ULTRA Satisfying RESTORATION of Painted Mid-Century Dresser!

I've had a good bit of luck lately with finding pieces of furniture on Facebook Marketplace, and when I saw this one, I recognized it immediately as a Russell Spanner design. I was pretty sure that under all that white paint and crayon marks was a walnut dresser. Why, you may ask? How did I know this? Well, it's because I think about three years ago I refinished a Russell Spanner buffet for a friend of mine, and here is what it looked like after I restored it. I messaged the seller and told her I could pick it up immediately and head it over there, and sure enough, when I opened the top drawer, the brand Russ Span by Spanner was displayed. My only beef with the seller is her definition of great shape, and mine are different. Take a look at this. You can see here that the paint job was rather sloppily done. I'm hoping that means that the person who painted it didn't bother to sand it before and just slap the paint on because that will mean there's less chance of burn through of the veneer which will be underneath. And the little pulls, I know for a fact they're solid brass because, like I said, I've refinished a companion to this one before and the handles were just beautiful. Okay, here I am starting on the actual stripping of the paint, and this was an ordeal, let me tell you. Just watch. As I put more stripper on to the second half of the top of the dresser, you can notice that it is starting to bubble in some areas towards the front here, but it's going really slow. It's having a hard time fighting through all the paint, so I just slog it out and keep putting the stripper on. I see various colors of paint, obviously the white on top. There's some sort of pinky beige-y color next, and there's even, where is it, even some yellow. So this has had several coats of paint, and the paint stripper is working, but it's taking a long time. So I'm just going to recoat everything and give it another try in another 15-20 minutes. This is what a half hour of work looks like. I decided to add even more stripper on, and this time I covered it up in some plastic wrap just to see if that would prevent it from evaporating. It is fairly hot outside, so there's a certain amount of evaporation to the stripper before it actually starts working, so I thought this might help. Again, it might not, but I'll try anything. This is the part of the video where I ask you to please subscribe to my channel. It's completely free, and all you have to do is hit the little MCM redo icon in the lower right corner of the screen or the black subscribe button below the title. At the time of this recording, I have 8,566 followers. I am so close to 10,000 subscribers, and my goal is to get there over the next few videos. Every subscribed new viewer and every new view on this video helps the YouTube algorithm push my content out to more like-minded people who like this type of content, and that allows me to make a little money from the ads that are placed on my videos. So, subscribing is free to you, and every time you watch one of my videos, AdSense pays me a small amount, and those small amounts add up if a lot of people watch. Clicking on my like and share buttons also helps. Okay, that's my rant. Thanks for listening. And here's the top with all the paint removed. Finally, bad news is it took forever, but good news is that there doesn't appear to be any major damage to the walnut veneer. Here's the view of the right side. It's coming off just as easily as the top, which means it's not coming off easily at all. Several rounds of stripper need to be added to it to get it all off. I think I am going to remove the legs now. It'll make cleaning up the bottom and legs way easier. The paint was really stuck in the grain of the wood on the leg structure after the initial sanding with 120 grit, but by the time I switched to 150, most of the paint flecks were gone. Because it was solid wood, I continued to sand until it all disappeared. Here is one of the drawers. This is what it looks like after I've completely stripped it. So there's still a lot of junk left on it. There's a lot of paint left in the wood grain. Here, I'll show you a close-up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some more stripper on it, and I'm going to use steel wool and really rub it into the grain, trying to get rid of as much of the flecks of paint as I can. We'll see how that works. I'm using mineral spirits to soak the wood to see how much of the white paint is still visible. Unfortunately, there still seems to be quite a bit in the grain. I think what I'll start to do is sand and see if that helps. I just have to be very careful not to sand too aggressively so I don't sand through the veneer. After the initial sanding and cleanup, I had to make a few minor repairs on the drawers, mostly with wood filler in the small chips of missing veneer. And I also had to glue back a piece of wood from the back panel of one of the drawers. This is the left side of the dresser. It's got a big gouge out of the back and lots of holes, which I have no idea why someone drilled all these holes in the side of a dresser. It's weird, but it is what it is. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take off the back because it'll make it a lot easier to do all these repairs. Whenever I can, I like to clean the inside of the carcass of the piece. It just cleans it up, makes it smell nicer, and just does a more thorough job. It's not always possible though, but when I can remove the back like this, it makes it nice and easy to do. There are some swirl marks from the sander along an edge, so I'm going to hand sand it to remove them. I'll go over it with 150 grit, then I'll follow up with 220. I'm removing as much paint as possible from the little holes that were drilled into the side of the dresser. It just makes it easier to patch them up when there's not globs of paint left in the holes. I'm going to patch the outside with a walnut color wood filler, and on the inside I'm just going to use a natural color because the inside is not going to be stained, and it's not walnut veneer on the inside. It's a light color wood, so... Okay, let's see how many holes are on the side. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen holes. They put seventeen holes in the side of this little dresser, and then it looks like someone crushed the side of it, probably in a move or something. So I got to take care of seventeen holes and a crushed part. All right, let's do this. Well, my intention was to show you making the repairs, but it appears I forgot to film it. So here it is with all the wood filler in the little holes and epoxy putty in the crushed part, and I'm attempting to put it on its side, and it is darn heavy. This is me struggling to get it in the position I want it in. This white part is the area I filled with the epoxy putty. I just used the epoxy just because it was a bit stronger and there was quite a large void. Just like I did on the other parts of the dresser, I sanded with 150, and after I sanded with 150, I went in with some more stripper and steel wool, trying to just really get any of the flexa paint out of the grain. It did help. It didn't work 100%, but it definitely helped. Ah, finally the wood grain is starting to look good. I'm sanding, hand sanding here with 220. Just this is the final go around before I apply finish, and I'm just going in over and over and over again, trying to get out every little fleck of paint that's left in there. It did a pretty good job, so I was satisfied with the results, but it took a lot of elbow grease, and the reason I'm hand sanding is that I just didn't trust the sander. I was worried because I had sanded so much on it that it might burn through the veneer, so that's why I'm hand sanding. I decided to sand off the finish off the back of the piece because it was pretty nasty looking, so I'll just apply a stain and put some oil on at the end, but the biggest thing I had to repair was this little gouge out of the side of it, so what I did is I just added some epoxy putty, let it harden, sanded it off, and it'll be good to go. Now the fun part. I get to apply the finish. I'm using, once again, Osmo Polyx oil because I have some leftover from a previous project, and I really like the ease of application and the finish it gives you. Now one thing I'd like to point out is that I could not get every fleck of paint out of all the nooks and crannies in the bottom piece here, so I decided that I would touch up any of the white paint left over with Mohawk's brush tip grainy markers at the very end after I finish applying the oil. I decided to apply a salmon water-based stain in dark walnut to the edges of the dresser drawers to minimize the look of the grain of the wood that's underneath the walnut veneer. I also used that same color on the very bottom of the cabinets where I attached the legs just to clean that up and kind of camouflage some of the, you know, imperfections of the underneath side of the dresser. These are slightly too big. I'm gonna have to get smaller ones, but for now I will put these ones on. Now this side is definitely the worst of it. I could not get any more of the paint out of the grain. I tried steel wool with stripper, I used a wire brush with stripper, you name it, I tried it. So I'm going to touch up all the repairs and then hit it with some stain and see what happens. I'll do my best to camouflage all the white. As long as it's not like sticking out in your face and obvious, I'll be happy. Here's my major goof for this video. I thought I had picked up some sealer to seal in all the repairs that I did on here, but I actually had picked up perfect brown toner, I believe, so it toned the whole side instead of just sealing it with a clear sealer. I was able to work with it. It didn't totally ruin it, but once I started I realized I had picked up the wrong can, but there was nothing I could do. I had to finish it. You can see here how the top is a different color from the side. It looks way worse in the video because there's artificial lighting hitting the top and the side has natural light on it. And there's also a reflection of a red moving blanket hitting the side. So what I decided to do is to stain the top. I was always going to stain it anyways because it just had so many imperfections and discoloration from having been painted that I thought it would make it look more cohesive if I added the stain and it would bring all the colors a bit closer together. So this is the first application of the nutmeg stain on the top. Meanwhile I've applied the stain to all the drawers and I've got them out in the sunshine drying. They look pretty good. Still need a few little touch-ups but they're much improved. Because there's so many imperfections on this side of the dresser, I'm being very light when I remove the stain. I'm not like taking as much off as I normally would. I just feel it's going to camouflage a little bit and the grain is pretty strong in there. You're going to still see the grain through the stain. I'm just trying to help with the camouflaging. I've already stained this I think twice and now I'm just using a bit of stain on a brush just to go over this section here which is still a little bit, you know, you can still see the the damage underneath. This actually camouflaged it fairly well so you'll see at the end when I show you the finished product and you can be the judge. I ended up giving the dresser two coats of osmopolyx oil although I didn't film it. I also used my mohawk brush tip graining markers to touch up a lot of the leftover white flecks of paint and that worked out pretty well. All in all I'm really happy with the results. This small little piece of furniture started its life as a walnut dresser. Along the way it found itself painted yellow, painted peach, and finally as I found it painted white. Now it comes full circle and it's back to its roots. Let me know what you think of this piece in the comments. You've probably figured it out by now that I love the look of anything mid-century. Would you buy this and put it in your home or is it just not your style? Either way sit back and hopefully enjoy the transformation and I'll catch you next time.