces and the original finishes I just find them so dull and it doesn't always show off the Grain in the best way possible so even though I ended up going in a completely different route I still wanted to show you this part you can actually see how the alcohol is melting into that old shellac and already looks a bit smoother but you would want to repeat this a couple of times and then add some fresh shellac and you can see quite a difference both in the color and the texture so this has absolutely beautiful bur Walnut and it reminds me of this radio piece that I did recently and you can see how much better the refinished one looks and same with these Art Deco style night tables the grain just looks so much better without that semi-opaque shellac so that's why I'm opting to do a different type of refinish then simply reconstituting the shellac these pieces here held the two drawers and not only are they super wobbly cu the base isn't there but there's also cracks in them so that's going to have to be repaired this whole drawer assembly is quite primitive actually I'm going to see if I can rig up something a little bit better here later on but for the time being I'm just going to pop these out and glue and clamp [Music] these there are a few repairs to make on the drawers but I actually don't even really like the drawers now here the whole bottom had split off so at some point someone put in a plywood patch which you can see there um I don't love these patchy drawer bottoms and there's a fair bit of goopy glue on the inside here and I just I don't love these drawers even looking at the back panel the assembly is just not great like this rabbit here is just terrible but so initially I was going to just reuse the drawer faces and rebuild the rest of the drawer and I even milled up some pieces of birch and uh got them ready to make new drawer sides out of I saved what pieces of birch I could from the original drawers glued them all up clamped them but then I ended up deciding to do a completely different thing but I'm going to show you how I did that part [Music] anyway so initially there were two drawers here in this middle section instead of two drawers I want to make three drawers I want to have a very shallow top drawer for cutlery or utensils kind of a medium siiz middle drawer and then a larger drawer on the bottom now this bottom drawer will be larger than the original bottom drawer and I want to give these solid Walnut drawer faces just where the rest of the cabinet on the outside is Walnut veneer I thought it would be nice to have some Walnut on the inside instead of all amber colored Birch so these are pieces of solid Walnut that I bought a while back from someone nearby who makes cabinets now these are all his end Cuts or off Cuts basically just his scrap pieces and I like to pick them up super cheap because I don't really build Furniture um I mostly use this kind of stuff for repairs but I thought these would be perfect to construct these drawer faces out of for the drawer boxes themselves I'll be using 1/2 in Plywood And then attaching these Walnut faces to the drawer [Music] boxes now if anybody else has this rigid job site table saw let me know in the comments below if you have this same trouble with it um it's great for making Quick Cuts that don't necessarily have to be precise but I'm having a lot of problems with the fence moving and kicking out on the end either toward the blade which is definitely not good or away from the blade which is also not good but at least I don't have to worry about Kickback that way the reason this is such a pain in the rear for what I'm trying to do is that I need these measurements to be precise and man it was a struggle I just had to keep adjusting and adjusting and I'm really not sure what to do because I don't really have the space for a full-size like cabinet saw but man it was hard trying to get perfect measurements with the saw and I've run into it a couple of times but it seems like the more complex things that I try to do the more apparent it is so I don't know I'm going to have to do some research and see if there's something that I can do to kind of fix [Music] that [Music] now one little trick that I use with my clamps every now and then is reversing one of the ends not every clamp can do this but a lot of them can so basically all you do is flip around one side and then your clamp becomes a spreader and to pop this back in that's exactly what I'm doing I'm just popping up this board ever so slightly just enough to fit that in and then I can put this back into [Music] place once I have this nailed back in place I'm just using a nail set to punch these down just below the surface of the Shelf now what was once super wobbly is now very firm and it's time to finally get to cleaning the inside of this piece now I actually strongly considered refinishing the inside of this I'm spending all this time to redo the outside and it seems like a little bit of a cop out to just leave the inside as it is but aside from being a fairly unattractive color there's nothing really wrong with the inside it needed a really good scrub and there were a few sections that needed some shellac reapplied especially here I'm not sure it looks like something sat here and ate through the finish so all I'm doing is just brushing on some new [Music] shellac I don't brush shellac a lot um it tends to go on quite thick but where this is just an interior shelf it's the fastest and easiest way to do it so having a good look at this big stain here I went through a couple of options when trying to decide what to do with this piece initially I was thinking I would try to re amalgamate the Finish which is when you add alcohol and more shellac to a shellac finish to sort of reconstitute what's there but there's actually quite a few finish issues with this and often on these big beautiful burled and you know highly figured Walnut pieces it's my personal preference to have more of a clear finish than shellac I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up having to use oxalic acid on this [Music] [Music] stain so it was pretty common on these Art Deco style pieces to have different colored Woods which is funny because often they would stain or tone them to all look the same color even though they're different woods but other pieces will highlight a two-toned like contrast and sometimes that is having the main body of the piece be dark with light trim my personal favorite is actually what I'm going to end up doing with this piece which is having the beautiful walnut wood grain be just natural and then staining these really light pieces to be very dark so you're still getting the contrast but it's very moody and deep and just so luxurious looking and you could go the opposite and have these light pieces stay very light but really comes down to personal [Music] preference so when this is sanded lightly you can barely see that stain but as soon as I put anything on top of this that dark ring is going to pop right back out and I will show you what I mean here in a [Music] moment I'm just going to use a little bit of the ODI safer solvent on this top and what this is going to do is it's going to give me a really good look at what this is going to look like with just a clear finish on it you can do the same thing with mineral spirits or Napa now initially this might not be apparent but as this sort of sets in you can definitely still see that big waterm Mark I also like using the sa solvent just to clean actually after sanding and before finishing so from this angle yeah you can definitely see that ring so I am going to hit this with some oxyc acid once the safer solvent has [Music] dried so for oyc acid you just want to mix some into some warm to hot water ratios vary a little bit um everyone seems to have their own sort of water to oxyc acid ratio that they like I generally add enough to the point where it stops dissolving and then that's what I end up using so you only ever want to apply this to raw wood um that's already been lightly sanded if you just strip the piece and then put the oxyc acid on before standing you're not really going to have any good results you want to do the light sanding first in most cases it's preferable to put the oxyc acid over the entire top of the piece to make sure that everything lightens equally which is what I'm doing here let the oxyc acid completely dry and then you're going to rinse it really well with some water and that's what I'm doing here you can see after the first round of oxyc acid that the stain is much much lighter I can still see it a little bit I'm I'm just going to give this a really good rinse and when you're dealing with veneer which is what this is I try not to let the water that I'm rinsing with um stand on the veneer because it can mess it up so this is completely clean now and you can just see a couple of these concentric circles so I'm going to do something I don't normally do which is ADD just oxalic acid on these Rings themselves and we'll just see how that turns out [Music] so for the details that I'm going to be doing darker I'm using a San water-based stain and the reason I sometimes use water-based over oil is because it's really easy to get a very opaque stain almost like a paint but not quite a [Music] paint what I want to do here I want this to be pretty opaque and I'm actually going to be using a dark toner on top of it which is going to give it a nice glossy finish which should contrast really well with the OD oil that I'm going to put on the Walnut which is a more subtle finish in terms of [Music] Sheen if you've been around my channel for a while you know that od's oil is one of my favorite products to use it's a tongue oil based finish it's super I want to say easy to apply but it's also pretty easy to mess it up so basically what you want to do is apply it with one of these little applicator pads rub it really well into the grain let it sit for a while and then you're going to buff it off and I mean all of it off not removing all of the oil is pretty much the only thing that can go wrong with this stuff if you don't get all of the excess oil off while you're buffing what will happen is it well a couple of things it could get pretty sticky they could look very dull and the sheen on Odis is controlled by how high you sand so on this piece I'm going for a fairly satin finish but if you look here at this piece I did a while ago you can get a mirror finish with odies is just all about how you sand [Music] okay so what the heck is going on here Angie um as I was mentioning earlier my table saw was proving to be unreliable for very accurate cuts and I need to make a bunch of Doos for these drawers I do have a rder but I don't have a rder table so I opted to quickly make one uh this is just temporary I'm actually going to be using my laser to cut a new custom acrylic base plate for this little mini rder so that I can make myself a more permanent rder table but in the meantime this will do the trick this is just a trim rder I do have a fullsize rder as well but this was just super quick and easy to set up this way using a rder is pretty messy so make sure you use a particulate mask I don't know why I can't say that safety goggles and hearing [Music] protection what this little doohickey is going to do for me is give me a consistent repeatable dat you can see on these two test pieces here even though these aren't going to be joined this way you can see how accurate it is it just these would snap right into each other and give me a nice locking joint and that's what I want for my [Music] drawers [Music] I'm going to be staining the drawer boxes in the same ciman waterbased stain that I was using on the outside of the piece normally when you see me use this stuff it's this color which is antique or sorry know American Walnut uh which is the one on the left here the one on the right is a new one that was actually sent to me by someone who works for San and this is a beautiful color this is called dark walnut and that's the color that I am using on this [Music] piece [Music] now I know I'm not going into a huge amount of detail here with how I built these drawers um there's a couple reasons for that number one it's boring as hell and number two this was my first time making drawer boxes like this so it was a bit of a learning experience and even though all of these drawers turned out great they're super sturdy they're Square they're solid and I know that they're not going to swell with the seasons I'd rather sort of perfect the build sequence before I really tell anyone else how to do it to be honest so these are those solid Walnut boards that I am using for my drawer faces and these PS are actually sent to me from my Amazon Wish List by a viewer so thank you so much for these and I thought with this sort of motif on it it would be perfect for this [Music] piece [Music] I love the profile of them and I love that they sit on top of the drawer the only thing that I'm going to need to do is carve out a little section here on the [Music] back so I'm getting ready to spray my toner on these dark stained areas I don't want to get any of this on the Walnut and again I'm just using the toner and lacquer on those parts because I want them to not only have a contrasting color and richness about them but I also want them to have a contrasting Sheen to the rest of the piece [Music] [Music] [Music] now whenever I redo pieces like this I always get someone that that says that they prefer the original finish and that is totally fine I respect everyone's opinion but here I saved this one door for last just so that I could do this comparison and to me there is no comparison the old finish is okay but looking at this gorgeous wood grain this wood grain looks like it's on fire and to me I would never want to hide that under a thick coat of shellac or toned lacquer or anything like that it's just absolutely Ely [Music] [Music] gorgeous [Music] all right I'm about to get serious here for a moment I recently picked this up this is an air quality meter and I brought this out 3 hours after spraying that little bit of locker and let it do its thing the amount of crap that was still in the air 3 hours later was quite [Music] something and here in the middle of stripping you can see that the levels have gone up even more I bought this meter because I wanted to see what I'm exposed to during a typical day and I have multiple respirators and masks that I wear for certain things and I'm hoping that this will bring some awareness to some of what we expose ourselves to when we do this job so if you do remember I still have to add some veneer to those side panels and I was a little surprised when I pulled this out of the box I've had this in the work room for I think about a year I knew it was Walnut veneer um I was technically saving it for a dresser top or something like that cuz it's a big piece what I didn't realize is that this is the 3M veneer and I love the 3M veneer I find it works really really well but I really wanted to use just regular plain Walnut veneer for this piece that is glued on but I didn't have any so I'm opting to use this because it's what I have but yeah it's not what I would have preferred to do I opted to do the grein horizontally I thought that would be kind of an interesting look where there's so many diagonal grains and stuff on this piece rather than the typical straight up and down I've cut it just slightly larger than what I need here and then I'll go in and trim it up burnish the edges sand it and finish it like the rest of the piece now these are the original handles like you saw earlier I'm opting to keep these little discs exactly as they are so these were stripped and cleaned but I haven't done any sanding or finishing to them I think they're really cool on their own and I like this sort of two-toned look now this part of the handle I did use some toner on just to make them look the same and yeah I think we're going to do a little two-toned thing like that I know it's been a while so it's time to go back and have a look at what I started with this Art Deco piece was picked up on Facebook Marketplace it had a ton of finish issues and cracks and as beautiful as it is it just had an overall sort of dingy vibe to it it's almost unrecognizable now and while that isn't always ideal for antiques I feel like this piece here that is just coming up on being antique well I just I can't imagine this any other way now so hopefully you feel the same I hope you enjoyed the video as always thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] a

Channel: Transcend Furniture Gallery

Views: 231,060

Keywords: furniture, furniture flipping, painted furniture, furniture painting, diy, diy furniture, repurposed, refinished furniture, refinishing old furniture, art deco furniture

Id: OT47fkjkLRs

Length: 37min 9sec (2229 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2024