Restoring A Chest Of Drawers - Junk Find Makeover

I work in an office job and I walk to and from work every day on my way home from work I often take different routes to see what junk people have left out in the many alleyways that surround by home often I'll find bits of wood and materials that I can use for projects but occasionally I'll find something like this so when I got home I got in my car and went to pick it up to take it home furniture it might not look like much to get excited about it's badly water stained and it's broken but beneath all that there's a really nice good quality piece of furniture so this is how I found the drawers although it looks really broken it does actually slot back together quite nicely with these dovetail joints so I can scrape off all of the old glue and glue it back up I love these drawer handles I think if I can sand off the old finish and refinish them they should look quite nice although one of them is damaged there are quite a lot of light water stains on the front of the drawers too but hopefully I should be able to get those off the drawers are really well made they're very solid they're built from sapele sides sapele front which is probably a veneer over chipboard or plywood they've built with dovetail joints piece of plywood on the bottom screwed in at the back inside the drawer runners are solid sapele I'm pretty sure that the top is a sapele veneer over either plywood or particle board as well because its side grain along the front and also along the edges ah in fact the veneers peeled off the back and it is indeed particleboard this chest of drawers is an unusual construction I'm not sure I've seen anything like this before it's basically two chests of drawers stacked together as one so at the moment I'm not really sure what direction to take with this because I could either keep it as one tool chest of drawers or perhaps make two new tops for each of them as there's only one top here and make them into two separate matching chests as they'd make pretty good bedside tables the water damage on the drawer fronts and on the top are mainly white stains which is moisture that's soaked through the finish and is sitting between the wood and the finish and those stains are usually relatively easy to get out using a bit of heat from an iron although as this is veneered I'm a bit worried about using an iron as it's possible that the heat from the iron will melt the glue that's holding the veneer on this dark water stain there is likely to be much harder to remove as that's moisture that has actually soaked into the wood beneath the finish so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do much to improve that I decided that I would start by carefully trying out the iron on the top of the chest of drawers first with a piece of cotton cloth between the iron and the veneer to see if I could get the stains out without affecting the glue on the veneer if the veneer peeled on the top then it wouldn't matter too much as I wasn't convinced that I'd be able to get the stains out of this top anyway so I was half expecting that I might need to make a new top for it or tops depending on whether I converted this chest into two separate chests if the iron did get the stains out without peeling the veneer then I would know that it's safe to try that method on removing the stains on the drawer front too as expected the iron works pretty well to get rid of the light water stains the darkest Danes however would not shift luckily none of the veneer peeled I was careful not to leave the iron in any one place for too long so next I decided to scrape off the old finish using a cabinet scraper I decided not to sand it down with an orbital sander as I would run the risk of sanding through the veneer once I'd scraped it I sanded down the surface by hand with some 400 grit wet and dry paper I did the same to the edges too then to rejuvenate the finish I applied some boiled linseed oil and it looked really nice the dark water stain wasn't completely gone but it was certainly less visible because I was happy with how the top looked it was at this point when I decided that I'd keep this as one sole chest of drawers mainly because I could make use of it at home as a single chest of drawers as I don't really have a use for two small chests also I wouldn't need to make two new tops next I could start working on the drawers I started by removing the handles then I could either draw France it was amusing to me that no one can get me to iron my clothes especially at the weekend but ironing wood just seemed a lot more enjoyable for some reason here's a before ironing and after ironing shot just to show how well it was working I gave the same treatment to the drawers as I had to the top first scraping then sanding and then willing then I took apart the carcass and did exactly the same to that too I let the oil soak in out in the Sun and meanwhile I sanded down all of the draw handles I used some brass oh just to polish up the brass on the handles next I could assemble the carcass again so first I scraped off all of the old glue from the joints using a stanley knife blade so that the new glue that I apply will soak in and bond properly to the wood I applied glue to the dovetail joints and added these two stretches this thin sheet of veneered plywood fits into some rebate joints in those stretches then I glued the side panels together and wiped off any excess glue there were two cleats attached to the bottom of the top panel so I glued them screwed them back on the panel as they were quite loose then I scraped the edges applied glue and added the top panel I added a couple of screws each side through the cleats into the top panel to hold it down then I could screw on the plywood panels around at the back as they were loose - and the original screws were missing there are a few spots of damage on these drawer fronts particularly on this drawer I've got one small chip there quite a large chip there and another small chip there the rest of the drawers are in fairly good condition apart from this one where there's another small chip so I'm going to have a go at filling these chips it's not going to look perfect but I'm really just aiming to hide the light color of the wood beneath the veneer so I'm just mixing the sawdust into the wood glue and because it's still quite a light color just gonna add a bit of dark teak stain I'm going to use a cocktail stick to apply this because I don't want to get too much on on one side of the chest of drawers there's also some veneer that's broken off from the side this piece is loose so I'm going to have a go at super gluing that once the oil had fully dried I applied some brie wax using a cotton cloth in a circular motion to the carcass and the drawer fronts and also the drawer knobs after a couple of hours I could then buff the wax finish to a nice Sheen I'm really pleased with how these tools stand out and they look great in my bedroom you

Channel: Rag 'n' Bone Brown

Views: 546,232

Rating: 4.872468 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, rag, 'n', bone, brown, keith, salvaged, reclaimed, wood, restore, restoring, restored, chest, of, drawers, junk, garbage, trash, rubbish, find, alleyway, finish, sanding, sand, scraping, oiling, waxing, furniture, home, bedroom, sapele, to, treasure, makeover, furniture makeover, furniture renovation, furniture restoration, furniture upcycling, upcycling ideas, old furniture ideas, old furniture makeover, old furniture restoration, restoring old furniture

Id: RuEzj14QeGw

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2016