Re-finishing A Mid Century Dining Table - Restoration

[Music] recently I saw a dining table for sale on Facebook ads and it was listed at only 10 pounds and I liked this style of furniture so I picked this up as I thought it would make a good restoration project it's a small table to seat four people or maybe six at a squeeze and it's a folding table so you can fold it up and put it to one side and it takes up very little space as you can see it had a few problems with the finish some deep scratches chipped veneer the finish was dry and flaky and there were a few moisture stains the table top appears to be teak veneer laminated to MDF the base and frame was in really decent condition except for one big chip on one side and it's solid sapele and there's a sticker underneath the tabletop which says legate furniture maybe it's pronounced legate or Leggett normally when I want to refinish furniture like this I just use a card scraper to remove the old finish like I'm doing here just to show you for the purposes of this video but I wanted to try something different that I've not tried before for this table so I bought some of this paint and varnish stripper bye ever build I picked up this bottle for around eight pounds on Amazon which is about eleven dollars so I've never used this stuff before and to be honest this didn't go particularly well for me but I'll explain the reasons why in more detail later in the video I followed the instructions on the bottle which said to apply it with a brush and leave it for 30 minutes after 30 minutes the finish was still difficult to remove but the bottle said that I could reapply if needed so that's what I did after another 30 minutes I found I could scrape off some of the finish a bit easier at least in some areas there was still a few places where the varnish was being quite stubborn the finish on the sides of the tabletop scraped off a lot easier probably because this is the edge grain of the MDF so I decided to reapply one more coat off the stripper to the whole tabletop just to take care of the rest of the finish here you can see that I'm applying this across the grain of the wood rather than with the direction of the grain and this is one of a few mistakes that I think I made on this project I'll talk about the others in a little while a few minutes after brushing it's on here you can see that where the stripper had been applied to bare wood it had left some streak marks across the grain after leaving the stripper for another 30 minutes this time the remaining old finish came off a bit easier I then applied some mineral spirits to the tabletop and I used this to clean up and remove any remaining finish and i'm using some 4-0 steel wool to apply it then I wiped it down with a cloth so now I had to take care of the streaking marks that the stripper had left across the grain so I used a card scraper just to take some light shavings off by this point I found it quite ironic that I have decided to use stripper so that I wouldn't have to scrape the whole tabletop and yet here I was doing lots of scraping I did manage to get rid of the streak marks by scraping though so that was good I thought it would be worth talking about the problems I experienced with the paint and varnish stripper and what I will do differently next time I use it so firstly as you've just seen if you apply this to bare wood it will leave streak marks so it's always best to apply it with the direction of the grain instead of across the grain secondly I applied the stripper in direct sunlight and I don't know for sure but I suspect the heat from the Sun may have dried out the stripper quickly which meant that it couldn't perform as well maybe if I'd have applied the stripper indoors it would have sat on the surface for longer eating away that old finish and maybe it would have been easier to remove thirdly perhaps I didn't leave the stripper on there long enough I did follow the directions on the bottle but I think next time I use it I'll try leaving it on for maybe an hour and see if that makes any difference in terms of whether I would use paint and varnish stripper again or whether I would just go back to my old method of just using the cards well on this particular project using the paint and varnish stripper took a lot longer than it would have taken if I would have just scraped it with a card scraper and that's not even including those 30-minute wait times waiting for the stripper to do its thing I will definitely try using stripper again and hopefully next time I will have better results because I will have learned from my mistakes on this project I can definitely see the benefit in using a paint and varnish stripper over just using a card scraper because using the card scraper is a lot of work and you have to kind of bend the card scraper with your thumbs and it is quite painful after a while next I stand at the table top at 180 grit using my random orbit sander then I applied some boiled linseed oil to nourish the wood and make it look beautiful again once the oil have dried I noticed that I'd actually worn away some of the veneer at the edges of the table through sanding fortunately it was just in one small area to fix this I used a brown sharpie pen to color in the edges and I smoothed it out with my finger just to better color match the wood and disguise where I'd standard through the veneer this worked well next I could work on the chipped piece of veneer and I really should have done this before I applied the boiled linseed oil because I needed to mask around the chipped area with masking tape and it doesn't stick so well to oiled wood even when the oil has fully dried I mixed up some epoxy to use as a filler around ten minutes after applying I removed the tape and then I could chisel away any excess epoxy to get the surface flat and flush at the edges I used my brown sharpie pen again to add color over the epoxy and blended it in with the finish using my finger before I had a chance to dry to seal those Sharpie pen repairs and also make the table more hard-wearing and resistant to moisture stains I chose spray varnish I first wiped down the surface of the tabletop then I applied the spray varnish to the edges of the table and then the tabletop once the first coat had dried i D nipped the finish by spraying on some water and using some 600 grit wet and dry paper to lightly sand the surface I wiped away any dust and applied the next coat of spray varnish I think I gave the table five coats in total by following the same process sanding in between coats and wiping away the dust before applying the next coat and by this point I was happy with how the table looks and it had a nice layer of protection I did decide to add a final layer of finish though some of this clair broy racks this isn't really necessary I just like the way it feels smells and looks once it's buffed out to a nice subtle Sheen I just think it's the ideal finish for old mid-century items of furniture like this to buff out the wax I used a buffing pad attachment in my drill and I did some final buffing of the edges using a cloth here are some before and after photos that's the dining-table finished and originally I had intended to buy this restore it and then sell it on but now I've decided that I want to keep it for a few reasons when I put it into my dining room to take photos of it I saw it alongside my teak sideboard and it looked really good I also liked how it looks with my dining chairs and when I decided I would keep the table I did consider perhaps staining the dining chairs a darker color to try and match that teak color but seeing them together with the refinished table I actually like that they're lighter in color I think it works I also really like this a folding table because I can fold it up put it in the corner of the room and that's really useful because I often use my dining room to take photos of the products that I make and at the moment my current dining table which is quite a bit bigger often gets in the way of taking photos and finally I'm not that fond of the dining table that I was using anymore it's the one that I built probably a year and a half ago on my channel and I just think it's time to get rid of that one I'm not sure what I'll do with that yet I'll probably give it away locally as I'm not really comfortable selling it mainly because I've improved as a woodworker since then and I'm just not comfortable selling something of a lower standard than I feel I'm capable of if that makes sense I hope you enjoyed this video please subscribe if you haven't already and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rag 'n' Bone Brown

Views: 51,983

Rating: 4.8329468 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, rag, 'n', bone, brown, keith, salvaged, reclaimed, wood, make, making, how, to, mid century, dining table, mid century modern, folding, sharpie, spray varnish, how to, restore, restoration, how to restore, how to re-finish, re-finish, re finish, boiled linseed oil, briwax, paint stripper, varnish stripper, stripper, paint and varnish stripper, everbuild, restoring, wood restoration, finish restoration, restoring a finish, restoring wood, furniture restoration

Id: hqNqi0NVm9k

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018