Restoring Mid Century Furniture- dealing with water stains / MAKING INK PAINTINGS for staging

this video is sponsored by skillshare hello everybody welcome back to another video today i'm going to be hopefully saving this cute little mid-century nightstand and matching dresser i picked this up locally from facebook marketplace it has a ton of finish issues on the top there's a massive black stain lots of areas where the finish is chipped or missing completely there's water damage but my biggest concern is this big dark stain there's also some gouges both in the finish and this one which is the most concerning for me because it's gone clear through the veneer the nightstand has a corner where the veneer has pulled away from the substrate so i need to repair that overall it's a fairly well made piece i wouldn't say it's high high-end but this was made on march 15th of 1963 and i'm excited to bring these back to life i'm also going to be creating some of my own staging art so you'll want to check that out too stay tuned my name is angie and i refinish furniture sometimes i paint and sometimes i don't but i always do what i can disable pieces from the trash welcome to my workroom so both of these pieces are covered in walnut veneer and all of the drawers are solid wood the long dresser does have legs they're just not attached right now because it's on the dolly they are a different type of wood and i'm assuming the frame is as well so you're gonna see that as we get into this i'm gonna be stripping all of the old finish off and hopefully restoring this just to its natural wood grain it can sometimes be hard to make videos where we're just stripping and refinishing interesting so i'm gonna throw a few little surprises in here and there i always check these wooden runners when i take the doors out just to make sure that everything is tight and i don't need to make any repairs and in this case everything looks good [Music] as always i'm using my favorite stripper which is circa 1850 super dissolver i like this one because it's methylene chloride free and it doesn't need to be neutralized when you're done using it i also like this particular formula because it's a little bit thicker than some strippers which means it's easier to apply to vertical surfaces like the sides of the dresser or the frame [Music] i am quite concerned about this one dark stain i've dealt with a lot of dark water stains in my past oxalic acid usually does the trick i'm going to be using that on this today and hoping that it gets it out but honestly i'm not exactly sure what this stain is this stripper works fairly quickly so by the time i was done coating the top of the nightstand i was able to go back onto the dresser and remove the finish [Music] as you can see from this angle the substrate on these mid-century pieces is actually like a pressed wood and it's sandwiched between two sheets of veneer so there's a veneer on the outside and a veneer on the underside and some people that don't really know what to look for this can look like solid wood so my recommendation is to always look at the back of the piece or the underside you can usually see what everything's made of there these handles are pretty cool um it has a brass plated inlay here these are extremely hard to get out but the problem here there's a couple problems the first problem is that it's going to be really hard to strip and sand this with the handles on and the other problem is that the handles have been pushed down from their original location anyway so they're going to need to be reattached so what i'm opting to do is just remove all of the handles just pull them straight out they're just stapled in and when the time comes to put these back all i have to do is slightly open the staples put them back in the original holes and add some glue here and that will help keep these on long term and whenever i'm removing handles like this i like to number both the handle and the drawer that it came from those staples are specific to this drawer so that handle will only fit in this drawer once i had all the handles removed i was able to get started stripping the drawer faces [Music] if you're wondering why i'm not using a scraper which i like to do all the time you see me doing it a lot in my videos this finish was really thick and i thought it would be a lot faster to just use stripper in this case [Music] so just as i suspected this frame is a different type of wood than the veneer which is walnut what this means is once i strip this old finish off and sand it down it's going to be a very different color than the walnut which leaves me with the two options either i stain and tone the frame and the legs to match the walnut or i stain everything together and honestly i don't love staining walnut oh my gosh i actually had someone leave a horrible comment a week or so ago is saying that i was a criminal for staining walnut like i mentioned i don't like to do it i usually reserve it for special cases and the reason i think i might have to do it here is whether or not i can get that black stain out if i can't i need to camouflage it as much as possible and stain will help me do that [Music] now before i get into sanding the main body of the piece i just want to take a quick moment and talk about today's sponsor and this one's a little bit more important because there's a segment later on in the video that's gonna loop back to this so it'll make more sense if you see this part skillshare is an online learning community that has literally thousands of really well made classes that are inspiring and motivating if you have something that you've always been interested in skillshare is a great place to start i've been an artist my whole life i've done acrylic painting charcoal drawings tattoos now what does this have to do with me walking around in my backyard i'm glad you asked as i was scrolling through a couple of weeks ago i saw this class on how to make your own botanical ink this class is by casey gallagher newman and it's about how to get colored ink out of materials you might find in your backyard for example i'm actually going to be doing a little art project i've been needing some staging art for so long i just decided i'm going to do it myself and i'm going to gather it from my own backyard but in the meantime if there's something you want to learn the first 1000 people to click on the link in the description box below will get a one month free trial of skillshare i'm very excited to do some painting with ink that comes straight from nature [Music] yes if you've been on my community section of my channel this week you will have seen me boiling something strange on the stove that was me making my ink and i'm going to be showing you three paintings that i made with it relatively quickly and i'm happy with how they turned out so you'll see that a little bit later on i'm actually starting the top of this with the spent sanding pads that i used from sanding the legs i like to do that sometimes when i'm sanding off after using stripper i find if there's any little remaining bits of finish or stripper residue this sandpaper will take it up and then i'll switch to a new sand pad and actually start sanding the veneer so because this is a veneer that has already been quite damaged and the finish is gone i don't need to go really aggressive with my sand pad so i'm actually starting fairly high at a 180 grit which is more than enough to get this down to the raw walnut and now the moment of truth sometimes i get lucky and these dark stains will actually sand out or lighten with sanding no such luck here whatever this is is in those wood fibers and has permanently stained them i also have to address this big gouge here in the back now normally when it's just a gouge in the veneer you can often use a combination of heat and water to steam the dent up so that you can then sand it off flush i usually use either a damp cloth and a regular iron and i recently had someone in my amazon wishlist send me a little soldering iron so that will be really good for pinpointing stuff like this the problem with this particular scratch is that it's not in the veneer it's through the veneer so you can actually see the substrate underneath which means that i'm going to need to fill this [Music] i'm opting to use the surf prep here i find this little rectangular sander is great for getting right up into corners and it's also a little bit shorter in height than my dewalt so it lets me get into these areas where i normally wouldn't be able to reach these sanders are definitely an investment but for me it is the perfect tool to pick up the slack where my dewalt just doesn't quite cut it and to be honest this sander would be fine also on its own as a main sander if this is something that you've been eyeing or wanting to try feel free to use my discount code to save yourself 10 off your surf prep order [Music] so it's time now to try to tackle that dark stain with some oxalic acid oxalic acid is a wood bleach you need to be careful with it make sure you're wearing a mask and gloves basically all you do is you mix it into warm water give it a good stir to make sure all the crystals absorb and then i use a chip brush to apply it i've seen people use a rag whatever your preference is when i have a bad stain like this i usually will start putting it on over the stain and then i will go back and coat the entire top this is something you have to do if you just use this stuff over top of the stain you will have the opposite problem you will have a light spot on your top oxalic acid works to break down organic stains and normally works pretty well sometimes it requires a second or even third coat letting it dry and rinsing and then drying again in between but generally if it hasn't done anything by the third coat there's no point in continuing that's as good as it's gonna get it really just depends what the stain is made of sometimes a gentle scrub with a nylon bristle brush helps get the oxalic into the wood fibers the little plastic drawer guys at the back of these drawers often get really gross so i'm just using some gentle cleaner here to clean them up and apologies my camera seemed to think my shoulder was more important than what i was doing [Music] and then there were a few that i actually had to replace these are quite inexpensive you can find them usually at most hardware stores or on amazon and usually you can reuse at least some of the holes if not all of the holes from the previous one [Music] now aside from just sanding down the drawer face which obviously had to be done i opted to sand these drawers inside and out and they were quite dingy and they just really needed some refreshing i like to do this when i'm able to in this case there are nine drawers in the dresser and one drawer in the nightstand so that's 10 drawers all together this took a considerable amount of time but really makes a difference in the finished piece and nobody likes dingy drawers [Music] this is what our stain looked like after one coat of oxalic acid so i added a second coat and then a few hours later a third coat like i said before there's no point really sticking with it after three coats because it's just not gonna work and in this case after the third coat had dried and was rinsed and dried again the stain was still there i'm choosing to use a two-part epoxy glue to fix this corner of the nightstand where the veneer has separated from the pressed wood substrate this should hold it much better than just plain pva wood glue [Music] all i did was coat both sides and clamped it down for several hours once it had dried i used some quick wood wood epoxy to fill in the gaps underneath i wanted to make sure that this piece of veneer is supported and some of the original press wood had fallen out so this will just stabilize that once it's dry i'll sand it flush with the rest of the piece now it's time to get at these handles just like drawers there are 10 of these so this is going to take a while i wasn't sure if the stripper would affect the brass plating at all so i decided to scrape these and honestly it was probably the fastest least messy way to do this these handles are solid walnut [Music] [Music] once i had scraped off most of the finish i used these contour grips to wrap sandpaper around and sanded them smooth now some of these handles have a little dents there wasn't much i could do about that i can't really remove these i tried giving this one just a little squeeze and it did help a bit but i just have to kind of accept that this is a vintage piece and sometimes you have little flaws like this once everything was sanded and the dust had settled i went in with my vacuum and cleaned out both pieces in preparation for finish whatever that may be these stapled on handles will need a little bit of extra help to stay on in the future it looks like there was a small bit of wood glue here at one point but it obviously didn't help that much because pretty much all of these handles had shifted over time anyway so i added a bit more glue than was initially there [Music] one of the reasons i keep my work room so clean is because i'm a capricorn and i can't help it but also because i frequently have guests when i'm not using chemical products so nacho just wanted to say hello and he also wanted to have an inspection and he doesn't seem overly happy with how this black spot came out and neither am i but thankfully for me the rest of his inspection went okay and we're good to go except for the top this little guy is growing like a weed he's almost doubled in size in the last month the oxalic acid did a pretty good job of removing the water damage from the front but there's this strange almost like a greasy oily spot here and then of course the black spot oxalic didn't work on those so i'm gonna throw everything i have at it i'm gonna try some denatured alcohol which dissolves certain inks [Applause] once that had completely dried it did help a little bit with the oily patch not a whole lot but the black spot was still there so i decided to try regular household bleach and this generally doesn't work so well for bleaching wood but it does do a pretty good job of removing dyes and other stains that oxalic acid doesn't help with i can't say i was thrilled with the results again it did help a tiny bit more so we're moving in the right direction but i think i'm at the point where the stain just is what it is [Music] i'm using mohawk graining markers here to fill in that wood filled area at the back of the dresser i'm going to go ahead and give the odis oil a try this was my first choice with refinishing these pieces this is what i wanted to use but i'm not sure if the stain is going to allow me to do that i'm applying the oaties the same way i always do with a 1500 grit merchamer lawn pad that i've cut into four individual sections it doesn't really matter what side i start at once i put any oil on the top i have to do the whole top because if i try to remove it and a little bit remains when i go to put stain on later it might be patchy so it's all or nothing right now i'm giving it a go and my initial reaction here is that i'm not loving the color of this particular walnut and you can see here the stain still shows through and it might not be enough to bother some people but it absolutely bothers me so i had to first remove the excess then i used some odi safer solvents to try and dissolve some of the oil and then a light hand sanding this is the stain i'm opting to use this as general finishes in the color nutmeg this is a gel stain and this is actually one of my favorite stains to use on mid-century furniture this is more the color i was picturing something a little bit warmer walnut can vary quite a bit in tone it can be almost a greeny brown color right up to a warm rich chestnutty color and that's kind of more where i'm thinking with this again this wasn't my first choice but sometimes you gotta roll with it with these older pieces that are damaged [Music] so the frame and the legs of these two pieces are a different type of wood like i mentioned i'm going to stain them with the same stain but they will need to have some toner applied later on the toner is a spray that is really useful for color matching and i will likely have to do a thin layer of that on the top as well to help blend in that stain [Music] now you guys have been awesome sitting through this so far i know like i mentioned before you can only make videos that are 90 sanding and staining so interesting and a lot of you guys have been asking for a rescue bunny update so i thought i would give you a quick little visit while they eat their breakfast i don't think i'll ever get tired of listening to bunny's eat it's so cute so earlier in the video you saw me walking around in my backyard and i'm going to show you what i was doing so as mentioned i watched a course on how to make botanical ink from various things but one of the things was oak galls and i went on a search for an oak tree i know we have a few here we've got lots of maple trees and birch and pine and fur i was looking for an oak tree and i found a beautiful northern red oak in the back part of our property but i didn't want to harvest anything from the tree directly so i decided to look on the ground and see what i could find i did find a chunk of red oak bark as well as multiple dead leaves i found some egg corn tops while i didn't find any oak dolls i'm hoping that what i did with the scavenge will be enough now even though i know some of you will be interested in this this is a furniture channel it's not so much an art channel so i'm gonna breeze through this fairly quickly i just thought it would be a really fun thing to do considering this comes from trees and nature and so does every piece of furniture i work on for the most part basically you add your tannin rich material whatever that is to a pot of water and this is a pot i use only for furniture related stuff we don't eat out of it there's a couple of the things i need ferrous sulfate was one of them and i just happened to have some of the otis brand i also needed some clove oil i used to make my own shampoos and lotions and stuff so i have tons of essential oils and i did find some clove oil [Music] once everything was done i used a coffee strainer to strain the ink once it had cooled a bit and you can see that the oak tannins made this beautiful sort of golden color i'm going to try to make a bunch of different colors from this one production and the way i do that is using this ferrous sulfate i don't know how it works i'm not a chemist but the iron somehow interacts with the tannins and you can get different strengths depending on how much you use [Music] so i came up with three separate colors that i used i'm going for a monochromatic look this is just my little test piece here watercolors and anything like it is not my forte i mainly use acrylic i've been using acrylic paint for the last 30 years but watercolor it's not my medium i'm not very well versed in it so be gentle if this is something that you do a lot of i'm creating a series of three sort of mid-century-esque vases with different foliage in it and i'm excited to show you in the reveal but first i'm gonna grab my respirator and we're gonna move on here we're in the home stretch so the first thing i'm going to do is seal everything with a vinyl sealer and then i'm going to use two different toners to help the legs and the frame blend in with the rest of the walnut the majority will be perfect brown and then i will do a light coat of dark red walnut on top of that and then to seal everything i'm using the mohawk pre-catalyzed clear lacquer in satin finish all in all here i was a little bit disappointed that i wasn't able to use my beloved odis oil on this piece but sometimes with the hard cases you just have to sort of roll with it and in this case i had no choice really but to try to stain and tone that big black blob away i'm really happy with how this pair turned out [Music] there's just one more thing left to do normally i seal the inside of the drawers with either big mama's butter by dixie bell or wisely furniture self i've had so many people talk about this feed and wax product that i decided to grab it when i saw it at the hardware store up the street and i do have to say it was quite pleasant it's really easy to use and it smells great as always huge thank you to everyone for your love and support we're going to have a quick walk back down memory lane now to see what we started with again this was a local find and they were in pretty rough shape i did what i could for this set and hopefully it will live on for decades to come i don't know what that stain was it gave me a lot of trouble but i'm really happy with how this turned out thank you for watching and let me know what you think of my little art project [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Transcend Furniture Gallery

Views: 131,913

Keywords: furniture, furniture flipping, painted furniture, furniture painting, diy, diy furniture, repurposed, refinished furniture, mid century, restoration

Id: PUmRu9Stbbc

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022