Picking up where someone else left off

hello everyone this is turn John's furniture repair and we've got a little dresser in here in the shop and we're just going to be getting a refinish it's kind of half started so let me show you some details on this one all righty so we've got a tall boy dresser here I believe it's Birch and it has been started so stripped down and stained but the prep work's not super great you can see a lot of um the paint that's left in the edges it was white and then on the sides here it's a really interesting grain going sideways and the sanding on these pieces was really difficult which is why I understand why there is a lot of uh scratches on the corners there but we're going to take care of that and get that all smoothed out so it takes a stain nicely it's got a really interesting uh mirror with two posts and they attach underneath the top with a little nut and that holds the whole apparatus up so that's kind of neat you can kind of see the old picture or sorry the old color on the back here a whitewash kind of messy painted look so they did get a lot of the paint off which is really great cuz I don't have to do that but just some of the sanding um is not great you can see a lot of scratches and stuff in the edges not super great and still a lot of the paint um in areas that we're going to sand a bit more I'm just going to take this off here while I open a drawer there's the back panel as well you can see still has that paint on it so inside you've got a nicely varnished drawer but there is a lot of messy stripper kind of running in here and the sides still have paint and stuff glued on them some of the drawers aren't working so great so we do have to address the function of some of these drawers and get that working as well form and function are important but yeah I think it's going to be a really great little dresser these colors here you're seeing are samples for the customer and we're going to go with this one this is a Gunstock Walnut so basically it's just going to be a good sand prep repair and stain so no stripping on this one so let's get to work [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so you saw me uh pounding in that Dow with quite a bit of glue in here and all the glue running out the sides so I'm just using hydraulic pressure to get glue into these cracked legs they're all cracked after a while with um Casters in them rolling around there's not a lot of wood here if it hits a bump or anything it can just snap right off and maybe we did a little bit of that in the shop but we're taking these out the dowel will really help strengthen it CU it'll glue everything to the dowel but also when we get all that glue in there it's going to just push it all into the crack so I just fill it up all the way pretty much all the way and it's going to make my Dow have a really hard time getting into that it's going to kind of Bounce out of there but it's going to come out of this crack and this crack you can watch it [Music] go and it just fills all those cracks with glue and I'll just scoop this up and stick it in the next tool here then I know there's glue in the entire leg and I can just clamp this against the dowel here and it'll be nice and strong when it's dry [Music] [Music] all righty so we've got the whole dresser uh prepped I've sanded everything with the um the Fest tool first because there was a lot of scratches to get out and then we had to do everything handstanding with 180 because this is birch it's going to stand up pretty easily but also it's going to stain up a little bit blotchy especially on the sides so I've just been um trying out the stain here um one thing I have to do before I get going too heavily with the stain is make sure all the drawers are working and I know a couple of them are worn so um this is the color though we just got a couple drawers here stained I think it's going to be really nice um it's staining up pretty good but just have to be really careful that I have everything sanded really evenly which is pretty hard on the side panels with the cross grain but I just spent all yesterday sanding those and making sure that they are good so I'm going to fit all of the drawers in here and just make sure that they're all working smoothly and they are numbered I believe this one is the top left so that's good there and you just want to check when you're putting drawers in are they hitting or rubbing on the bottom does the front lip of the drawer front catch and drag across this frame these ones don't seem to and usually the top drawers are pretty good but we'll just kind of slowly close them and feel for any dragging looks good second one this is the top drawer so again we're just going to look on the drawers for where you can often see there'll be like a pattern where the drawer will kind of curve in the bottom here and that'll just wear a lot you can look inside as well and see is there a Groove in here on the runner and these actually look pretty good so I'm just going to try the drawer in the cabinet just see how it comes in and again right when this face Mees the frame I'm just going to go slowly to see if there is any dragging there that one looks pretty good I think I will lift it though cuz it's really tight to the base so we got these have bottoms here let me just grab a screwdriver if you want to lift the drawer up in the cavity here there's a couple things you can do one is to actually add wood to the runner on this drawer if it's not a serious lift that you're looking for you can add um these little tacks these smooth tacks and that I took these out of the dresser so I am going to put them back in so we're just going to put these in and see if that does enough if that still doesn't do enough then I'll just uh veneer a piece on the bottom of this drawer so let me just grab a hammer we'll tack these in to put some new ones in here right there and on the other side same thing and I just use a needl nose to guide that in CU these do Bend pretty easily okay and then we'll try that drawer again and see if that's enough of a lift yeah that's a nice even space there so the why you want this not to ride on the frame is if you have your finish here and this drawer is constantly hitting this Frame it's going to wear off the finish on the entire face also it's just going to make your drawer work badly so the stops in there are doing pretty good as well so basically I'm just going to go down the whole dresser I know that there are worse ones down here and make sure these are all working and then we will stain up the whole dresser and it'll be ready for finish all right so I've got all the drawers fitting had to add a couple of veneers to a few of them um and then also use the slip it Compound on the inside and on the drawer bottoms so now we're just going to get to staining and one of my pet peeves in staining is when people just get stain all over the place I'll show you how or where I like to draw the line I don't get super meticulous like a tapel line or anything but I just keep my stain kind of controlled to drawer front so on the back here I'm just going to come straight across and do this whole Edge not try not to get any on the runner and then on the side I just want to do the edge of the door front I don't want to go into the Dove tail or on the runner just like that and then on the front obviously just the edge just like the back no nothing on the sides running down same thing with stripping a piece try to keep it off of the rest of the drawer unless you're stripping the whole drawer just makes for a much nicer job so I'm going to wipe off most of this if we need to darken it we'll do it in the tint area cuz I want kind of a bit of a lighter and then careful with your rag too wiping off the edges so you don't smear it around there we go looks good so we've got all these drawers cleaned up too I've sanded in the inside of these guys on the bottom and all the sides got all the paint off of everything um there was a lot of paint on the sides of these so when we clear coat everything it'll come back to life and we'll just have the color right where we want it so I will get to seeing the entire thing [Music] now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so because this is PL I would um after the base color of stain I'm going in with a gel stain because this always is this Birch ply which stains up super blotchy so we're going to kind of do a preliminary glaze over the whole thing before we kind of tone it in and we're going to be going for a bit darker on the tops and the sides because we'll need to hide all this lovely paint gray plywood some uh pieces from the factory were painted pretty sure this one was just from you know the pieces they used on the tops and the sides so we're just going to be kind of brushing in and adding a little bit more color with some dabbing with the brush on the whole top getting it to that nice color and we'll only be adding a little bit of black after just to kind of bring it from this really super blotchy color into a little bit more of a tone down so essentially we are kind of painting it back on but with the other option would have been just to start with the toner instead of the stain because it brings out all that um lights and darks wood and this veneer is pretty beat up so it's going to show a lot of stuff but I think we're going to get it to a nice tone it kind of looks like a mess at first so um believe me I'm kind of like ooh but it's going to be okay trust me so we'll have to do this to the top and the sides but the rest of the frame um um and the drawer fronts are all solidwood so no worries there they all standed up really nice and beautifully we'll need to go probably a little bit deeper but when we get everything together we'll be able to shift all the colors into the Z they need to be and then I'm going to take um a rig and I'm just going to really gently not even barely touching the surface just kind of smooth out those brush marks with the glaze get a little bit of material off barely touching the surface here and then if I need to go back in with the brush and just kind of look at areas like if there's a bit of lightness and we can also adjust this with the toning all right so we've got the whole thing stained except for one drawer needed to have a bit more repair done didn't do the sides but there that's how they turned out got the gel stain on the top and the sides and we'll do a bit more tinting as well when that's dry tomorrow I wasn't able to get every single scratch out some of these cross green ones we'll just have to blend in but I think we got everything pretty good and the mirror frames over here under stain as well and I just put a coat of stain over the back panel of the mirror and the dresser so we'll maybe add a little bit of tint to that we'll know how everything's looking when we get a clear coat on but the uh solid parts look really great I mean it's Birch so it's kind of blotchy but we're going to get it all working together here [Music] tomorrow [Music] [Music] [Music] all righty so we've got a clear coat on everything obviously we need to shift some colors here add some warmth to a drawer like that and those ones I'm going to be doing that and then adding a black tint to take out the Warmness a little bit got to kind of start from the same place looking good though everything's kind of even a little bit of orange peel on the top surface so hopefully the second coat goes a little nicer [Music] and there it is all finished up and all of the hardware put back on looking very much more put together and sophisticated than before I didn't get this at the beginning so I really don't know where we started from but I might be able to find a picture but just look how cute that little Hardware is and we have about three different Woods on this whole dresser so we've got a lot of character we got the plywood panels on the sides and the tops that we got to look pretty good and then we've got Beach I believe for all the solid wood parts and Birch for the drawers so we've got a lot of different things going on inside the drawers we did of course finish there was some staining and things we couldn't get out but they are all sealed and looking better got all the paint off of the sides of the drawers this is all cleaned up that's looking so much better there are nice Alder uh panels inside the drawers there so drawer bottoms are looking good so I think we've got this thing all finished up and it's looking great so thank you so much for joining me on this quick little restoration and I hope you enjoyed um this piece wasn't a whole lot involved in it but we did do some repairs to the drawers and a lot of sanding so thanks again and I hope you have a great day thanks for joining me [Music] cheers [Music] [Music]

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 59,880

Keywords: trena, john's furniture repair, thomas johnson, antique restoration, furniture, shop, workshop, tools, stripping, spraying, sanding, woodworking, mohawk, walnut stain, table, festool, tiktok, at restoration, dewalt, bleach, this old house, beard meets food, modern makeovers

Id: R_bmnHa4tnY

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024