Saving A Mid Century Modern Gem | Furniture Restoration

today I'm working on this mid-century Drexel table this is from Drexel's profile line of furniture from the 1950s and this is actually one of my favorite Furniture lines from that time period and actually one of the first pieces that I refinished was a dresser from The Drexel profile line of furniture and I've always liked them ever since then this particular piece is actually not in terrible shape um but it does have some evidence of mouse activity you can kind of see down here there's some mouse droppings and some wet spots and there's another wet spot up here so it's kind of gross and my biggest concern is just whether or not those wet spots are going to leave stains in the wood and I'm not even sure if there's finish on this piece if there is finish it's really thin so there probably isn't much in between the mouse urine and the wood which isn't a good thing and right now I'm just planning on refinishing the top where this bot is and also this lower Shelf since that's got all this going on the rest of it is actually in pretty good shape the legs are looking pretty good there's some paint there I think that I can probably just clean off so the first thing to do is just to clean up all the mouse issues I'm going to start with some naphtha I don't want to use anything water-based because it's only about 28 degrees Fahrenheit out here so it would probably freeze foreign wipe this paint off of here with the NAFTA and some fine steel wool whoa look that came right off maybe that wasn't paint I don't know what that was that was easy while I was cleaning it I found some spots that looked like the veneer may have been sanded through like right here this light spot in the corner that looks like a sand through and that actually could have been from the factory I have seen pieces where I'm stripping off the original finish and underneath the Finish are veneer sandthroughs it's actually not that unusual at least in my experience but I want to make sure I if I do any sanding on this I have to be extra careful in this area to not remove any more veneer there and there's a suspicious looking spot right here where it looks like the veneer may have been sanded a little too much and is almost sanded through uh either that is just a natural thing in the wood but hopefully this comes across on camera but you can kind of see how the pores of the wood are visible here these little dark marks and then when you get into this area there's no pores visible it's like the texture of the wood completely changes right there it's really smooth so I think that might be where the veneer is getting really thin um so I'm just going to make sure if I do any sanding on top here be careful especially in this spot not to sand too much so I don't go through the veneer and there are some spots like this spot here on the edge of this piece of veneer where it also looks like it's almost sanded through because again these little grain marks these these pores in the wood that are going this way just stop right here only get to about here and then there's no more so again I'll just have to be careful not to sand too much and there is some a little dark mark there and some scratching hopefully that's not a problem well we got some snow since the last time I worked on this table but I want to try and use some stripper on it to see if there's any finish on there that needs to be removed hopefully it's not too cold for the stripper to work it's just above freezing out here so the stripper did work and I was able to remove what little bit of finish was on here and now that that finishes off it's even more apparent that this spot here is a veneer sand through and there's also spots on the edge of the veneer where the veneer was sanded through so I have to be extra careful from here on to not sand this any more than I absolutely have to I think the next step is to try some oxalic acid to hopefully get rid of the stains from the mice and there's also a little bit of grayish black stain in the middle of the top and just see if the oxalic acid helps with those okay it's time to put the oxalic acid on and it's really cold out so I mix it up with some really hot water and hopefully it doesn't freeze the oxalic acid worked really well to get that grayish Mark out in the middle of the table but it didn't do anything for the mouse stains as you can see here it's still visible so I did a little research and I read somewhere that hydrogen peroxide can help remove pet stains on wood floors so I decided to try some on the mouse stains and I first just added some to one spot on the lower shelf and here is how it looked about a day after I applied the hydrogen peroxide this is the spot right here that I'm pointing at and it's a lot lighter than the rest of the stains so it seemed to be working so I took it inside to apply some more hydrogen peroxide to the rest of the stains I ended up doing a bunch of applications and I would usually just leave it overnight and then the next day I'd apply some more and just repeated that until it looked like it had lightened enough so after putting on about four or five applications of the hydrogen peroxide and letting it sit overnight in between each application this looks so much better you can just barely see some Shadows of the old stains but if you didn't know that they were ever there then you wouldn't know that they were ever there and the one on the top is also pretty much completely gone and I just added the hydrogen peroxide to the spots with a Q-tip instead of putting it over the whole thing mostly because I really like the color of this and I didn't want to lighten it if I didn't have to but when you do it just spot by spot you do run the risk of creating a light spot there instead of the formerly dark stain so if you look closely here there's a little bit in some spots of a light halo around where the stain used to be from where the hydrogen peroxide bleached the unstained wood a little bit just past the stain so if you didn't want something like that then you'd want to put the peroxide out of the whole tabletop but it doesn't bother me so I've got the table turned over and I was getting a closer look here at this piece and I noticed that it's not finished I can tell just by feeling it that it's raw wood so I guess this piece has been refinished which would explain all the sand throughs on the top set the sand throughs on the veneer so I'll put some finish on here when I put the finish on the top and on the Shelf I guess I just forgot to finish this I also noticed that there's this little piece that is cracked here and it's hard to see but on the top side of this piece there's a piece of veneer that runs along the whole Edge and it's actually a really thick piece of veneer and I think that's the only thing right now holding this little piece in place but it looks like it I might be able to get it out and then re-glue it although I don't know if I'll be able to get rid of that Gap just the way it's sitting now it seems like it's down all the way it will go and there's still a gap there but let me see if I can get it out first I don't want to um try too hard to get it out because I could end up just making more damage if it really doesn't want to come out well I don't think it's going to come out and I don't want to just cause more damage to try to get it out and it's I don't think it's really a structural issue so I think what I'm going to do is just shoot some glue into a little Gap that's down here between this piece and the veneer on top and just clamp it down and I think just leave it as is and while I have the table turned over we can see here the date of 1955 on here by Drexel I found this catalog page from an old Drexel catalog and it shows this table in it and it calls it a corner table k-73 and that's what got here k73 -4 I'm not sure what Dash four was for but the dimensions they have are 30 inches wide by 30 inches deep by 26 inches high this is actually 24 inches so slightly different but maybe they change the dimensions over the years this catalog is from 1960 and this table is from 55. so maybe they made some changes but it's a bit of an odd size I feel like it's it's too tall to be a coffee table and it's I feel like it's too big too wide to be a an end table so they call it a corner table I don't know if that means it would be put in a corner in a room or maybe it was meant to go in between two sectional couches like you'd have one piece of the couch going this way and then the table at the end and then the other section going that way maybe that's what it was meant to be not sure but it's cool to see it in the old catalog like this so earlier when I had stripped the top I taped off this section with some blue tape like this and when I removed it it tore out some of the grain here um this is a spot here where it tore it out kind of deeply and if I wet it down with some NAFTA it mostly disappears which tells me that if I just put some clear finish over this it would probably be fine it would probably not be that visible but it is kind of deep and you can kind of feel it so I want to try to fix that and to do that I'm going to use one of these hard fill sticks and basically you just melt it into there and it fills it up so you won't feel it anymore and I'll scrape it with this thing here that looks pretty good I decided I'm just going to put a clear finish over this but before I do that I want to wet it down with some NAFTA and this will show pretty much what it'll look like with a clear finish on it and you can see there's some pretty big scratches here not much I'm going to be able to do about that this is a veneer so I can't just sand them out or I'll go through the veneer like someone already has before me and if I stain the piece then those would look even worse because they would collect the stain so I'm just going to leave them and it is as is and I don't know how well you can see it on the camera but there's a kind of a dark section here kind of in this area here and then it's lighter a little bit lighter over here I wonder if somebody had something sitting on here so that the top didn't fade equally across the whole thing and it left a little bit of a Mark here but again there's not much I can do about it I can't sand it out because it's a veneer and I'll just go through the veneer and I'm not going to bother with stains or anything on this one so just going to leave it as it is okay it's time for the finishing step and I'm going to use some clear satin lacquer as a top coat and it's only about 38 degrees here right now which is probably below the recommended temperature to spray lacquer but I'm going to give it a try anyway I'm going to spray some really light coats just a few see how it comes out and I'm just doing the top and the Shelf below those are the only two parts that I am refinishing and now you can kind of see the difference in the color that I was talking about there's a darker section here and this is lighter around here I think somebody probably just had something sitting on the table for years and years that made that dark spot and here it is all finished I'm gonna forgo my usual Final Shots in the driveway because it's covered with snow and slush so I'm just gonna leave it here definitely not perfect but I like it this one's got some imperfections that I couldn't get out on the top like the veneer sand throughs you can see one of the sand throughs back here the shadow on the top where something was probably sitting on a table for years you can see that dark spot really well here I couldn't get rid of that stuff without putting new veneer on and I didn't want to do that putting new veneer on this top would be complicated because there's a solid piece of wood here I think this is Walnut and then there's this other separate piece here and then the veneer is inset in the middle so it's all flush so it would be really difficult to get this piece out without taking this piece off and that piece off and just taking it all apart it would be just way too much work so I'm choosing just to leave it as it is thanks for watching thanks for watching

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 58,852

Keywords: restoration, repair, mid century

Id: eBl0VDEFb6M

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022