Thrift Store Rescue #8 / Mid Century Furniture Restoration

spring is finally here it's a good day to go thrifting on today's trip to the thrift store I had to do a little digging but I managed to find this little end table cabinet was in pretty rough shape they had it priced at $29 but it was a discount day so I got it for 25 which is still more than I'd want to pay for this if I was planning on restoring it and then trying to sell it at a profit in this case I'm buying it mainly because it'll make a good video and I may keep it or I may end up selling it for whatever I can get for it but a lot of people ask me how much I sell pieces for and basically how much money is in the business of restoring furniture and selling it and really that depends on first how much you want to pay yourself an hour and then it depends on how much this type of furniture sells for generally in your area and in this case there's not a whole lot of value in a single end table like this if there was a pair then there would be more value because people could use them as matching nightstands which are always in high demand and in this case I probably had about eight hours into this piece by the time it was done and I would think I could probably sell it for maybe on the high end maybe 125 but that would probably even be difficult since I don't have a shop so more realistically if I wanted a quick sale probably would be under $100 so you can do the math there as far as what I would be getting paid hourly after you subtract them out I paid for it twenty-five dollars so that's just something to think about I started by removing the doors and once I had the doors off I could remove this weird shelf thing that was in here and then I apply the stripper to the whole piece except for the inside it's very difficult time-consuming to refinish the inside of a cabinet so I would only do it if it really needed it and if it was gonna be worth it in the end and in this case it's not just due to the value of the piece and once the stripper had been on long enough I scraped it off with a scraper and there wasn't a whole lot of finish on this whatever finish was left on it was pretty thin so it came off easily and once I scraped off most of the residue I went over it with a dry piece of Faurot steel wool and this helps to catch any of the residue that's still on there and then after that I went over it with again with steel wool but this time with some mineral spirits to clean off anything that was left the steel wool helps especially on curved pieces like the base here where the scraper doesn't work as well the inside did need some attention I didn't refinish it but it did have some some kind of material stuck to the bottom so first I just tried spraying some household cleaner on it and tried to scrub it off that didn't work too well so eventually I just wet it down with some mineral spirits and took a utility knife blade and just tried to gently scrape off any of that stuff that was stuck to the bottom and after it had dried from the stripping process I did some sanding and the top was in the worst shape the rest of it wasn't too bad so on the top I used an orbital sander and started with 120 grit and went to 150 and then 180 and then 220 and there was this ring on the top that was still there even after all that sanding so I just tried going over it gently by hand with some sandpaper just to see if I could get any more of it out but I didn't want to sand too much because if you sand just in one spot too much like this it can leave a light spot so I just tried a little bit to get more of that ring out and here I'm wetting it down with some naphtha after sanding and you can see it's the ring is still somewhat visible but after the stain is applied it'll probably be okay and on the rest of the cabinet I just went over it by hand just with 220 grit it didn't need any more than that I was in pretty good shape and I just wanted to smooth out any of the grain that had been raised by the stripping process one of the back legs had a small chunk taken out of it so I filled that in with some of this epoxy wood filler and basically just slice a piece off however much you think you'll need and it's a two-part system so you just knead it together until the two parts are mixed evenly and then just put it into your repair and it helps if you wet your finger a little bit when you're shaping it won't stick to the epoxy as much and it's just easier to shape it that way and then once it tried I just sanded it lightly and went over it with stain later like a lot of mid-century Furniture the base on this piece is a lighter and cheaper wood than the walnut veneer that's on the rest of the cabinet and and you'll see this a lot especially a mid-century Furniture so that lighter wood has to be colored to match the walnut and I'll do that later with some gel stain but first I'm going to stain the rest of the piece and I'll just tape off the base so that the stain does not get on there because I don't want to seal that I want it to be able to absorb the gel stain that I apply later I'm using a Vera Thayne walnut oil stain on this and it may seem redundant to apply walnut stain to walnut veneer but I like doing it on pieces that are being refinished and especially when they've had some damage like this one has some spots on the top that I couldn't get out completely you'd really have to sand them out but it's a veneer so you can only stand so much or else you'll go through the veneer so the stain I find just helps to blend in imperfections and maybe hide them a little bit and just give the whole piece a more uniform look and I just applied the stain with a foam brush and I don't usually let it sit on the wood for very long in this case probably just a few seconds and then wipe off the excess and here I'm applying the stain to the doors once the application of stain on the sides and the top had dried then I moved on to the base and for this I'm using a different stain I'm using gel stain and I'm using a gel stain because this is pretty light wood on the base and the gel stain sits on top of the wood more than a regular oil stain and it's just easier to get a darker color on light wood like this and it'll hide the grain more and since this isn't walnut grain because it's not walnut wood on the base hiding it will help to give the illusion that it's walnut like the rest of the piece which is generally what they try to do at the factory when they made these just cover the whole thing with a uniform color so that looked like the whole thing was made of walnut and in this case this gel stain I'm using is called candle light and it's made by general finishes and again I just apply it let it sit for maybe a few seconds and then wipe off the excess and after this first coat had dried I did go and apply a second coat just to darken it a little bit more once the stain had dried then I applied the top coat which in this case is a satin lacquer and this is a deft satin lacquer and you can spray on as many coats as you want I usually spray more coats on the top than the rest just because I get some more use so we'll have more protection and here it is all finished and here's that spot on the top that ring and you can see it's not very visible looks good to me thanks for watching you

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 2,266,352

Rating: 4.8934002 out of 5

Keywords: mid century, restoration, refinish, thrifting, thrift store, diy, furniture refinishing, vintage, reuse

Id: pv7b_iulx7w

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019