OLD CHILDHOOD DRESSER gets a SYMPATHETIC restoration

Welcome back everybody! Today I'm going to be working on a piece that's a bit special to me. This was actually my childhood dresser. I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first got it but I do remember it through my teens, in my high school years, and it's been with me ever since. It's not in terrible shape but that's subjective. There are a lot of finish issues including this big blotchy section here which is where I spilled perfume on when I was in high school about a million years ago. There are a lot of little dents and marks and when refinishing this piece I don't necessarily want to get rid of all those. It's part of its history, it's part of my history, so I'm going to be refinishing this to retain some of those character marks but also to give it a brand new finish and make sure that this is good to go for the next several decades. My name is Angie and I refinish furniture. Sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom! This piece is solid walnut except for some of the drawers. This is made by Gibbard which is a Canadian company. It is one of my, I'd say, top three Canadian furniture manufacturers. They make really good furniture. The drawer faces are all solid walnut but we've got two drawers that are mahogany and the bottom drawer is cedar. I've never been a fan of tinted shellac pieces especially when it's on walnut because it obscures so much of the grain. Yes, you can tell clearly there is wood grain but I just find it doesn't really feature it, I guess the way I personally like. I'm going to start by pulling all of the drawers out and laying down my poly backed canvas drop cloth which you can see has seen a lot of use over the years. Initially when I set this down you can see there is quite a wobble. It's actually not the dresser, it's the floor. This is a garage so there's a dip in the middle where there used to be a drain. So I'm just going to pull this out of the way until I get somewhere that it's stable. As I mentioned before this is a shellac finish. Now shellac can be dissolved or cut down with methyl hydrate which is also denatured alcohol and that's what I'm going to be using here to strip this off. I could just use a chemical stripper but to be honest it's way more expensive than this and this is going to do basically the same thing. I'm using 4-0 steel wool also known as 4-0 steel wool and the alcohol to remove this old finish. I'm not going to be doing much sanding on this piece because I want to preserve all of these little sort of dings and character marks and you can see here just how effectively the alcohol removes the shellac. I'm going to be stripping the entire piece this way. The reason that perfume stain went right through the finish is because obviously perfume has alcohol in it and it acted just like the denatured alcohol is doing here and just dissolved that shellac. If I take a little plastic scraper here and this was an amazon gift from a viewer it was actually two of these yellow grips with a hundred plastic scraper blades so thank you so much Cheryl for that. As I'm doing this you can see the residual tinted color coming off as well as probably decades of furniture polishes and dirt and waxes. But underneath all that is this absolutely stunning solid walnut. So here's where I'm at now with the top. All of the old shellac is off. This feels so smooth and so nice but I am going to do a little bit of a light sanding. I don't want to lose some of these marks. That's why I'm choosing to sand this by hand and not with a orbital sander or my surf prep. But before I do that I'm going to move on to the sides. You can see there are many different things going on here. There's some areas where the shellac is gone completely and it looked like a furniture marker had been used to try to patch up whatever scratch that was there. But that's all going to even out as soon as I get this old finish off. Now there are some instances where you can actually reconstitute the shellac by adding the alcohol and just kind of re-rubbing it but it doesn't always work. You have to make sure that there's no other products like silicone furniture polishes and stuff on it as well before you do that and it's not really the look that I'm going for here. You see that beautiful quilted figure in that one board in the middle of the side here? It's perfection to me and it's just one of the features of this piece that you couldn't really see when the old finish was on it. Now there's a bit of a story and an issue with these casters which are original. I will go over that more in depth later on when I try to clean these up but for now I'm just going to pop them off and get to work here on the legs. Now straight vinegar does a pretty good job at dissolving rust if you leave it long enough. I'm using this actual rust remover. I'm just going to soak the casters in it overnight. I've used that product before. It does a pretty good job. I'm using a 180 grit sand pad here kind of sandwiched around one of those foam blocks and I'm not using a ton of pressure here. All I'm really trying to do is just smooth things out and I'm really not removing much wood here at all. This is a surf prep foam pad that I'm using for the edges also in a 180 grit. There are a few little repairs I need to make. Two of the legs were split. I'm not 100% sure why this happened. I have a theory that has to do with the casters but I'll explain that a little bit later as well but for now I'm just going to put some wood glue in here, clean it up, and clamp it down. The split isn't near the insert for the caster so I don't have to worry about that. It just seems to be kind of off to the side. Moving on now to the front of the piece. There's a lot of little curved or routered details that need some special attention. This drawer in particular, this is the top drawer, the wood there is a slightly different tone than most of the rest of the piece. The top and the sides were beautiful sort of reddish walnut. This is very light so I'm going to have to address that at some point. It's the next morning now and I'm pulling my casters out. I'm just using some 4-0t steel wool here to remove as much of the surface rust and residue as I can. As you can see, quite a bit of crud came off of them. I'm just using some clear water here to rinse any residual product off and then making sure I dry them completely so that I'm not just adding more rust. Now I'm not going to be needing the mirror for this piece although I do still have it. I will refinish it at some point but I'm taking these off. As you can see, this is pretty typical in vintage furniture. You get usually a mix of different screws from different repairs over the years. We've got a drywall screw and a couple of random ones. I'm going to tuck these aside and keep them with the mirror. It's time now to completely vacuum out the piece. I'm using a tack cloth to make sure I get all of the remaining bits of dust from the sanding off. You gotta be a little bit careful with tack cloth sometimes. There is a little bit of a varnish component to them and sometimes it can create a resist if you're doing certain finishes over top of wood that you've cleaned off with it. So I try to use as little pressure as possible when using a tack cloth. So although this was originally finished with shellac, I'm going to be using lacquer on this. So I'm going to start using a vinyl sealer to seal the wood and then I'll finish off with the pre-catalyzed lacquer. Anytime I'm spraying finishes like this, I love to use these little handles. They're super cheap from the hardware store and they really save your hands and fingers over time. Also want to make sure that you have a respirator when you're using any kind of lacquer or spray paint. This is where we're going to get the first look at what this wood actually looks like. I'm choosing to do lacquer versus just simply applying another shellac finish on this. While lacquer isn't necessarily the strongest finish out there, it is significantly stronger than a shellac finish. I also wasn't sure if I would need to do any colour work with toners on this piece so that's why I opted to go with lacquer for this. It dries extremely quick, you can do multiple coats in a fairly short amount of time, which was actually one of the main reasons manufacturers started switching from shellac to lacquer in the first place. I considered using odies on this, you guys know I love my odies, but again because I wasn't really sure if there would be any colour issues, I opted for lacquer. Now this is a question I actually get asked quite a bit and it has to do with removing finish from drawer faces where it leaves a little bit of a, I guess you'd call it a ghost, an impression where the hardware sat and the main reason this happens is because underneath the hardware it doesn't see any sunlight and certain woods are reactive to sunlight. Cherry is a huge one, mahogany, sometimes walnut, and that's what happened here. Basically all of the wood not covered by the hardware was exposed to sunlight and faded slightly over time. I've had pretty good luck using a wood bleach to remove those marks or if it's a piece like this that's solid wood, sometimes you can sand down far enough to get that out. You just need to make sure that you take the whole drawer down by that level or you'll have sort of a divot if you just try to sand out that one little spot. This little decorative piece of veneer here was lifting up on one side so I'm adding some hide glue here to glue this back down. If you're wondering why the glue was in a cup, it has to be warmed up so I just set that in some hot water for a short time and it softened the glue right up. Then I can just do a quick cleanup, clamp this down, and leave it while I go and work on other things. This is a random little tip that I found out not that long ago, but you see that little black dot? A lot of spray cans come with this little dot and apparently you're supposed to turn the nozzle to point toward it and it helps flow better. I had no idea about that but yeah, give it a try. I'm adding my second coat of vinyl sealer here now. Usually the first coat will absorb in a fair bit. Sometimes it'll look kind of patchy. You don't want to do thick coats with either the vinyl sealer or the lacquer. You want to do thin coats. It'll allow each layer to dry super fast and you won't have to deal with drips or runs. Now this is something I've been meaning to do for quite a while. I bought these filter replacements, oh gosh, months ago and I've been meaning to do this and it was actually Katie Scott who posted a reel or post on her Instagram a few days ago about changing your filters on these and it was one of those oh yeah moments, so thank you Katie for reminding me to do this. These filters clog up over time and you want to make sure that you're breathing good air while you're spraying these chemicals. You can replace the whole cartridge but you don't always have to. It's sometimes better to just change the filter first. You can usually do that several times before ever needing to replace the cartridge. Another thing you want to do fairly regularly is clean it out. I've been wearing this now for most of the day. You get a lot of moisture in there from breathing. You don't want to be breathing any bad stuff in there either, so I just usually use a cloth soaked with some vinegar and just wipe it all out, dry it, do the strap too, and it's good as new, at least for a while. Quite a difference here. If you use a respirator, make sure you do this fairly often. I want to give the inside of the drawers a refresh as well, especially the cedar. It doesn't have any smell anymore. It's just kind of dissipated. A light sanding on cedar is usually all that is needed to sort of bring that smell back and this use right here is one of the main reasons I purchased a surf prep. It gets right into those corners with no problem. So this is what it's looking like after the two coats of vinyl sealer. I love that the way I'm choosing to refinish this particular piece is retaining all of those cool marks. As far as the wood grain goes, I want to give you a side-by-side here. There's one drawer I haven't stripped yet and you can see here the way they sort of change the tone of the wood is in the color and they also sort of mute the wood grain a little bit. It's no disrespect to the furniture manufacturers. Things were different back then. The styles were different back then, but this is how I prefer to see walnut. This is now my first coat of the pre-catalyzed lacquer and you can see how the richness of this wood just gets deeper and deeper with each layer of sealer that goes over it. I'm using some Howard feed and wax inside the drawers. This is one of the mahogany drawers. You have to be careful a little bit with these. Often mahogany drawers, it will be literally solid wood on the sides and the back, but the bottom panel is usually a veneer. So if you're sanding the bottoms, be careful you don't sand too much. Look at that wood grain, oh my gosh. I'm also using a little bit of the feed and wax on the drawer runners inside. So now it's time for me to tell you about these casters. I have one that is in good shape. The other three have all been, over the years, severely bent. They just don't operate the way they should. I went through my stash and I found these, which are very close, but unfortunately I only have two of them. And then I found these, which would be super cool because they actually have the solid wood wheels. But again, unfortunately I only have two of them. Because the room that this is going to be going in is actually a softwood pine floor, I don't really want to use casters anyway. So what I'm going to do, it will now be my mission to find a good set of four and keep them along with the mirror so that if I ever do sell this piece, I can have it complete. I consider myself to be a pretty organized person, but lately I've really been struggling with time management, purchasing and picking up pieces to make videos about, and flip actually doing the pieces and editing the videos, dealing with social media obligations, and then life in general. I found this video on Skillshare called How to Organize Your Workflow to Maximize Productivity, and this is by Ali Abdaal, and he is a doctor and YouTuber and also one of Skillshare's top teachers. I'm no stranger to to-do lists and keeping calendars, but I have to say there are times when I have so much on my plate to do that it's almost like I'm paralyzed and nothing gets done. I learned so much in this class, not just about technical things to try, but also the psychology of what happens when we lose our motivation, and it's really inspired me to sort of get things in order, get all of these to-do things out of my head and onto paper or onto an app and start being more productive. I'm willing to bet that a huge majority of you are in the same boat as me. The first 1,000 people to click on the link in the description box below will get a one month free trial of Skillshare where you can check out this class and many many others. Things are really starting to come together now. I'm just finishing up the drawers. Here I'm just doing a very light, almost no pressure sand in between the seal coat and my first coat here of the lacquer. Unfortunately I didn't get it on camera, but that top drawer that I said was a little bit light in spots, I did end up using a tiny bit of cherry colored toner, actually, just a very light spray. I think I did like one or two strips along that light section and that was enough. I'm using some Brasso metal polish to tidy up the hardware. Now this is going to be done in a similar way to how I did the rest of the piece where I don't want these to look shiny and brand new. I want to keep a little bit of that patina, a little bit of that character, but it definitely needs a little bit of a buff and you can see the difference here between the two. Once I'm finished with the Brasso, I'll take it over to the sink and just give these a quick rinse and then wipe them off. These are the screws for the hardware. A lot of them were stripped so I went ahead and replaced them. Just before I get to the reveal, it has been a really long time since I've done a rescue bunny intermission and you guys keep asking for one, so here it is. Littlefoot got himself a brand new bed and if you're wondering if the bunnies actually use these and sit on them, yes they do. He was very happy. The ginger boys also got a new little hut and a new tunnel. They weren't quite sure what to make of it at first. They ended up flattening the little house so that had to go unfortunately, but they still love the tunnel. Redoing this piece was a lot of fun. Again, this was in my bedroom as a child or at least in my teen years, so a lot of the damage was probably from me, so it's kind of beautiful in a way that 20 years later here I am redoing it. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I wasn't trying to restore it back to its original finish because honestly, I like the way the walnut looks without the tinted shellac, but beauty as always is in the eye of the beholder and hopefully you guys see what I see. If you enjoy videos like this, please consider subscribing to my channel and giving this video a thumbs up, and I will see you next time.