We found a SURPRISE inside this 1940s vanity

When you find a 1940 light bulb in an Art Deco vanity, you really don't expect it to work. But when it does, wow. Welcome back to Montford Boulevard and welcome to a celebration of Art Deco furniture. Today we're focused specifically on the center portion of a makeup vanity. We'll do our best to make use of the vintage incandescent light bulb, which somehow still is functioning. We'll also be receiving a special delivery today, getting a surprise visit in our shop, and we'll debut a bonus piece of furniture as well. Stick around for a unique demonstration of Art Deco furniture. It's getting a little crowded in the shop today, but for good reasons. We have some boxes going out to customers and a couple packages arriving today as well. Here's our focus for today. This has actually appeared in another video. Any ideas what this might be? Some very interesting elements. You can see inlay wood in the back of this piece, intricately done. This is actually lacquer veneer. That's not real wood. Same with the striped trim. You'll see that more often in Art Deco furniture. It's a high quality piece nonetheless. So here's where it came from. This is a vanity that we separated and made nightstands out of. The finished result here. The focus was automobiles of the 1920s, specifically the Chrysler Airflow and some of the fantastic locomotives of that era that inspired our design choices. The centerpiece of the vanity was very interesting though, and we did not want it to go to waste. Look at this glass. This beautiful gold glass, but they cut the pieces long. You cannot get them out without taking the furniture piece apart. You can see you could risk cutting your fingers if you were to change that light bulb. Did not expect it to still work. As a matter of fact, the wiring was cut off in the back, but we plugged it in and look at this. You can see the electricity dancing through the filament there. This vintage incandescent bulb. You may have heard of the term planned obsolescence. This very much affected the lighting industry. Realizing there was more money to be made, major lighting companies converged to come up with a plan to make light bulbs burn out faster. This was in contrast to Thomas Edison's vision. His light bulbs originally lasted around 2,500 hours and the plan was to get them down to 1,000 hours. Planned obsolescence started around 1924. The piece that we are working on is 1940, so it's tough to say why this light bulb is still working. We're just happy that it does and excited to do something with it. If you look at the curves of the contour, somebody had drawn with a pencil just to make sure that their nails didn't pass through. That's the safe area for nails. That's original factory. Kind of interesting to see that. That was a cut that accidentally happened when we were separating the vanity. Going to try out a new product here. Barry over at Mad City Modern actually gave us some tips with this product. I was surprised how quickly it dries. You just mix these two components together. There are ways you can slow that down if you need it to cure a little bit slower, but that should do. Do that before we sand, of course. It was a real high quality finish on here, but this surface that I'm sanding, that was the inside of the drawer. There's no veneer on there. That's just kind of a junk wood, just a plain wood right there. Gotten most of it off. It'll take some hand sanding to get in those grooves. That putty sanded out really well. It'll definitely require some touch-up regardless. Using naphtha here to clean the surface and just take a look and see what we have to work with. This is a nice veneer, but it's quite light, so we'll want to add a little bit of color with stain there. That inlay though, pretty spectacular. This is two-part epoxy. We've made a patch to kind of continue filling the gap there. So this template is for veneer. We've got this peel and stick veneer. Had this leftover scrap. Turned out to be just enough so we can cover both sides. That is oak veneer, 3M brand. This works really well for us. It is self-adhesive, but if you want to make sure it sticks, you can always use an iron just to reactivate that glue. A little bit more of that putty. We're going to plug up the socket there. That's where the original switch was. We have a different idea. Black gel stain. It's quite dark. You can always lighten it with naphtha. Sometimes we can get these plain woods to look a little bit more dynamic though with this black stain. It's probably pine we're working with. There you go. That's looking a little bit more interesting. So this is some walnut colored stain, oil stain. Giving just a little bit more life to that veneer. Looking good. The inlay as well. It was looking a little bit lighter than we wanted on the veneer that we stuck on the side. We'll address that later. Starting to look a lot more uniform. You can see the sides are just a little bit too light though. We'll be addressing that. So we have an exciting delivery today. Before we get into that, a little bit of backstory on myself. Having lived in Tokyo for five years, not a day goes by that I don't think about the Japanese work ethic, their focus, and dedication to quality. There's a quiet humbleness that permeates every aspect of the Japanese culture and it deeply affected me. It's for that reason I was excited to check out the Japanese style joinery bed by Flexispot. Right away I noticed the quality rubberwood frame. Rubberwood comes from the para rubber tree which is known for its durability and resistance. A moisture resistant, scratch resistant finish also helps protect this bed frame from mold and scratches. The interlocking joints are a alternative to screws and fasteners that can loosen with time. All of these aspects combine to minimize squeaks and to provide a reliably strong bed frame. There were a number of customizable options as well including different colors of wood and a removable washable pillow board. It was really a treat to find this fine example of Japanese craftsmanship available in the U.S. with the Flexispot Japanese joinery bed. We work with fine furniture every day, so it's a joy to have furniture I can appreciate each night as well. Also, I found a washable rug offered by Flexispot that's added some fresh personality to my living space. It's low profile anti-slip backing and rug grippers help keep it staying in place. Click the link below to experience the Flexispot bed frame for yourself and use our code for an exclusive discount. Transform your sleep with comfort, convenience, and unmatched value. So this is toner Mohawk brand. I'm going to use that to add just a little bit more of an orange richer color to that veneer and that's doing the trick. Gotta be careful not to overdo it. And we've been getting good results with shellac. It is compatible with lacquer. The word lac and shellac and lacquer refers to the lac bug, so it's basically beetle juice that we're using in the finish there. Here are some designs we're working on. We're going to use the laser cutter. First of all, mapping that opening there. That should do. But we also have a pattern for the sides. Really delicate lines here. We're curious to see if we can pull this off with the laser cutter. Sort of an art deco sun. When you come to realize that Egyptian artwork and hieroglyphics were a influence on art deco, it makes a lot of sense. Shouldn't take very long to cut this out. It's amazing these laser cutters do things that human hands cannot do. This pattern probably only took about four or five minutes to cut out. Such fine detail that I had to be very careful pulling this out. We learned something new here. Laser cutters do not work with acrylic, with plexiglass. The beam is light based of course, but that means it goes right through if it's translucent like this. Tried turning up the power of the laser and it just does not cut it. So we did that by hand with the bandsaw. So this was an idea for that opening. We thought it looked similar to a door. So this is lattice work, kind of like we have in our shop for the windows and the door. And we do have some of that same color paint left over. Here you go. It's almost like doll furniture. That drops right in there nicely. If you're going to do any interior painting, bare marquee. Highly recommend that paint. You can get that at Home Depot. But sometimes you have to admit an idea is just not quite working. We didn't really like the color here and wanted to do something else. Back in Illustrator here. This is a design part of a package that we purchased on Etsy. And you can see this is looking a lot more elegant. Sometimes it's better to work with people who design professionally. It's not the case for me. Perfectly cut out here. Isn't that impressive? And we think that works a lot better. Hopefully you agree. Also had to admit that this sun pattern could maybe use a little bit of alteration. So we're trying something out here that feels a little bit more elegant. Less on the nose you could say. We're adding just a little bit of a border here. Around that opening. It'll make those wood grains pop a little better. And here's our surprise visitor for the day. Frances, our favorite bulldog. We picked up some treats for her. She was very excited. But she's excited about everything. Always happy to see Frances. We're back with the gel stain walnut color. This is oil stain rather. And now it's time for some touch-up. I am not at my dad's level at this but I'm trying to get better using French lacquer with these blend all powders. You can see that's a bit too orange. A bit too rich. Looking better. After this I'm going to use a balled up rag with a little bit of French lacquer and do a French polishing technique to blend it in there. Getting closer. I'm going to seal it with lacquer. But we decided just a little bit of toner could add some color there. It was just a little flat at the bottom. But we're going to call that good. Using this adhesive next. It's for showers, for glass. We think it'll work really well with this plexiglass acrylic just to hold that in place. But for the lattice work we actually used two-part epoxy. And now a third adhesive. This is Mod Podge. We don't need this to be really strong but we're going to put on these gold sun patterns. Such a delicate piece of applique here. And we'll put something on top of that and let that dry for a little bit. Time for a field trip. This is a local hardware store. Such a fun place. It's your old-timey vintage sort of store. I hope you have one of these near you. Home Depot and Lowe's are great but it's just really fun to go to these types of shops. There's not a lot of them left anymore. All right. Hi Ricky. Say hello. Just those. That gonna be it today? Yes sir. Using a calculator. That's so much fun. Those guys are long-time friends and they're always hanging out in there. So here's the original switch. It was missing components. Leviton is the brand. As I mentioned, somebody clipped off the wires on that. We decided this is the style we're going to go with. We purchased several choices but the switch on the bottom, that's going to work best. Grips nice and tight there. We clipped off an extension cord and we're just going to use that to power our light. Just connect the wires. Pretty simple. We're going to run the cord straight through the back. First we'll add some black to the edges here just to kind of give this a smarter look. So in the background you can see the bonus piece of furniture mentioned earlier. This is our second take at a radio cabinet. We turn these into curio cabinets you could say or a bluetooth speaker shelf. We just think this would be a fun way, a fun throwback to these old-timey radios. We've got a light that glows in the bottom behind that speaker cloth. Wooden shelf and then the top shelf is tempered glass custom cut. Beautiful traditional waterfall top. So putting the light back in now. That radio you saw that will be available for sale in our shop. This light we are keeping but the last radio moved pretty quickly. So here is our idea for the background of this light. This is an Art Deco font. Montford Boulevard is our business name. We're thinking that will bring some life back there. The laser worked perfectly. Cut those out. We're going to go black. Mohawk brand lacquer. It's kind of hard to find but we get it from a local retailer. Going back to the Mod Podge again. We're going to use that as adhesive on each of these letters. We'll let it dry for a couple minutes. Get tacky and then drop those in place. We're using the leftover piece from what the laser cut out and that was really handy. Looking good. Now the last thing we're going to do is make a background on the wall. We're using peel and stick. It's got a little bit of texture to it. It'll just be a fun background for us in the shop here. Adding some trim that we had stained previously. Only thing left to do is hang it on the wall. Plug it in and with that... All right Mr. DeMille I'm ready for my close-up. It's nice for a change to do something that we plan to keep around. We're going to have fun looking at this and especially knowing that there's a vintage light bulb inside of it. We think that'll be a nice addition to our shop here. The lattice shows nicely in front of the light. One more look at the before, what we were working with, and how it came around. Just trying to get those elements to pop and separate a little bit. So again the radio cabinet, the curio cabinet is available for purchase in our store. We ship free domestic in the United States to most locations. We have plenty more videos on our page you can check out and more on the way soon. But you're welcome back here at Montford Boulevard anytime.