Beautiful Art Deco Vanity Gets A Much Needed Glow Up

Hey guys this is Rich from Phoenix Furniture Restorations and I am finally back with another video. I am working on this little vanity here this little art deco vanity and you might be thinking to yourself wow that actually doesn't look that bad at all and at first glance you may be right and to be honest at first I thought when I first got this that I was just going to give it a little bit of a sprucing up and not a full refinish but the closer you get to the piece and eventually I realized if I'm going to be selling this again I want to make sure that it really has a good finish on it that will last for years to come. So the more I looked at this piece the more I realized that this finish is extremely thin and it is failing in certain places. We got some missing veneer on this tiny little inlay right here. There were pieces of veneer missing all over the place actually and this piece actually came with its mirrors so I'm definitely going to be refinishing them with the piece. I have a couple of repairs to do as well but I think I'm going to give this piece a nice little glow up so sit back relax and enjoy the process. So to begin here I'm just going to be using some Dawn Dish Soap just to give this piece a really good cleaning and Dawn Dish Soap is really good for cleaning especially grease and oils that have built up on the piece over the many decades and all I'm simply doing is I'm just applying the dish soap giving it a really good scrub and then I'm just taking a damp paper towel and wiping up all the residue and I'm not letting it sit on the veneer I'm wiping it up immediately to lessen the chance of it ruining the veneer. I'm just going to remove the drawers and set them on top of the piece so I can give them a really good cleaning as well and as I was taking the drawers out I was keeping an eye out for any maker's mark or anything that would signify who made this piece but unfortunately I couldn't find any maker's mark or any stamps or any any kind of information at all really but I did do a reverse image search on Google and I did find the exact piece and it said that it was an American made waterfall designed art deco period dressing table or vanity from the 1930s so this piece is almost coming up on being antique which I think is just so cool I personally love working on these older pieces that are from like the early 1900s they're usually built pretty decently and they use a lot of beautiful veneers and one of my favorite things too is there's a lot of really nice marquetry work also what you would call like an inlay there are some really beautiful patterns and designs out there so I'm just giving the inside of the carcass a really good scrubbing with this dawn dish soap there was a lot of dirt and just kind of weird stuff coming out of it so I just wanted to make sure that I got that perfectly clean inside and out you guys know me by now I really like to give my pieces a very thorough cleaning and even those places that you can't even really see I'd like to make sure that I get those all nice and clean and there wasn't a ton of hardware on this piece there was one pull on the center drawer that I'm taking off and there were a ton of washers on it I don't know why but the hardware consists of metal and I think bakelite and like I said in the beginning there really wasn't much finish on this piece there was a little bit but it was very very thin as you can see as I'm scraping this right here so I decided eventually to do something that I kind of normally never really do and that's to sand through a finish so I'm just popping over to my little box of sandpaper that I have here and I'm going to be choosing a 180 grit to start with and I think that's going to be just enough to cut through this finish I don't want to start with anything that's too coarse because I don't want to burn through the veneer but I think that 180 is in that sweet spot where it's just enough to cut through the finish but not too much as to burn through now one thing I haven't mentioned I don't think before is if you have a variable speed sander you might want to turn the speed down to one of the lowest settings when you're sanding veneer this along with using a fine grit and maybe even using the pencil trick will help prevent you from burning through the veneer I'm going to be hand sanding the waterfall edge over here I could also use a foam pad by surf prep to sand this but whenever I have waterfall style furniture I usually like to hand sand because the waterfall edge tends to be more on the delicate side and it just minimizes the risk of me burning through this veneer I started to hand sand this section right here this little middle section but eventually I decided to actually switch over to my surf prep to get this area because it's a nice flat large area and using my surf prep is just going to speed things along here now if I wanted to I could split this piece up into two individual nightstands it definitely would be a good candidate for that but I'm not going to I like to try to keep the original integrity of the piece intact but I did want to mention that that was an option and I'm just sanding the side here and some of the wood grain on this piece is just unbelievable walnut has to be probably one of my favorite woods if not my favorite and this is exactly why because walnut just has such a variety and diversity to it in terms of the color the figure it's just a beautiful wood and I'm just flipping this piece on its side just so I can get to the inside and you're going to notice that there's a ton of veneer chips and little patches of veneer that are missing but don't worry we'll take care of that and I can get pretty close up to the edge with my surf prep but I can't get all the way butt up against it so I'm just going to come in with hand sanding and just get that tiny little area that I couldn't reach with my surf prep and now I'm just going to flip this piece upside down just so I can reach the underside and also reach the casters that this piece came with and it was a little difficult trying to get these out they were really in there but eventually after putting some muscle into it I was able to get them out and taking a look at them they are pretty rough looking and there's also one missing so I'm thinking that I'm just going to order some new casters online and I'll just put these uh oh whoops oh my god that just went flying but I'll just put these in my caster collection box and see if I have use for them down the road and before I do anything to this base I just want to give it a really good cleaning as well there were a bunch of spider webs and dirt and dust so just want to make sure that's all clean before I continue and I'm actually going to be coming back to this base a little bit later on first I just want to start working on the trim work and I'm using a 150 grit and believe it or not this is actually the part that kind of takes me the longest and that's just because there are so many different nooks and crannies and routed sections to the trim work normally at least and you have to make sure that you sand pretty much every square inch and it's definitely time consuming and very tedious now I'm not really sure exactly what I want to do with this trim work yet I'm thinking that I'm going to try to keep it original and keep it light I'm definitely not going to go dark even though that's a look that I typically like to go for I think in this case just having the really light rim work with the beautiful walnut wood grain just being natural is going to look really nice I'm going to be removing this little decorative piece on the bottom here just so I can access the entire base and make it a lot easier to sand I'm being very careful too because this piece is very delicate and after that's off I'm just going to remove the tiny little nails that were holding it in place and this one was being a little bit stubborn so I'm just going to use a pair of needle nose pliers and I accidentally nicked a piece of the veneer but that's okay I'll come in a little bit later on and just glue that back down I'm just sanding the inside of the carcass now and I know you're not even going to be able to see this once the piece is all finished and the drawers are in but it's just something I like to do I like to get in all those unseen areas and just give it a really nice refresh in my opinion at least I think it makes a pretty big difference all right so I have quite a bit of gluing up to do so I'm just getting my little glue syringe here and I'm choosing a needle that's a little bit on the bigger side it has a bigger hole just so I can get really good glue flow the smaller needles tend to be a little bit more difficult to squeeze the glue out of and a really great trick to see if you have any lifting veneer that you need to glue down is just to tap it if you tap the veneer and it sounds higher pitched than the veneer around it you know that you're going to need to glue that down and I'll show you what I mean right here so it's subtle but you can hear the difference the the veneer that isn't adhered is a little bit higher pitched than the veneer around it so I'm going to be doing that for pretty much this entire piece just tapping the veneer seeing where I need to glue down and gluing it down now a couple of people were curious and asked me about my story and you know uh how and why did I become a furniture refinisher and this actually all started with my own dresser um it was in pretty terrible shape actually and I was redoing my entire room and I really didn't want to go out and spend you know so much money on buying a new dresser so I did some research and went down the rabbit hole on YouTube and just started learning and I realized really quickly that I didn't need to go out and buy a new dresser I can make the one that I already had pretty much brand new again now the dresser that I had was a painted dresser it was it was all black it's a big dresser there were scratches and gouges and a couple of big burn marks from when I was burning incense and I just learned about bondo I learned about different painting techniques and with the help of my dad eventually about after maybe a week or so I was able to bring that dresser back to life and the feeling I got from doing that was just amazing and after I finished that dresser I continued to watch YouTube videos and just kept on learning and pretty soon after I finished that dresser I went on marketplace and ended up buying a pretty beat-up dresser for about 25 dollars and just started working on that one and I just completely fell in love with furniture and the idea of taking something that is old and on its last legs and bringing it back to life and giving it a second chance and not to get too personal but it's kind of what I did with myself in a way so I think it's kind of a reflection of me and what I went through and yeah that was about three years ago now I bought that first piece off marketplace and I never stopped and eventually I realized that there were some people who were even making a career out of doing this they they opened up their own businesses like Angie for example from Transcend Furniture Gallery who is somebody that I very much look up to and somebody who I've learned so much from and eventually I opened up my own furniture business refinishing furniture doing commission work along with working a full-time job at Costco so I'm pretty busy but I love it and I love the fact that I'm able to share it with everybody and I'm not perfect I'm definitely not an expert I make mistakes all the time but you know that's that's how you learn I'm constantly learning and growing and it's a process but I enjoy every second of it this whole YouTube journey is very new to me still and I'm still trying to figure things out but I'm glad I did it I'm glad I started my YouTube channel you guys have been just absolutely great uh in the comments section and you know giving me uh feedback and tips I really really appreciate it but anyway back to the piece so as you can see I'm just uh sanding down all these drawers and I'm starting with a 180 grit and working my way up to a 320 grit on everything and when I say everything I just mean all the veneer the top the sides and the drawer faces are going to be 320 grit and I'm just checking this glue up that I did and it seems pretty good so I'm going to move on here so when I lifted this base up I tried to pick this piece up and I lifted it by the base and this piece broke off so now I got to fix it so after making sure that all the joints were clean I came in and put some glue on every surface kind of dabbing it around with my finger just to make sure the glue was evenly distributed and very carefully started to piece it back together just carefully putting this piece in place and the nail popped out so I'm just gonna very gently hammer that down and use a nail set just to punch it below the surface and then I just clamped it up and I'm so happy because for Christmas my dad actually bought me some new clamps so thank you dad now the spacing between the middle section and the two towers were pretty significant there was quite a gap there mostly on the left side but also on the right so I need to definitely fix that so first I'm just going to unscrew the screw that was holding the middle section to the towers I'm going to add a little bit of glue in that gap just to make sure that there's a pretty strong bond when I press this together and after I have enough glue in that gap I'm just going to take a pretty large clamp and I'm just going to tighten it as much as I can and I'm also going to be adding some extra screws just for some extra strength first I'm just drilling a pilot hole with a countersink bit and then I'm going to add my screws and it's a good idea to drill a pilot hole before you add your screws just because the wood is very fragile old and dried out so drilling a pilot hole is just lessens the chance of me splitting this wood and of course the countersink bit is just so the head of the screw sits below the surface and with the help of my dad I'm just flipping this piece on its head and I'm going to begin working on the base so first off this little block here that holds the caster was a little bit loose so pretty simple fix I just screwed it back in place and that seemed to do the trick all right so now for some more glue ups the veneer on the underside and the substrate that it was on was coming apart so I'm fitting the needle down in between the substrate and the areas that I couldn't fit the needle down into I'm just putting some glue on the top and I'm just kind of squeezing it down in with my finger and with the help of gravity also this this technique actually works pretty well I'm just squeezing as much glue as I can into that crack and once I have just enough glue in there I'm going to give it a little squeeze just to test it and I get a nice glue squeeze out so I know that I have enough glue in that joint and it's the same thing with this area right here except in this particular situation I'm deciding to use a brush to get the glue on there as you can see there is a small piece of veneer on the very end that's missing and I don't show it I don't know why my phone didn't capture it but I did add a new piece of veneer there I'm just very gently lifting the veneer as much as I can without cracking it and just fitting that glue down in between that joint and once I have enough in there I'm just going to clean it up a little bit because dried glue can be a little bit of a pain to sand off later I'm just going to tape it up and I'm actually going to be using a little board to fit the entire span of the veneer just so even pressure is applied now for this trim work I was thinking about maybe leaving it natural and just putting a clear coat on it but it was a little bit too yellow and orange leaning and I thought that that might clash a little bit too much with the color of the veneer that's on this piece so I decided to use a pretty light colored stain it's a cement stain in the color of antique walnut and I'm just testing it on this little piece of trim right here just to see how it would look and I thought I liked the way it looked so I'm going to continue here and I'm not using any tape because I have to do another round of sanding on the veneer so any stain that I get on the veneer I'm just going to sand right off and I want this stain on the trim work to be more on the light side so I'm just applying it letting it sit for not very long at all actually maybe about a minute and then I'm going to be wiping a lot of it away my whole goal with this is just to slightly tint the wood in more of a brownish tint more of a brown color rather than the yellow orangey kind of a look that it would have had if I just put a clear coat on it and you can see it's it is very much on the light side so there is going to be contrast with this piece but in the opposite direction that I usually go in I'm also choosing to stain just a little bit of the inside of the carcass just to make it a little bit more cohesive just removing these clamps and this glue up actually went really well it's nice and solid so I'm going to move on here to my final round of sanding of 320 grit and I'm using 320 as my final sanding because with Odie's oil which is what I'm going to be using for all of the veneered sections of this piece the sheen is controlled by how high you sand so the higher you sand the more of a shine you're going to get so I'm looking for more of a satin look so I'm going to be sanding to 320 which I think is going to be just enough to give a nice satin finish and I couldn't get all the way butt up against the edge with my surf prep so I'm just going to come in and do a little bit of hand sanding so as I give this piece its next round of sanding I just wanted to mention really quickly that my new website is actually under construction I'm going to be listing all the products I use and I'm going to have a question and answer section and I was just wondering what kind of questions you guys would like to see there I already have a couple of questions such as how long have you been doing this for what made you start refinishing furniture where are you located etc and I would just love to get your feedback and also if you have any other recommendations for my website certain things that you'd like to see on there please let me know my website is definitely still a work in progress I do have some information on there already but I just want to expand and be able to provide the full experience of what I'm really going for and speaking of questions that I typically get one question that I get constantly is where am I located and I am located in Suffolk County Long Island New York if you couldn't already tell by my accent I decided to sand the underside of the middle section just because it was a little rough looking and I wanted to make sure that pretty much every square inch of this piece was refinished I'm adding a little bit of stain on the underside and on the underside of that middle section just so it's cohesive and matches the trim work and I don't show it but I am going to seal the underside as well with Odie's oil and I know it's not something that you're really even going to be able to notice once this piece is standing upright but I decided to stain the underside as well all right it's time to sand down the drawer boxes and these drawer boxes actually weren't in terrible shape at all but I am choosing to give them a nice light sanding just to give them a little bit of a refresh and I don't end up showing it but I do put Howard's feed and wax inside the drawer boxes a little bit later on I'm choosing to use that same water-based stain by Ciman to stain the sides of the drawers and don't mind my workspace I know it's a little messy right now I'm working on three different pieces at one time so I have a bunch of different products out and I'm working on a bunch of different things at once so it's a little messy there was a little strip of veneer on the side of the piece that was coming up so I just added a little bit of glue and put that back in place and after I got it all cleaned up I just added some tape just to hold it in place so it didn't move when I put my clamps on and then I clamped it up all right so now it's time for some wood filler and to be honest I much rather would have used some walnut veneer and made some veneer patches but I forgot to check beforehand and just realized that I had no walnut veneer left so unfortunately I'm just gonna have to use some walnut colored wood filler instead of using real wood which is what I much rather would have done but it's all right I'll just do some color correction over the wood filler and you hopefully won't even notice that it was there but I did put in an order for some more walnut veneer so hopefully that comes soon I just really wish I would have checked beforehand but it's all right I'll make do as you can see there were quite a number of areas that needed wood filler her I'm not even showing all of the areas I'm just showing you a couple of shots but there were quite a number of areas that were missing veneer so I waited a couple of hours until that wood filler was dry and then I came in with 320 grit and I just sanded it all down just a little note here if you're using wood filler you want to remember to make sure that the wood filler is proud so that when you come in later on and sand it it'll be flush to the surface now I'm just going to wipe up all the sanding dust that remains and get ready for the next step which is lacquer and I kind of went back and forth in my head about what I wanted to do with this trim work I thought maybe I would use odi's oil also on it but I really love that look of the trim work having a little bit more shine than the rest of the piece so there's going to be contrast in the color but also in the sheen so I'm just going to tape off all the areas that I don't want to get lacquer on and I'm going to start here with using some mohawk easy vinyl sealer and this is just going to act almost like a primer under paint except this is going to be sort of a primer under lacquer and all this is going to do is just seal the wood grain and act as a barrier between the raw wood and the lacquer and as you can see I definitely did not tape off enough so I got some easy vinyl sealer and lacquer on the veneer but that's all right I can just do a very light sanding and that'll come right off and you can see in this shot right here the color of the trim work as I'm applying this easy vinyl sealer and this is exactly what I was going for this was just a very very light brown just to accent the beautiful walnut veneer so I'm very very happy with this and after applying two coats of the easy vinyl sealer I applied four coats of lacquer and I'm using Mohawk's pre-catalyzed clear lacquer in semi-gloss finish just to give a nice contrast to the satin finish that the veneer is going to have just removing the tape now and yeah you can see that I definitely got quite a bit of the lacquer and the easy vinyl sealer on the veneer but that's not really a big deal I'm just going to do a very light sanding with 320 grit and that'll come right off just cleaning up the dust and now for one of my favorite parts it's time to bring out the beautiful walnut wood grain that's on this piece back to life and to do that I'm going to use Odie's oil. Odie's oil is a tung oil based hard wax oil finish and it really is absolutely fantastic at bringing out the beauty in figured woods and not even figured woods but I mean just wood in general it just it brings out just such a depth and clarity to it and especially for me personally on woods like walnut, mahogany, teak, etc. I just find that it really just brings out the natural beauty of the wood. It's made of a bunch of different natural oils and waxes and it's also completely non-toxic and food safe which is why I'm able to put this on without wearing a mask or gloves and I just wanted to say that I'm not sponsored by Odie's or anybody else honestly I just really like the product and I know there's a lot of other great products out there like Rubio Monocoat for example and my dad actually uses that stuff for his live edge work. He does a bunch of live edge stuff like tables, shelving, mantles which you know maybe one day I'll show you guys if you're interested but he swears by Rubio Monocoat so it's really just a matter of personal preference. Odie's is definitely a lot more labor intensive there's a lot more work that goes into it like buffing it out and everything but I personally think it's worth it. I find that Odie's just gives such a spectacular finish when done right of course. Now as I got to the base I realized that there was a little chip that I missed so I'm just gonna fill that in with some wood filler and I'm just gonna go ahead and continue to Odie the base. Going around that little chip though I'll come back to that a little bit later when the wood filler is dry and this is one thing I really like about Odie's as well it's really easy to do patchwork so basically when that wood filler is dry I'll sand through the Odie's oil that I already put there and then I just have to add more Odie's oil over that little patched area and it'll be totally fine but if I was working with something like lacquer or polyurethane I definitely would not be able to do that or at the very least it would be extremely hard. Just remember a little bit of this stuff goes a very long way so use it sparingly. Now here on this drawer there was some of this marquetry work that was missing and some of the details in this little inlay right here is just so intricate and so tiny I honestly don't know how I'm gonna replicate that but I'm gonna try. So first I'm going to try to replicate that little tiny black line that runs up the side and to do that I just had this little piece of maple veneer here and I stained part of it in a black stain by Ceman and I'm just going to cut out a very very skinny little thin piece of veneer and I'm making multiple shallow cuts I'm not just cutting straight through the veneer. It's really a good idea to score the veneer first and then start to cut through it. So I have my little piece of veneer and I'm just going to cut it down to size bring it over to my drawer and luckily it fit perfectly. So now to make those tiny little squares that you see those black squares I'm just taking the scrap piece of that little skinny piece that I just cut and I'm just cutting small little squares off the side and when I say small I mean probably about a sixteenth of an inch so they're very very small. Next I'm just going to cut a couple of lengths of regular plain maple veneer and after playing around with it for a little while I got pretty close. It's not perfect but it's as close as I can get so I'm pretty happy with it. I think it looks good. I do have to do a little bit of color correction on those lighter pieces of veneer but for the most part I think it came out pretty well. Now I just have to glue it down into place and I decided to use regular PVA wood glue. I guess I could have also used CA glue which would probably have worked out pretty well also and that's actually the route that I went with the mirror that I'm going to be doing but I'll show you that in a little bit. I'm just very carefully trying to get these tiny little pieces back into place. It was a little bit difficult. They kept moving on me but eventually I got them. After I got them in place I'm just going to put a piece of tape over it just to hold it in place and as I was putting the tape on I realized that there was one little tiny piece of veneer that was sticking up through the tape so I just pulled the tape back readjusted the veneer and put it back down. I then clamped it with a little piece of wood that I found in my shop and let it sit to dry and as that was drying I started the buffing process on the rest of the piece. I let the Odie sit on the piece for about an hour and a half and then came in and buffed it all off. Now for the buffing process I just wanted to show you that you can see as I drag my fingers across here you can see some trails or streak marks and that indicates that there's still oil present on the piece and the whole goal is to get every single last bit of residue of oil off of the piece so you're going to want to continue to buff until you can drag your fingers across and you don't have any trails and yes it is a lot of buffing and there we go no more marks so this side is ready and now for the mirrors my dad's actually giving me a hand in helping me take this mirror apart first we're just going to unscrew all of the little clips that are holding the mirrors on and we also have to take off this little decorative wooden piece at the very top just so we're able to slide the mirror out and as I slid the mirror out I actually found a little family photo which I'm guessing either belonged to the man that I bought this from or maybe even the original owners but I'm going to see if maybe I can end up returning it I think that would be a nice surprise so I'm going to start off here by doing the same thing that I did in the beginning and that is to give this piece a very good cleaning there was a bunch of dust and a little bit of dirt and I just want to make sure that when I sand I don't grind that stuff down into the wood grain and it's the same situation here that I showed you in the beginning of this video and I'm going to cut through this old finish with a 180 grit and work my way up to a 320 grit to match the sheen of the rest of the piece this little decorative piece of wood down here on the bottom of the mirror kind of fractured as I was sanding so I just collected old pieces and made sure that the area was completely clean before I started adding my glue and just put the pieces back together I'm just using a damp paper towel just to wipe away the excess glue because it could be a little bit of a pain to sand off later on and I'm just taking a spent foam pad by surf prep and using that to clamp it down just so the pressure is evenly distributed and I'm just going to let that dry the next step is to add wood filler to all the patches of veneer that were missing which was quite a few and like I said before I much rather would have used a real wood veneer to make these patches but unfortunately I didn't have any walnut veneer left so wood filler is just the next best thing but hopefully by the time I'm done with this you won't even be able to notice and I'm using a little bit of a lighter colored wood filler for this section right here just because the wood around it is a little bit lighter and I think that walnut colored wood filler would have been a little bit too dark and when you're doing wood filler you definitely want to go lighter because you can always darken it up but it's a little bit harder to lighten it if you go too dark just removing this little pad here and this glue up actually went pretty well it's nice and adhered so I waited a couple hours for the wood filler to dry and then I came in with my surf prep and a little bit of hand sanding and I just sanded it all down smooth but it's the same problem here with this marquetry work or this little inlay there was some of it that was missing so I just cut up a bunch of little pieces of veneer and tried my best to fit them in place and after gluing it all together and doing a little bit of color correction this is what it ended up looking like which is pretty good I'm actually pretty happy with this taking into consideration that I've never done a veneer patch that small before and I don't show it but I sealed all of the trim work on this mirror with lacquer just like I did on the piece itself and then for all of the veneered sections I'm using Odie's oil to bring out the beautiful wood grain and this decorative piece on the bottom of the mirror right here is just such a beautiful touch to the whole thing I absolutely love Art Deco it's such a unique style and they use so many beautiful veneers and there are so many intricate patterns and I just love it now there were two smaller mirrors on both sides of the larger center mirror and the wood that holds those two mirrors was not sealed at all it was just raw wood so I'm choosing to sand and seal it with Odie's oil just to make sure that the wood is protected now this is an extra step that I really don't have to do this is just kind of an extra thing that I kind of wanted to do and that is to sand the entire back and stain it with some leftover stain that I had lying around I believe it was a leftover Odie's oil stain that I made and it just happened to be just the right color to match this pretty perfectly actually and just like any other stain I'm just applying it letting it sit for a little bit and I'm wiping it all back and it came out nice I'm happy that I did it even though you're not really even going to be able to see it I think it adds a nice touch and this is also an extra step that I just kind of like to do sometimes and that is to apply some Odie's wood butter to just the tops of the piece now the wood butter is kind of a mix between the Odie's universal oil and the hard wax and it differs from the universal oil in that it has a little bit of a higher wax content so it's going to add a nice layer of protection to the tops and this differs from hard wax in that it's a little bit easier to apply and I'm applying it I'm letting it sit for about 90 minutes and then I'm going to come in and buff it all off just like the universal oil all right we are almost there so the next step is to do some color correction on all the wood filler areas and my dad is actually helping me with this step he's pretty good with color and he's actually done this before on his live edge work and he's using a combination of blend all sticks mostly and a little bit of mohawk graining markers and he's just mixing and matching different colors to try to get a pretty close color match and I would recommend going in with the lighter colors first and then slowly building it up from there and then using the darker colors to more closely match the veneer around it and once he's happy with the color correction he's just going to spray just a little bit of some dead flat lacquer just to seal it in and I'm using dead flat lacquer here just because I don't want to add any more of a shine that's already there from the odies oil and sorry about the lighting in this clip I know it's a little rough but my dad just needed a spotlight to be able to see what he was doing a little bit better and I just wanted to mention for anybody who was wondering the lacquer that he's using he's not putting it over fresh odies oil the odies oil that I put on the piece has cured for about three days I let it sit for about three days so the odies oil is pretty dry if you're going to put lacquer over some color correction that you're doing you just want to make sure that you let it sit for minimum 12 to 24 hours but I like to let it sit for a little bit longer so here I'm just removing the two wooden braces that this piece came with to hold its mirrors I'm sure that it would have been strong enough to hold the mirror but I wanted to use something that was a little bit more durable so I took a ride to Home Depot and I bought these two little metal braces they're one inch by 12 inches long and it's an eighth of an inch thick so this is definitely going to be strong enough to hold this mirror and give nice strong solid support so as you can see I'm just drilling my pilot holes for where I want to put my screws and again you want to drill pilot holes because you don't want to split the wood with the screw and I'm using one and a quarter inch pan head screws and me and my dad are very carefully putting the mirror right on top and it fits perfectly now I'm just drilling my pilot holes into the back of the mirror making sure that I don't drill too far because I don't want to drill right through the mirror and then I'm just going to add the rest of the screws all right so for this hardware I'm just going to give it a really good cleaning just to get rid of any grime that has built up on it over the years now this hardware I believe is brass plated and a lot of it is worn off so it looks kind of patchy so I'm going to add a little bit of rub and buff just to give it a nice aged gold finish and this piece was actually missing two pieces of hardware so I went online and I found two poles that were very very similar so I ordered those and you'll see that in the reveal just wiping off the excess rub and buff especially off the little bake light piece right here and it's time to reassemble everything so I just wanted to say thank you guys so much for watching another video I know it's been a little while since I posted my last video I've just been so very busy lately along with dealing with the weather we got a ton of snow on the island so that set me back a little bit but I have been working on three different pieces including this piece so I will have a couple more videos down the road coming soon if you like this kind of content consider subscribing I try to put out a video every two weeks and like I said before I will have two more videos coming out very soon and also like share and comment I love hearing from you guys so feel free to give me your feedback my website is phoenixfurniturerestorations.com if you want to check that out it's still under construction so there's not a ton on there yet but I am hoping that with your input it'll be done shortly and you can also reach me via email at phoenixfurniturerestorations at gmail.com so I look forward to hearing from you guys so let's just take a quick peek at what this piece looked like before it really wasn't in terrible shape but the finish on it was extremely thin and failing in certain places there was a ton of missing veneer and veneer chips and some marquetry work that was missing on the drawer and the mirror this may not be a very dramatic before and after but I just wanted to make sure that this piece had a finish on it that would give it the chance of lasting for decades to come so I hope you learned something in this video and I hope you enjoy the reveal I'll see you guys soon