My Most FRUSTRATING Furniture Restoration Yet

I bought this record cabinet in March thinking it would be a quick restoration and flip. It had a lot of dings, scratches and stains but nothing I hadn't encountered before. Many times during this restoration I really thought this video would never get made. It took me so long to complete because the choices I made kept backfiring and I just wasn't happy with the results. This redo really shows how hard it is to stay motivated when things aren't going exactly as you've planned. But here we are four months later so follow along, enjoy the process and let me know if you've ever started something that didn't go your way. Did you just give up and say no more or did you hang in and finish the job? I've heard glowing reviews on Stripwell Furniture Stripper on social media but I'm a little underwhelmed. I'm not sure if it's just the type of finish I'm using it on or if I'm using it the wrong way but as you can see here some of the finish is coming off but not all of it and I still have to use my scraper. With my old standby stripper I can strip the finish and go straight to sanding. At this point in the refinish I'm looking at the top and thinking to myself that it doesn't look too bad. I've sanded out most of the finish. There's a few stains left on but I'm thinking oxalic acid should really help with that and we'll move on from there. The oxalic acid did work. It lightened some of the staining but I'm just pointing out a few other things here. There's a bit of missing veneer there then there's some dents that have to be ironed out but again at this point I'm thinking yeah that's totally doable. Oh my god the veneer on here is so thin. Let's see if I can get a shot of it. That's how thin the veneer is. I don't even think I'm going to go in with the sander. I'm going to hand sand the whole thing. Maybe do some scraping and then some sanding by hand because I am afraid of blowing through the front of this door and I do not want that to happen. Meanwhile I'm still not happy with the top so I apply a second coat of oxalic acid, give it another round of sanding and iron out some of the scratches and dents. But stay tuned because the top is not done yet. After the second round of oxalic acid everything had lightened up considerably but the marks were still there. But I'm not at this point very concerned. Things are okay. I haven't even mentioned the unevenness of one side of the top. It appears there must have been some water damage to the substrate and a bit of undulation is happening. That's basically a polite way of saying that the edge is kind of wavy. But hey you probably won't even notice it when it's done, right? And even after the ironing there's still quite a bit of scratch marks that didn't come out. You can still see this nice little water ring here and that strip of whatever that is. Of course there was a little bit of burn through here which again I'm not too concerned of. That could be touched up fairly easily. The rest is looking pretty good. The body of the cabinet is all done. A bit of detail sanding still left but all the small repairs are done and the walnut veneer is looking pretty good. On the side here you can see the walnut veneer here which is a dark wood and then legs which are solid wood is very light. Back in the 60s they often toned the legs to match the color of the walnut. A lot of people these days leave the contrasting colors. I'm going to darken the legs but not as dark as the sides. And I've lightly sanded the inside to clean it up but I'm not sanding back to bare wood. I'm still in denial here thinking that after I put the stain on it doesn't look too bad. I'll be able to you know salvage it. And here's the first look at how bad the edges look. When looking at it with just the stain on the wavy bits looked okay but that was because stain is flat and doesn't really reflect the light. Once the odies oil went on which is a much higher luster finish the edges looked awful. Okay here's the cabinet. It appears to be finished but the top still has problems. You can see the marks from the water damage and just not happy. You know this is very noticeable and I'm not going to be able to paint it like in paint it well enough to hide it. And of course there's the edges that I still have to figure out what to do with. So all in all I'm just you know not happy. So I'm going to re-sand it down and re-evaluate. My thought process for the top is that I will re-sand it by hand so as not to remove too much of the near. I will then stain it and then on top of that I'll spray tone it to address the lighter parts. I'm also hoping that it minimizes the look of the wavy edge. And here we are. I have given up and I have re-sanded the whole thing and I have decided to sand it so far down and so far through the veneer that I'm going to straighten out all those wavy edges and I'm just going to re-veneer the whole top. I just was not happy with the results I was getting. I'd refinished it so many times and just you know always thought it would look okay and just was never happy with it. So this is my solution. I'm going to re-veneer. Should be easy. At this point it is May 27th. I started the project about two months ago on March 20th but I kept putting it aside because I didn't like the way the things were going on the top. My main reason for not re-veneering the top right from the beginning was the cost. I knew I wasn't going to be able to get too much money for this piece and re-veneering can be quite expensive. I've veneered a few pieces in the past with success using a spray adhesive so of course I decided to repeat the process except this time things didn't go quite as planned. The biggest mistake I make here is not cleaning off all the adhesive completely before I try to reapply the veneer. I go through the entire process again of staining and oiling the piece and think I am finally finished but when I rub my hand across the veneer I can feel the little bumps of adhesive and if I bend down and look at it at a certain angle I can see them as well. I was done at this point just completely done. It was May 28th and I didn't even look at it again until June 12th. I know it doesn't look very bad here in the video but believe me take my word for it it did not look or feel very good. So finally on June 12th I decided to peel off the veneer and this time I cleaned it properly. I used Goo Gone and let it sit on the adhesive for a good 10-15 minutes and then just scrubbed it all off. And because lifting the veneer also lifted off the epoxy putty I had to reapply the epoxy putty. Once again I haven't touched it since June 13th. Can you tell I'm a little sick of this refinish? But I'm determined to get it done so on July 14th I give it my second attempt at reapplying the veneer but this time I get my husband to help because three weeks ago I slept on a wet ramp and severely bruised my wrist and my lower right arm and I still can't put much pressure on it. And of course I'm right-handed. After letting the adhesive dry for 15 minutes I put down some wax paper between the top of the cabinet and the bottom of the veneer. I am determined this time not to have any premature sticking of the adhesive and it worked out pretty well. I placed the cabinet upside down so it would be easier to trim the veneer. Again thanks to my husband for pitching in to get this done while my wrist is out of commission. Finally we are reaching the end of this refinish. I had seven hours of video footage to go through. I've never filmed so much for something so small. This one was definitely a learning experience. The second attempt at veneering was a success and I can finally contact the lady who delivers my mail and tell her that the vintage record cabinet that she keeps eyeing for the last several months in my garage is finally ready to go.