RESTORATION - ANTIQUE ART DECO VANITY/DESK

Hello and welcome back to Ross Taylor Woodworks. I'm here with the Art Deco Vanity that I found at a yard sale. It's a freebie. This is from episode 17.1 on the picking episodes. It says that it's a yellow green. I tried to attempt to remove that. The top is just a clear finish. The paint has already peeled off of that and the veneer looks like it's in good shape. The only thing I'm concerned about is the drawer fronts. They have this printed on grain underneath the paint so I'm going to try to get the yellow paint off without damaging that. Okay I'm going to try to get the clock out here. The only thing I see is a couple of small nuts here. I'm going to try to get those off and see if the clock comes out. It looks like it's in a really good shape. The wiring looks like it's in good shape here. Now the drawer fronts here I'm going to try the heat gun first. I'll see if I can get this paint off without damaging that printed on grain. I'd like to try to save that if possible. As you can plainly see that did not work. The finish underneath that I was trying to save just bubbled right up with the paint and we're not going to save the grain paint. So I'm just going to revert to what I was planning on the rest of the piece is to use a paste stripper. Now this is the citrus based stripper and for paints like this apply it and then let it sit overnight up to 24 hours. Okay I've let that sit overnight and there was a couple little dry spots here. So I'm going to just brush on another coat over these dry spots. Where it remained wet it's going to come off very easily. So I'm just going to apply some more of the stripper and let it sit for about an hour. Here I'm scraping it off the front. It comes off very easily and then follow up with a lacquer thinner and just scrub the rest of the paint and the finish off. Here I finished the stripping. I let it dry for a few days and now I'm going to go back in and pick and scrape all the corners. There's usually a little bit of paint in the corners and on the inside edges here. Using a cabinet scraper and an awl to go in and pick the paint out of the corners and the cracks and things. Okay now I'm going to do some repairs on the drawers. First I'm going to pull all the drawer bottoms out, sand all the interiors, marking all the drawer bottoms where they go back. Just using some 100 grit and then some 120 grit to clean up the interiors of the drawer and the outside edges. Then after assembling the drawers I put glue blocks along the bottom to stiffen up the drawer and make it square. Now on the bottoms of the sides they're kind of banged up and damaged. So I'm going to install some rails to cover up that damage and help stiffen up the side of the case. Okay I took the pieces off the front. I'm going to replace them. They're all chipped up and coming apart but I want to reproduce this bead in the middle. So what I'm going to do is cut this out of the original, make a groove in the new one and set the bead in that groove. Okay now we're down in the finishing room. Now I have to start by coloring in those new pieces of wood. So I mixed up my shellac and pigments and made a background color to darken the new pieces before staining. Okay now I'm ready to start staining using the yellow can dark walnut stain. Now on the drawer fronts I want them to be a lighter color. I'm not quite sure what color I'm going to make them just yet. It's just a gum wood veneer and they've got a little bit of a red dye showing through. So I decided to put some red mahogany dye on. Now I'm going to put a little bit of dark walnut over the red dye. I think that'll make a nice color. Okay I let that first coat of stain dry and then put two coats of shellac on and then scuff sanded. Now I'm doing a glaze coat which is the dark walnut cut half and half with naphtha. All right this came out absolutely fantastic. We're all done. Restored the clock. I got that working. Nice dark walnut stain. If you remember I lost the green paint on the drawers. I was underneath that yellow paint and I couldn't save that. So I wasn't quite sure how the drawer fronts were going to come out. It's not a very good wood. It's just a gum wood veneer. So I kind of winged it as far as what color to do and also had some red dye showing through. So I kind of winged it a little bit and I think came out fantastic. If you remember one drawer handle was missing. So I looked on ebay and found some original Art Deco Bakelite handles in very good condition and they had the same screw spacing. They were a little bit stripped out on the handle. I found some new screws and epoxied them into the handles so that they're on there good and solid. After staining I did shellac and wax finish. There was a slight blotchy spot on the front here but I don't think that's a big deal. And there's some nice graffiti on the inside here. I saved that.