TRASHED & FILTHY: Unbelievable Before & After Laminate Furniture Makeover

[Music] [Music] welcome back everybody in today's video I'm going to be taking this pretty sad looking Facebook Marketplace dresser and doing what I can to turn this around to say this piece was gross is a bit of an understatement as you can see lots of Mouse Poop there's dings and chips all over this it's dirty this piece has a solidwood frame but the top and sides are laminate if you're new to my channel you're probably going to wonder why IID waste my time on something like this if you've been around for a while though you guys know that this is the type of furniture I like to work on this is the stuff that nobody cares about and usually ends up in the dump so let's change that my name is Angie and I refinish furn sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash welcome to my work room so jumping right into this makeover I want to talk a little bit more about the construction so like I said solidwood frame laminate top and sides this wood grain if you will on the front is not actual wood grain it's a faux blonde finish on top of solid wood drawers but the grain that you're seeing in the Finish is not the grain of the wood that's underneath this finish which you'll see a little bit later on when I go to remove this old finish it's not quite the same thing as the blonde finish from a lot of the mid-century mahogany Furniture this is all [Music] fo so because I'm lucky here that the drawer faces themselves are solid wood I'm going to be stripping right back to that wood but keeping in mind when you do that on pieces like this there's usually a reason they pick that specific wood for underneath another finish it's usually not great quality it's very mismatched it can be miscolored you never really know what you're going to get but for me anything is better than what I'm looking at right now [Music] so you guys saw me take the hardware off pull the drawers out vacuum all of the mouse poop up from the inside and now I'm getting to cleaning I have to clean every square inch of this piece inside and out a piece like this that's been left in a barn or a basement or a garage just because they've had some little Grodin in there doesn't necessarily mean that it's a right off and should be tossed you do have to be a bit careful with mous excrement because of Haunter virus which isn't super common around here but it is in other parts of the world you can see here that a lot actually all of the drawer bottoms are loose at the back so I'll have to repair that you can also see I have a mask on now I didn't while I was vacuuming because I wasn't really disturbing anything but now that I have the sander going to try to smooth out all of these little nice chew marks I just want to make sure I'm not breathing in any grossness so another reason I'm lightly sanding the inside is so that I can add some odor blocking primer now it doesn't really smell too bad but this is just going to seal in everything so onto the drawers I'm going to refinish these inside and out so I'm going to make sure to sand everything you can see I'm even going to be sanding away the old overspray from the [Music] manufacturer all of the drawer bottoms were popped up at the back you can see they're just stapled down so I'm just going to tap that back down but I'm not going to rely on that I'm adding two small Nails in the back to hold it as well I'm very lucky that these are solid wood drawers because it's going to give me more options when it comes to refinishing I'm not limited only to paint which is sometimes the case with these laminate pieces so you can see as I'm standing here there's this white layer coming up that is the primer that was sprayed on and then the new faux finish was laid over top of that it's fairly easy to sand right through that into the raw wood but you have to be really careful with these dressers they can be misleading the two top drawers have this groove that's been red in to make it look like it's two drawers initially I was just smoothing it out with sanding but as you can see here it's quite shallow so I'm actually going to go in and a bit and reroute that channel just to make it stand out a bit more this drawer needs some repairs this glue block is in completely the wrong spot and looks like it's always been there and there was a split in the side of the drawer itself so I'm adding some wood glue in and I'm going to clamp it [Music] up this small spring clamp at the end is just going to hold the two pieces in line with each other and then well not this clamp wrong clamps these clamps are going to apply pressure one thing you want to be careful of and I see this all the time you don't have to press super hard with the clamps especially on a repair like this because if you clamp too hard those pieces are going to shift a bit so I haven't really told you my total plan yet obviously the tops and sides are getting painted and part of the frame I need to remove that slick shiny surface so I'm just scuffing down past that you don't want to go too far down or you'll expose the hard board or fiberboard backing underneath I was initially hoping to have these two sections be wood grain showing because they are solid wood as is much of the frame but when I started sanding down this bottom one the grain that would be facing you is just not that pretty it's not the right type of grain and you can actually see it a little bit better here in this shot it's just I don't really want this showing so those will be getting painted after all I'm adding some CA glue here to rebond where this is pulled away from the frame it's kind of nice with this type of glue cuz you can just sort of let gravity do its thing and add some accelerator and then basically just press and hold and this stuff works really quickly originally it would have been adhered with something like contact cement but when you're doing a repair like this you can't really get contact cement in there so this is a quick and easy way to bond [Music] it so one thing this piece is missing as you can see here are its casters now I don't have anything here that will fit um normally there would be a long insert that would plug in here I don't really think this is the right piece for tapered legs just kind of the way the base is built I think it would look funny so I am going to get some small casters to replace the ones that are missing obviously you guys can't feel through the television or phone but the top of this is quite pitted there's quite a bit of scratches and divots I have this wood filler I've had for a while I don't particularly like it so this is a great piece to kind of get rid of it on you can see it just doesn't spread very well and this is definitely not my favorite this is going to look super messy but all I'm really doing is spreading this over the entire thing you could do the same thing with Bondo or something like that I just really wanted to get rid of this wood filler and as I'm sanding the dried excess away you can see how it has filled all of those little divots and scratches this is important for a smooth finish but now that I have two different textures on the top I going to have to Prime I use Fusion mineral paint which is usually really good for adhesion and when you're painting over something like laminate that's been scuff sanded properly and cleaned I find you don't always need a primer with Fusion I'm not worried about bleed through but in this situation I do have wood filler on there if I were to just paint the top as it is those little marks would show through the paint so of course I made a mess you can see it kicked back here a little bit on me and dried almost immediately on my counter bought a little bit of rubbing alcohol and away it goes I ran out of my normal rollers so I picked these up I don't really know how these are going to work but we're going to give it a [Music] go [Music] I had so many ideas for this I thought about bright colors I thought about pretty much everything but there's one color that I've had sitting here for a long time that I haven't used yet and that is woodwick I'm not a huge brown taupey kind of person but this color was intriguing to me the first coat always goes on fairly thin when you're using a brush don't be alarmed you can see that thin first coat dries super hard and provides the foundation if you will for the subsequent coats of paint so back to those two grooves in the top drawers I'm using this compact rder to do this I do have a big rder but for a job like this this is totally fine I'm using a straight 1/8 inch bit and basically all I'm doing is just setting it directly in the middle of the groove it's the same width adjusting the fence and then routing you always want to make sure you're going in the right direction there is a right and wrong way to do it and that looks much better to me using a Rudder can be scary and intimidating but I find if you start off with something small like a trim Rudder even if you get a bigger one later you'll still use the trim Ruder for certain things so that's what I would recommend this is not chocolate milk a while back I did a monotone set of laminate dressers same idea the top and sides were laminate and the fronts were laminate covered solid wood um but I didn't love love the result so I wanted kind of a second go at it with this similar but different color so this time I'm using more water in my paint wash and then actually sanding some of it back what this is going to do is tint the wood all the same color but still allow the warmth to come through which I think is what was missing in that first set of dress that I did this is what the drawer would look like without sanding it back which is still nice but it's just a bit too dark because these don't have a full paint wash on because I sanded some of it off when I put this wood butter on it is going to darken a bit but that's what I want here I wanted the paint wash to tint the wood slightly gray in certain areas so that even though these boards are completely mismatched and you know different colors different grains it'll still hopefully anyway work together and give me a little bit more translucency and warmth than the other set that I showed you a minute ago you're probably wondering why I bothered to paint wash anyway if I was going to sand some of it off and if you look at the inside of the drawer how much more yellow it is you can see that this has tinted it slightly which is all I [Music] needed this is a new product to me I saw it recommended a few times when I was doing that clock a few weeks back supposedly this cleans and polishes really well without really damaging plated metal and it just came in the mail a couple days ago and it actually does a pretty good job it removes tarnish but if that tarnish has eaten through the plating obviously it's not going to help that I thought about adding more Modern Hardware to this piece I thought about repainting these but you know considering I'm dealing here with paint grade wood and a bit of a so story in terms of this piece's history I thought leaving the original Hardware complete with its patina would be a good [Music] idea these are the casters that I bought I paid more for these casters than I did for the entire unit considering no one's going to see this it might seem a little silly but it kind of just makes me smile that this will be up off the floor in such a pretty way now [Music] so the ultimate test here Willow is our resident Mouser she can smell a mouse a mile away I thought it would be a good idea to have her come in and do the sniff test I need you to do your thing no no interest smell what's in here I think that's a good sign come here [Music] so we are in the home stretch now everyone still with me thank you you rock don't forget to like this video And subscribe if you want to see more stuff like this I try to get three videos at a month looking back at what I started with it's I almost don't even recognize it it's so so different now these pieces get overlooked all the time at thrift stores usually because they look like this or they might be a little bit stinky and yeah this isn't a top quality piece but it's not junk either this is still a really sturdy piece of furniture I truly believe I was the last hope for this the lady I got it from bought it to flip it I think she was overwhelmed with what she had to work with because she immediately listed it again and bought something else this was the last chance for this guy and and hopefully I did it justice I love a well-built solid Walnut piece of furniture with you know stunning wood grain but there is sometimes Beauty in imperfections and these drawer fronts are exactly that for me as always thank you so much for watching enjoy the reveal and I will see you next [Music] time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Transcend Furniture Gallery

Views: 62,106

Keywords: furniture, furniture flipping, painted furniture, furniture painting, diy, diy furniture, repurposed, refinished furniture

Id: SYC8ahgM4Rw

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024