My husband asked me to refinish this family heirloom | Antique ELM Furniture Restoration

hello everybody Katie here from salvaged by K Scott today I'm bringing you along as I refinish this antique wash stand that's a little bit of a family heirloom for my husband this piece has definitely had a good well-loved life as a utilitarian piece of furniture it used to be the nightstand between the bunk beds in the kids room at my husband's family Cottage but his nana replaced it with something new about 10 years ago and Doug just couldn't quite let this go since then it's been kicking around our house without much of a purpose but it's finally time to shine it up it would have originally had a backsplash or more likely a harp with a towel rod on this back lip but that is long gone and I'm not going to worry about replacing it but I am going to be stripping all of this mess back to bare wood so that I can restain it I can honestly say that I've never really paid much attention to this thing and I kind of always assumed it was Maple but now that I'm looking at it up close I can see that it's actually film Elm trees used to be very common and were used in a ton of furniture but after a fungal infection spread by beetles knocked out most of the tree population it's actually pretty hard to come by these days this stand was probably made sometime at the beginning of the 20th century but this isn't its original finish it's already being made over by a gdr in 1985 and if you look closely at the drawer you can also see these ghost marks from the original Victorian style hardware this French provincial stuff does not belong on here I'm gonna pull these off and I've already ordered some more period appropriate replica pieces to replace them with Doug's only request for this is that I leave all of the marks on the inside of the drawer it's where all the kids art supplies used to live at the cottage so I won't be touching that at all [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] I started trying to get the screws out of these hinges but they're teeny tiny slotted screws and they're stuck in there pretty well so instead of getting frustrated with them right now and probably stripping them I'm just going to move on and I'll revisit that later because I'm very well aware of just how much wax and furniture polish this thing has seen I'm gonna wash it down with some simple green Degreaser and really hot water before I start removing the finish so I don't end up grinding that stuff down into the wood [Music] once the wood was dry I was ready to start working away at the old finish I hooked up my orbital sander to the shop vac and then sorted through my mess of sanding discs to find an 80 grit a 120 grit and a 180 grit I put on my respirator to catch any dust that the vacuum doesn't get and started with the 80 grit to clean up the drawer [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] next I moved over to the cabinet top this is a truly rustic piece of furniture that's got a lot of wear and tear especially on the top here and I don't necessarily want to get rid of all of that history it's definitely still gonna have some beauty marks and even a lot of original Milling marks are on here but I do want to give it the smoothest finish that I can foreign [Music] there's not too much I can do about the cigarette burn on the front edge without creating a big divot in the wood so that's going to stay as it is and there are a few other pretty good gouges but for the most part the wood cleaned up really nicely once I had the finish and stain removed I switched out to my 120 grit and just started smoothing out the wood again then it was just a matter of working my way around the whole wash stand using the 80 and 120 grit abrasives and I also busted out my carbide scraper to help me cut through any thicker spots of the poly finish even faster wherever I could fit it I did as much as I could with my five inch orbital sander just because it cuts through the Finish super fast but on the insides of these shaker style panels I switched out to my smaller 3x4 rectangular sander this job of getting into Corners could be done quite nicely with a triangle Mouse sander as well if that's what you've got at this point I couldn't really avoid the doors any longer I needed to get them off so I could finish sanding them properly and also clean up the inside of the frame so I grabbed a smaller flathead screwdriver and my hammer sometimes sometimes when screws are being a bit stubborn you can get a bit better of a grip on them if you tap the screwdriver into the head of the screw a little bit and then use all of the pressure that you can muster to press it in while you're turning the screw after about half an hour of struggling I did manage to successfully remove two of the 12 screws and then I had to tap in my tool maker husband for help dog I need your help with these screws please he unscrewed a few more and then ended up having to drill out two of the screws that just wouldn't budge but we did eventually get the doors off of the cabinet and the hinges off of the doors then I could move on [Music] I finished sanding the doors and then used my detail sander to get whatever else I could before moving on to hand sanding the smallest stuff with the help of this little foam gripper and even a paintbrush handle [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] once everything had been sanded with the medium 120 I moved up to the finest grit that I wanted to use on this piece which was my 180 for the finished sand and I did all of that by hand mechanical Sanders no matter how good they are will usually leave behind those little curly cues swirl marks in the wood not pressing down on the sander can reduce them a lot but to make sure that I don't get any of them in my final finish I've learned to do my last Sand by hand I vacuumed up a bunch of the dust that I'd made and then wiped everything down with a microfiber cloth and some mineral spirits to pick up the rest and while that dried I pulled out the stain colors that I had on hand and did some little test swatches on the back of the stand to see what they looked like on here foreign [Music] before I stained I applied a coat of pre-stained wood conditioner to help the penetrating wood stain go on a little more evenly and once that had dried for about 30 minutes I rubbed on a coat of minwax's special Walnut I like to rub it into the wood first and then when I go back to wipe up the excess I always follow the direction of the grain [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] as that was drying I didn't really love the kind of green undertone that it was giving the wood it was close to what we wanted but not quite right so I let the special Walnut dry for a few hours and then applied a second coat using their English chestnut color which has a little bit more of a red tint in it [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you I decided to seal the table up with some wipe on polyurethane it's really forgiving and easy to use and leaves a beautiful soft sheen on the wood I used a dark t-shirt rag to apply this so I didn't accidentally end up with any white fluffies in my top coat and I wiped on three coats and gave each one just a really light smooth out with some 600 grit in between foreign [Music] [Music] the last thing I needed to do was reattach the doors and install the new hardware but I was not interested in messing around with those flat head screws again so I popped out to the hardware store and picked up some little Robertson ones instead [Music] thank you [Music] these new polls that I found online are more appropriate to the age of the piece and I really like The Rustic cast metal look that they have the polls did come with screws though to attach them and since I've already got holes in here I rifled through my box of bits and Bobs to find some machine screws and nuts that I could use to install them with instead I was even lucky enough to find four of them the same and in a pretty similar color to The Cup Pools too foreign [Music] here's one more look at the wash stand that I started with and this is what it looks like all spruced up well not all the way spruced up it's still got a ton of its antique charm with some good dents in the top and that cigarette burn of course it's still filled with childhood memories of giggling cousins jumping from bunk to Bunk with their flashlights long after bedtime but now it's ready to take on yet another generation full of stories make sure you're subscribed for tens more furniture makeovers leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts on this one and I will catch you all next time foreign [Music]

Channel: Katie Scott SALVAGED by k. scott

Views: 426,640

Keywords: Antique washstand, antique furniture, elm wood furniture, furniture restoration, furniture makeover, DIY, Stripping Furniture, Sanding Furniture, Staining Furniture, Katie Scott, Refinishing, Restoring Wood Furniture, Staining Wood, Furniture Flip, Antique Furniture, Second Hand Furniture, Thrift Flip, Facebook Marketplace Flip, WOOD WORKING, ANTIQUE RESTORATION, BEFORE AND AFTER

Id: AllzL8jjenE

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023