Thrift Store Cabinet Gets A Much Needed Makeover | Furniture Restoration & Refinishing

I just brought home my latest find this is an old Lane cabinet I paid about 11 for it which may have been eleven dollars too much but I think it can be saved this was made by the Lane Furniture Company and I'm guessing by the looks of it probably in the early 70s or late 60s Lane started making some kind of chunkier looking stuff in that time period and I think this piece kind of looks a bit chunky it has been painted unfortunately but just on the sides so hopefully I can get that paint off without too much trouble the top is in terrible shape hopefully I can save that veneer I'm hoping some oxalic acid can help the black stains on it I don't think the knobs are original well I know these knobs aren't original and there's an extra hole here that's not being used prob probably from the original handles so I'll have to do something about that and the inside of the doors is in really good shape and you can see how nice the veneer is so I'm hoping that I can get the outside to look like this first thing I want to do is try and remove the paint and it's only about negative three degrees Fahrenheit out here right now but that's okay because I'm going to use a heat gun to remove the paint hopefully if this works foreign foreign out here but I want to try and scrape what's left of the finish off of the top I've already started in a small spot here it looks like it's working so see how it goes foreign so I got the finished scraped off what was left of it it really wasn't that much on there but I did notice something there are a lot of these kind of swirly curlicue marks on the top hopefully you can see it on the camera and they look like marks from an orbital sander so I don't know if somebody maybe already tried to refinish this or tried to sand the finish off of it and left those marks but just hoping it's not a problem because there's only so much sanding I can do on here to get stuff like that out because it's a veneer we'll see it's day three and it's even colder than it was yesterday it's only about negative six degrees Fahrenheit right now so I think time to bring this project inside yesterday I got the top scraped and then sanded lightly just to remove anything I missed with the scraper and now I want to try some oxalic acid but it's way too cold out here to apply that it'll just freeze right away so I'd rather not have to haul this whole thing inside and down the stairs to the basement so I'm gonna see if I can remove this top I think it may be held on by screws hopefully just by screws and not glue but we'll see okay so I tried taking the top off by removing the screws but it's glued on as well so I didn't want to try to force it off probably would have just caused more damage so I'm just going to leave the top on and I'm going to haul the whole thing inside and into the basement but first i'm going to remove the doors just to make it a little easier to carry okay I've got the cabinet inside and I'm going to apply the oxalic acid now well the weather warmed up a bit so I'm back outside it's above freezing now at least so I can continue work here in the garage so the oxalic acid didn't help that much of the dark marks are still on the table top which makes me think that they're probably not from water sitting on the top or LC oxalic acid probably would have cleared them up I also tried a little bit of stripper to see if that would get up the whatever that dark stuff is but didn't help much so I think my last resorts are sanding and scraping and of course especially with the sanding that has the risk of sanding through the veneer but um the veneer is looking pretty bad anyway so there's a chance I might have to uh either put new veneer on it or who knows maybe even paint it we'll see first thing I'm going to try is just scraping on some of those dark areas and see if I can clean it up with the scraper all right [Music] foreign scraping and it looks a lot better than it did but there is still some some of that dark stuff on here so I'm going to try very carefully sanding a little more with some 120 Grit foreign scraping and sanding to 180 Grit and it looks a lot better than it did I think I'm just going to leave it here I'm not going to do any more sanding or scraping probably end up going through the veneer if I did so this is as good as that as it's going to get on the doors I'm just going to use the scraper to get the finish off there's really not much finish left on here shouldn't take too long foreign [Laughter] [Music] and now I'm just going to clean them up a little further with some 120 grit sandpaper foreign [Music] [Music] okay so here's the door after sanding and scraping and looks pretty good I think these dark sections might be Rosewood not sure though but uh yeah it's not not too bad looking I do have to do something about the holes from the uh handles but I'll figure that out a little later all right so I think today I can start putting some finish on this and I'm going to start with the top and I'm going to use some stain on this partly because this middle section is a lot lighter than the outer section and I'm not usually a big fan of that high contrast look on furniture so I want to see if I can put some stain on here and try to bring the middle closer to the outer part and also there's a lot of imperfections on this top and hoping a stain might help to cover some of those although you have to be careful because if you have some scratches the stain might actually make those stand out even more because it'll fill them fill them up and they could show up even more than they did before and I'm going to use Antique Walnut Gel Stain and now before this dries I'm going to take a paper towel uh wet with some mineral spirits and just wipe it along the outer Parts the dark parts because I don't need those any darker than they were so I want to try and clean off some of the stain from those parts without taking it off the middle part like I just did here so I'm going to put a little bit more stain there and wipe off the excess it looks pretty good okay and then just very carefully I'm going to keep going around the outer parts and you may have noticed earlier when I was wiping this door down that one of these sections is a lot lighter than the rest so I'm going to do the same stain on just this one part just to bring it closer to the other sections at the factory when this was made they probably just sprayed the whole thing with a tinted lacquer that would have brought everything sorta into the same color range so that's probably why this didn't looks so bright so light when I first got the piece but I'm going to use stain instead of tinted lacquer so that should do it instead of trying to find new handles for the doors I'm just going to install these latches here that will allow me to not use any door handles you just push it and it releases the door and that will replace these standard magnetic latches they had and first thing I'm going to do is fill the old screw holes in the doors and to fill those I'm going to use one of these hard fill sticks and just melt it in there fill them up first thing I want to do is to fill the holes just with some I think this is part of a chopstick put these in there so that I don't have to fill the entire hole with this stick so I just want a little backer in there then I'll wipe it down just uh get it wet so that I can see what the color of the wood will be once some clear finishes on it and I want to try to get as close to that color as I can with the stick and this is probably the closest that I have and then I can just melt it in and once it's dry I can level it out and I think I have a low spot right in the corner of this one here put some more in foreign a little later after I get some finish on here if I want to try to blend it in a little more I can take a dark fine tip marker and put a few Grain Lines going through it so that it Blends in a little bit more because right now the Grain Lines just kind of stop and then start again but the color is pretty close okay now I can put the latches on and I'm going to reuse this metal plate here the latches came with their own but I can just use that and the way I'm going to do this is to just stick it on there and then close the door and I don't want it shut all the way I want to let it out maybe like a sixteenth of an inch because that plunger thing on the latch needs room to go in and then pop out so just very carefully hold the latch on there open the door and then I have to get in here and make the screw holes while I hold that there and that's going to be kind of tricky but we'll see how it goes all right I got the latches installed and they work they work great foreign to spray the lacquer top coat and it's only about 34 degrees Fahrenheit outside where I'm going to be spraying so it's probably not recommended to spray and that kind of weather but we'll see if it works seems to be working just fine things and here it is all finished the lacquer worked out fine no problems with that right Rock thanks for watching

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 106,042

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Id: bqZnFUNnUpc

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 01 2023