Thrift Store Rescue #22 | Refinishing And Repairing A Mid Century Lane Table

in this video i'll refinish and repair this old table i found this table recently in a thrift store i paid 25 dollars for it it was made by the lane furniture company in the 1960s the finish on the top is rough but even through the old damaged finish i could see that the table had some nice grain patterns on the top so it looked like it was worth putting some time into to refinish there are some chips in the veneer along the edge the finish on the base is in pretty good shape so i won't have to refinish that which is nice because that would have been a lot of work to have to strip the old finish off of all those pieces it does have some loose joints though which i'll have to glue back together it has these details here on the legs that i think is supposed to look like either pegs in the joints or maybe a plug to cover a screw but they're actually fake they just stamped a circle in the wood and then colored the circle darker than the rest of the finish and you can see here how the grain pattern runs right through that dot so it's not a separate piece of wood i started by stripping the finish off of the top i used a paint scraper to get most of it off and then i sanded off anything that was left and when i do it like this with the scraping followed by sanding i always get the question why not just sand it all off instead of scraping it first and there are a few reasons one is because scraping is usually quicker and i also go through less sandpaper and most importantly i feel like there's less risk of doing damage to the veneer with the scraper i get a lot of messages from people who have stripped a finish with an orbital sander and ended up sanding through the veneer and they want to know how to fix it so i don't want to encourage people too much to strip off a finish with an orbital sander because if you're not experienced with it you could sand through the veneer when i'm using the sander i always keep it moving and try not to linger on the edges too long because it's even easier to sand through on an edge and i also don't apply a lot of pressure to the sander i only apply enough pressure to keep the sander on the surface and going in whatever direction i want it to go and i haven't had any problems with sanding through veneer doing it this way after the finish had all been removed i sprayed some water on the top and this just helps to show what the wood will look like with a clear finish on it and it looked great there was some really nice veneer hiding under that old finish i had started sanding with 120 grit sandpaper and i wanted to continue sanding up until about 180 grit but first i wanted to address the veneer chips they were mostly just along the edge in some spots and i chose an easy fix with these and just used some wood filler i first wet down the wood around where i was going to be using the filler so that i could see what the wood will look like once the finish is on it because that's the color that i want to try to match with the filler but i didn't have any filler that matched that so i just went with a lighter filler and then later on i'll go back and touch up the color so it's a better match once the filler had dried then i could continue sanding first i used 150 grit with the orbital sander and then i used 180 grit by hand once all the sanding was done then i could go back and touch up the color of the filler and here i've wet down the surface again so that i have a good reference of what color i'm trying to match and then i took some golden oak stain which looked like it was going to be pretty close and just brushed some of that on i let that dry overnight and when i came back the next day it looked like it was still a little bit light and i also wanted to add a few small grain lines to it which will also help it to not stand out as much so first i just took a sharpie with a fine point and drew in just a few very fine grain lines once that was dry then i brushed on some walnut gel stain and after all that i was happy with how it looked it blended in pretty well and your eye wasn't drawn to it the base had a few loose joints that i would need to re-glue this joint in particular was loose but it wasn't loose enough for me to pull the stretcher out of the hole and easily get glue in there so to get the glue into the hole that the stretcher goes into i first had to drill a small hole on the underside of the stretcher and this would be just big enough to get a glue syringe into and then with the syringe i could inject the glue into the mortise and i just tried to fill it up until it started coming out around the edges and it worked pretty well and then there were two other joints that were loose enough for me to gently pry them out of the mortise and easily get some glue into there and then i just clamp it up once the glue was dry then i just cleaned up the legs with some naphtha and fine steel wool the bottom of the legs all have this dark color and at first i thought it was just dirt or grime that had collected there and i was going to clean it off but upon closer inspection i could see that it was actually intentional from the factory if you look on the very bottom of the leg there's a light circle where there was probably some sort of a little foot or pad or something like that on the leg and they just sprayed the color right over that you can see the outline around it so i just left that as it was overall the finish on the legs was in really good shape but it did have a few dings and chips so i just touched those up with some stain and in this particular spot i chose to use a dark stain because the legs all have this dark color along the edges it's kind of subtle but if you look closely you can see it sort of like what they did at the bottom of the leg so i just used a dark walnut stain for that then i was ready to put new finish on the top the color of the top and the figure in the grain all looked so good on its own that i decided not to use any stain on this i had some clear lacquer left over from a previous project that i wanted to use as the top coat but before i sprayed the lacquer on i applied some clear danish oil to the top i did this because the danish oil will be absorbed by the wood and will help to accentuate that nice grain that it has if i just sprayed the lacquer on it it would look good but i don't know if it would show off the grain as much because the lacquer doesn't get absorbed down into the grain as much as the danish oil does so i decided just to give this a shot couldn't hurt once the danish oil was dry i sprayed on some lacquer satin lacquer i'm using a spray gun for this but you could just as easily buy this in a aerosol can and use that i had a little bit more lacquer than i needed for the top so i sprayed some over the bottom over the legs and the whole base just to freshen it up a little bit the lacquer had dried i rubbed it down with some fine steel wool and wax and here it is all finished thanks for watching

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 39,394

Rating: 4.9803095 out of 5

Keywords: thrifting, diy, restoration, mid century

Id: YWbxMaXAfCo

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021