Mid Century End Table Restoration | Furniture Refinishing

this table came to me from a viewer of my channel it was in rough shape but this is the kind of project that I really enjoy it's challenging work but very rewarding to breathe new life into an old piece of furniture that's been neglected for a long time there was paint on the top stains of various kinds holes and damage to the veneer so a little bit of everything I began by applying stripper and there really wasn't any finish on the top but there was some paint and stain so I figured I'd use the stripper first and see what I could get off with that the legs did have finish on them so I also used the stripper on the legs [Music] I left the stripper on for about 20 to 25 minutes and then removed it on the top I just scraped it off on the legs I used steel wool to remove the stripper instead of scraping it off because it's a round surface I find the steel wool works a lot better and then I went over it with some mineral spirits and some clean still will to remove any residue that was left the stripper did a good job in removing the red paint on the top but it didn't do much for that big black spot and it looked like that was black ink that had soaked into the wood so I decided to try some oxalic acid to remove that spot oxalic acid has worked well for me on black water stains but I don't think this was a water stain look more like ink and I'd never use it on ink but I decided to give it a try and first I just sanded it a little bit just to kind of open up the wood and help the oxalic acid to get absorbed and then I applied the acid and I put it over the whole table top and after the top had dried I could see that the black stain had lightened considerably and here I'm just wetting it down with some mineral spirits just to help see what it looks like after the oxalic acid and here you can see the stain it's still kind of a shadow of it there but I thought that it looked pretty good and decided to move on and that pink spot next to where the stain was that's some kind of filler I think it's probably bondo automotive body filler just judging by the color and I'll deal with that later I think that this table may have had a shelf on it at one time it has six holes in it where I'm assuming the Shelf would have been screwed on and one of the holes actually still had a screw in it my next step was to fill in the holes on the top and I decided to use wood filler for this some of the bigger ones could have been fixed with some veneer patching but I decided for this project the wood filler was the way to go first thing I did was to scrape out some of this bondo just so that it's sat below the surface so that there was some room for me to put some filler on top of it so that the pink fondo didn't show through so I just chipped away some of that and then I failed it with some water based wood filler I just put a little bit in at a time I didn't try to fill it all at once and I let it dry in between layers and I also used a heat gun just to help it along helped a try quicker I tried to wipe off some of the excess with a wet paper towel since its water-based you can do that and this just helped to reduce the amount of sanding that I would have to do later on these bigger holes I first filled them with some little wood sticks and on top of those I used some gel superglue and this is just to help fill in the hole so I didn't have to do the whole thing with wood filler and I just filled it until it was just below the top surface so I still have some room for the wood filler and this is accelerator for the superglue it just makes it dry quicker next I sanded the whole top and since this was in pretty rough shape I started with 120 grit then went to I think 150 and 180 I also sanded the legs lightly with some 220 grit they were in pretty good shape and it turns out they were solid walnut which was a nice surprise here I'm wetting them down just to show what a nice color they have all on their own I didn't need to use any stain on these I just put a clear coat on later on the top on the other hand did need some stain it was in pretty rough shape and I used some walnut gel stain I applied it with a foam brush and then wiped off the excess after I wiped off the stain I could see that it still looked pretty bad that black spot was a lot darker than I thought it was going to be and the filler that I put in was very light and would have required a lot of coloring to try to blend it in so I decided I'd have to try it again and I got out the sander and I sanded off the stain that I just put up but first I had to close up the garage and wait for a big storm to pass through once the storm had passed I got to work sanding the top once the gel stain was sanded off I applied some more oxalic acid to that black stain and this time I only applied it to the stain as opposed to the whole tabletop [Music] and it worked really well he got the spot out after a few applications all that sanding that I did to remove the gel stain had sanded through that filler that I applied so now some of that pink bondo was showing again so I decided just to chip the whole thing out and put in a new filler and this time I put in a little bit darker filler and I just followed the same process as the first time but this time before I reapplied the gel stain I put some regular walnut oil stain on those spots that I filled just to help darken them a little bit and give them a head start so they weren't quite so light then it was time to reapply the walnut gel stain once the gel stain was dry I applied some wipe on satin polyurethane to the top and to the legs and the legs had no stain on them just the polyurethane once the polyurethane had dried the table looked a lot better but now instead of that black spot on the top I had a light spot where that was because I had put so much oxalic acid there and as opposed to spreading it over the whole top which would have made it all evenly light now there was just that one isolated light spot to fix that I took some of that walnut gel stain that I'd put over the whole top and a brush and I got some of the gel stain on the brush but not a whole lot it's just a little bit and I lightly brushed it on to the light spots and then wiped off as much of the gel stain from the brush as I could and then went over it again and just tried to kind of feather it in to the rest of the top and take off some of the excess gel stain so that there wasn't too much on there and after a short break for the ice-cream man I came back and decided that it was just too dark so I took some mineral spirits and wiped it off and tried it again and this time just went lighter with the stain [Music] I let the gel stain dry and then put on some more clear topcoat but this time I sprayed on some satin lacquer I didn't want to wipe on polyurethane again because I didn't want to risk wiping off that stain that I just put on and I came out pretty nice doesn't look perfect by any means but it looks a lot better than it did when I started and it was a fun project thanks for watching you

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 346,245

Rating: 4.8598385 out of 5

Keywords: midcentury, restoration, vintage, furniture refinishing, mid century, minneapolis, finishing, mid century modern

Id: eXadfZ3CYJw

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019