Flip This! 💯🏵️😎Modern MAKEOVER of Art Deco Waterfall Dresser! // UpCycle Studio

Hey guys, I am back with a new furniture flip. This is an Art Deco waterfall style wardrobe dresser. This is the, the image on the right is what the original would have looked like with that mirror on top. I would have removed that anyway, just because I'm trying to update this dresser to have a bit of a modern twist, and I just don't think that that mirror would have, you know, been suited for something modern. You'll see later that I take out the table saw and add a piece of trim in order to fill in the gap there for where that mirror was held on in the back of the dresser. So to get started, as always, I cleaned it really well with Spray 9, which is a degreaser, and this was in someone's storage area within their basement, so it was pretty grimy. So right here I am taking off all the finish on this veneer top. I'm trying to get it down right to the raw wood without, you know, burning through it. So I took my time here. I started with, I think, a 120 grit on my sandpaper. This is going pretty fast to see, but I had a lot of footage for this particular video. I had an interface in my sander, so that waterfall dresser has that real rounded front, and that interface, that foam interface, allowed me to get to those curves without burning through. And this is the Bondo that I'm using to fill any imperfections in this wood, any gouges, which there were plenty. I don't use the Bondo that is for general purposes, I believe. I actually use the wood filler Bondo. This was busting my chops because I was a little bit lazy. I didn't want to mix up another batch of Bondo, so I was hell-bent on making sure that this got filled thoroughly with what amount of product I had on that plastic spatula. So I really worked this quite a bit. The sides I was going to paint, so once I sanded smooth the Bondo, I scuff sanded the whole piece, just as always, so that it adheres properly. It's a nice smooth finish. And a lot of sanding, hand sanding as well. I love the sand net discs, sanding discs, because you can really fold them up really well to get in those tight spaces. For cleanup, I typically take a brush first to get the big stuff off of those dust particles, and then I use denatured alcohol, just so that the wood grain doesn't raise like water would. And I wipe down the whole piece. This Bondo piece, that quick spray that I used to clean was shellac, and that was just sort of to prime that, because that went through to raw wood in that one spot, and I didn't want the paint to absorb differently into that Bondo piece than the rest. So I just took a clear shellac, it's really fast drying, it's one of my favorite products to use, and just sealed up that Bondo spot before I went and painted this. It's a matte black soft finish, it's a mineral paint by Fusion. I have mixed thoughts about this particular product. The color is charcoal, I'll link it down below, but let me know your thoughts if you've used any Fusion mineral paint products, if you liked it, loved it, or have had troubles with it, and let me know if you have any tips or tricks. Maybe I'm doing something a little bit wrong. When I say mixed thoughts, that means some of my thoughts are not positive thoughts, but maybe I'm doing something that I could be doing better. So let me know in the comments down below. This is just a second coat of that black mineral paint finish. I think in total I might have done three coats of this, and my thought process was to use a brush the first couple coats, that way I can work it into the wood grain, and then I would finish with a mohair roller. So this is coat two. After the second coat, I did notice a couple of gouges. They were much finer, but they were much more noticeable than I would have liked. So you can see those little scratches there, that is just a wood filler that I did to smooth that out. And I was sanding down that wood filler, but also scuff sanding again that second coat of paint, just to make sure that once I had my final coat of paint on this, I wanted it super smooth. And then I took a damp rag, just an ever so slightly damp rag, in order to get that dust back. And here's the mohair roller I was mentioning before. I think this has probably the smoothest finish for the final application. And yeah, it went on really nicely. But I did thought that it was going to need two coats, so I was disappointed to think that this needed three coats. And out of that 500 milliliter bottle of Fusion paint, I think I ended up using 75% of it. So in my mind, I would have wanted to get two pieces of furniture done with that bottle, which is roughly $30, I believe. So this is some trim work that needs to be painted, so I'm just trying to protect that wood veneer, because I'm just trying to get to the trim here. In this video, you'll see me jump around a little bit, and maybe it's just me, but I get super bored with things. So I like to do what I like to do, and then stop and go on to something maybe more interesting, just to mix things up. So I had some parts that had dried, and I also have kids at home, and I just do what I can with the time that I have. So the jumping around is real life for me here, and probably a lot of you guys too. So here's some more hand sanding. There were a lot of details with this particular piece that I really got into, and that's that sanding net. You use far less sandpaper with these nets. I think they claim it's 10 sanding rounds to one sanding net. I think I got that right, and I think that probably is accurate marketing. I really enjoy them, and I will link them down below. If you're anything like me, I prefer these videos to be relaxing more than exciting, so I'll stop talking and you can watch satisfying processes. I just love it. You hear that there's a little bit of finish that I did not get off of this corner, so I'm going in with a sanding sponge. This is 100 grit in order to get that because I plan on staining it, and you know, if there's any finish that's not removed alongside a piece of raw wood, it's not going to absorb the same way, so the finish is going to look different in those corners, so I really had to get in there. And this is a wood conditioner. Oh my god, this smells so bad, so you know, use a respirator when you use this product. It's oil-based, but it's just really strong. Protect your lungs. So this just allows for this stain that I'm going to apply next to absorb evenly throughout the piece. And this is, oh geez, this is another oil oil-based stain, which I do prefer to work with. Not nearly as stinky as that wood conditioner, though. I don't remember the name of it. Jacobian, maybe, or something. I will link that down below also for you to see. I did two coats of stain, so I did the wood conditioner, wiped that back, the first coat of stain, wipe that back, and another one, and wipe that back, and then let it dry. So it was a bit of a process because oil-based products take a long time to dry, so it was, you know, every day was a different coat of this stain product. So it took a while for this piece in total. So here I am fixing that piece of trim with some black paint. That's the trouble with getting bored easily and the bouncing around that I do, that sometimes I have to go back and fix things that I should have done first, but I don't. So I make a little bit more to this piece, so I am just protecting that wood top. This is frog tape, and I used this because it's usually more delicate than the traditional blue 3M, I think, painter's tape. So when I'm removing it from that veneer, I just want it to be gentle. Because I think it is for delicate surfaces, it sometimes doesn't stick as well as I want it to, so there I am trying to force it to lay flat in that corner, which, you know, I can only do so much for, but I did. It did work out fine in the end. I am using a spray polycrylic to finish this piece, so with a spray application, I could just kind of use my finger and push that down when I went near that area, so it was all good. And here's the spray. I have such a time opening the cap of that particular product, so if you want to use that, don't put the cap back on because it's a battle. This is the same process that I'm going through for the drawer faces as I did the very top of this waterfall dresser. So I'm just removing the finish. I plan on staining these, but you'll see what I do in the end, because these pieces, while you look at them and you think that it would look nice stained, it was incredibly blotchy, and I couldn't figure out where the discoloration of these was coming from. They had no rhyme or reason. I thought it might be sun bleaching in some places, and so once I had them all stripped back, I just didn't want to stain them, because it was exacerbating those discoloration patches, and I just didn't like it. So that's when I sort of really dug in with the modern feel to this piece. I love those chevron inlays on the top dresser drawer, so I wanted to preserve those and stain those and keep watching, and you'll see how it turns out. I'm just using a little bit of wood filler to smooth out these edges that were missing pieces of veneer, but can you see that, how blotchy that all is? I couldn't sand that down any further, because I would burn through the veneer, and if I stain that, it just wouldn't make that look worse. So I'm back with my sanding sponge, 100 grit, just smoothing down that wood filler. Now the very top of this piece, I am going to use a wipe-on poly product, because it's an oil-based stain. I prefer to use an oil-based top coat, so I use my tack cloth just prior to the wipe-on finish, and got everything off of the top of this piece, and just like it says, I wiped it on, and this is a satin finish. I really love this product, it's super user-friendly, it has a beautiful finish, the cleanup's easy, so especially if you're starting out, I think this is a great product to use, but I mean, even if you're not starting out, go with the wipe-on poly. In between the coats of wipe-on poly, I think in total I used three coats for maximum protection. I mean, it's the top of a bureau, I'm assuming there's going to be perhaps a lamp or something on top, which can have a tendency to scratch, so I want really good protection on top for whomever purchases this piece, and in between, I like to knock back any particulates that fall into the paint, the paint, the poly, excuse me, and so I used the finest steel wool in order to do that, so I went over the whole piece, and then cleaned that again with the tack cloth, and make sure you reuse those guys, you don't need to use a new one every single time. I like to have one tack cloth for typically one piece of furniture. There are times that you need to get a new one if you have like paint dust, and then you're going to something stained, you don't want the paint dust to go into your stained wood, you know, that would not work well, but typically I use one for each one, and I keep wiping that back, and then I applied my second coat, and hopefully onto my third. I don't know if I caught that on video, but there are three coats of poly on this, you just gotta trust me. So here's a sneak peek, I'm wiping all the dust back, but you can see what I decided to do for this dresser, and I really love the black, I just think it looks really modern and sophisticated, and it has a, you know, black has a lot of pretty masculine feel to it, but because it's a waterfall dresser, and it has that rounded front, plus the stained top, I just think it has a nice balance between the masculine and feminine, and yeah, I really loved how it turned out. This is the second coat I'm trying to get on. This product supposedly has a top coat built into it, but again, I use polycrylic in order to seal that in, I just, it doesn't feel right to not put a top coat on a piece of painted furniture, so. So after I got all those detail pieces done, this is the piece that had the mirror on in that original picture I showed you at the beginning, and I didn't want to leave that gap there, so I went and bought a piece of poplar. It was cut maybe, you know, 40 inches long already, two by two, probably. It was maybe $14, I think, so it wasn't too bad, but I just couldn't leave it like that, it looked unfinished to me, so I took out the table saw, and here I am just zeroing it out, that way my measurements are accurate, and anyway, I just cut this down to size in order to fit the back of that piece, and ended up painting it, and it looked beautiful. And here is a picture of my dog, because yeah, I'm a crazy dog lady. This needed a second coat, it was pretty absorbent on the edges of the drawers, so I needed to go back in and touch that up. So again, back in with the frog tape, and just protecting that wood in order to paint chopping for hardware. What do you think I go with? You'll have to see. So to jump back in time, this is what it looked like before I got started. It was in pretty rough shape, and here is what it ended up looking like. Pretty happy with this piece. I can tell you that personally, I don't have a lot of modern things in my home, but I just thought it was super cool. I have some teenage daughters that thought it was cool too, so that's the ultimate approval, really. They said it had boho vibes. So if you like this, please consider subscribing and hit the like button. Thanks!