Revitalize your old teak dining table | DIY furniture refinishing

Welcome back everybody. I know it's been a little while. Today I am going to be working on this Canadian made mid-century teak dining room table with one leaf. It's not in terrible shape but definitely needs refinishing. I will also finally be getting around to doing something with these mid-century lamps that I've had in my workroom for well over a year and you'll also see me do something very stupid. Yes, I absolutely did that. Stay tuned. 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. So having a look at this piece, this is one of those ones that people almost always think are solid wood. You've got teak edge banding here on the sides all the way around and a teak veneer on the top. If I flip this upside down you're going to see wood grain but it's not teak. This is mahogany veneer underneath and those two layers of veneer are sandwiching pressed wood. Now there will always be people that do not understand mid-century furniture and how it was constructed. Pressed wood and high quality veneers like teak and mahogany were extremely popular in the mid-century and the majority, like vast majority, of furniture from that era is actually pressed wood not solid wood. There's a misconception with this furniture that solid wood is somehow better. For me living here in Canada where the humidity swings are pretty crazy from summer to winter, solid wood furniture here is a bummer, I'll just say that. We have very little solid wood furniture in our house yet we have several high quality mid-century pieces and this is what it is constructed of, pressed wood with veneer. Now why would they do this? Species like teak and mahogany, rosewood especially, even walnut to a degree, these are not cheap woods to construct furniture with. Turning a log into a high quality veneer versus solid wood planks is a much more sustainable way of building furniture. So I'm just continuing the cleanup of this piece before I move forward. I can't get over how stuck on these were. It was pretty rough getting them off. I had to use a pair of pliers to pull a couple off. I'm just cleaning this very lightly with some vinegar and then I'll rinse with water and then dry off everything. You may be wondering why I'm not choosing to just strip this piece. Well the truth is there's not really much to strip and I'll explain more about that in a moment. First though, looking at the underside of the main table you can see it's also mahogany veneer underneath. This tape is what holds the sheets of veneer together while they were putting it together. We've got solid wood extenders here and again around the edge you can see this trim which is pressed wood covered with veneer. Every time I turn one of these tables over I curse silently to myself because I never understand why they don't refinish or seal the undersides. I don't know why they don't do it. There's no logical reason other than I guess they don't have to because no one sees it. I'm just using that same vinegar here to clean the bottom and I just cleaned that one little area and it is absolutely filthy. So once I have that all cleaned I can pull this open make sure everything is working well. I actually prefer these wooden assemblies more than the metal ones. The metal ones I find they can get rusty or greasy. It's just gross. I like the wooden ones. I don't know what this is but I'm just gonna scrape that off. So yes about stripping these. Mid-century teak pieces were sealed with a variety of finishes but the main two are oils, some type of oil, or conversion varnish. You see lacquer sometimes it's not as common. I've redone a few pieces with lacquer. I'm not a huge fan of it on teak to be honest but I'm actually going to be using Odie's oil on this piece. There were some water stains and marks you saw in the before photos. I'm hopeful that I won't need to do any more than just very lightly sand this. And speaking of sanding I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to talk a little bit more about sanding because I often get asked how I get such smooth seemingly flawless finishes when I'm sanding. And to be honest when I first started I wasn't very good at it. But one of the key things here you can see there's some marks and scratches. When you're working on veneer one of the worst things you can do is try to sand those out at least with your most aggressive grit. So I'm starting this is a 180 grit. This is the lowest grit I'm actually using on this table and it's a pretty high grit. And the reason is there's no film finish on this table. This was clearly done with oil. It comes right off there's nothing to scrape or strip off. So I'm doing 180 to remove most of what's on the very surface and you can see I'm leaving some of these scratches because as I go down through my grits it's going to come out. Now this is a trick I've used on and off for years but lately I've been doing it a lot more. And if you want to take your finishing and sanding especially to the next level try this trick. This is just a carpenter's pencil. I'm going very lightly just enough to leave a mark not hard enough to indent the wood. Oversanding is incredibly common in refinishing. We all do it. Everybody has done it but it's especially problematic with beginners who don't really understand veneer and what sanding is for. Sanding is really just meant to prepare the wood for finish. It's not normally meant to remove finishes but a lot of people do it. Even here you can see I'm actually removing the old finish but there's very little finish actually left. The point of the pencil here is to show you how little sanding you actually need to do to get a smooth surface. So if I didn't have these marks there's a really high probability that I'd be going back and forth and back and forth. I'm a member of a lot of furniture communities on Facebook and I swear the most common complaint or question among beginners is why did I sand through the veneer or how do I fix this? I've sanded through the veneer. If you try this trick the likelihood of you sanding through veneer is going to drastically go down. You're going to have smoother finishes, less of those swirl marks that you sometimes get but there's more to sanding than just this. You don't want to skip your grits when you're going up. Don't go from 120 to 220. I know it seems like you're saving time but your finish will be so much better if you do 120, 150, 180, 220 or whatever grit range you're working with. Your sander will have a lot to do with it. Random orbital sanders are not all the same. They have different orbit patterns. They have different stroke lengths. They have different powers. Even the abrasive that you use, the sandpaper, there's so many different types and they're not all created equally. A couple other tips. Don't use a ton of downward pressure. You want to have a good grip but you also don't want to be pressing into the wood. That can often cause those little swirl marks. Change your sandpaper out more often than you think you need to and don't do your final sanding until you're ready to actually put your finish on, whether that's stain or a seal coat. I actually learned this one fairly recently in a course that I took when I was in Las Vegas for a convention. I had a habit of getting all my sanding done in one day, finish up for the night, come back in the next day and apply my stain and finish but I didn't realize that those wood pores that opened up from the sanding overnight close up. So if you ever notice you have uneven stain absorption or issues with your finish and that's what you normally do or how you normally work, change that. Do your final sanding right before you're ready to put on your finish and you'll have much better results. I know that was a lot of talking but this video was a lot of sanding and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to kind of talk about some of those points because they are questions I get quite a bit. Now you've seen me use multiple Odie's oil products. This is the super duper everlasting oil but in dark. Now this is a bit of a misunderstood product. A lot of people buy the dark thinking that it's immediately going to make the wood darker, almost like a stain or like a tinted oil and that's not what this does. The Odie's dark has a way of helping the wood deepen or patina faster than it normally would. So when you're putting it on it's going to take on the natural color of the wood and it's going to look exactly the same as if you were using the regular Odie's oil but over time this is going to deepen and I chose to use this on this table. One because the super duper everlasting oil is a bit easier to apply than the universal oil. It's not quite as thick and because this is a vintage table and teak tends to deepen over time in color, I wanted to kind of speed that process up. I often get people that try Odie's for the first time and then message me saying my finish looks dull or it's uneven. That is always user error. So if you look at this here, it doesn't look very good but it's because you're supposed to wipe it off. So you apply it, you let it sit for a while and then you buff it off and I mean all of it. If you leave any on at all it's going to look dull, it could even be sticky and it's just not going to do what it's supposed to do. You have to buff all of it off. Everything that hasn't already bonded to the wood. You can see how much better it looks as you're wiping it off and this has a nice luster. This was sanded I believe to 220 and it's a nice luster but if you want a higher sheen, you just sand higher. It's pretty easy to work with. So I let the super duper everlasting oil set up for about a day and I'm going to add some Odie's wood butter. Because this is a dining room table, it's going to take a lot more abuse than something like a dresser. So having that extra layer of protection is not a bad idea but the main reason I'm using the wood butter is it has a higher wax content but it's a lot easier to apply than a traditional hard wax. So on tables I really like using this stuff after I do my initial Odie's oil treatment. What's kind of funny about this is that I used to hate teak. I never liked it until I started working on it and I mean there's no denying that's a beautiful piece of wood and I think this is a great amount of sheen for this mid-century piece. The legs are pretty straightforward. They're solid teak but I'm putting my thick pad here on my surf prep which is going to allow me to easily sand this without changing the profile of the leg. Sometimes when you use a sander with a flat hard base on a round surface you can have these little flat areas but I find these sanding sponges working really well for this. If you like this sort of content please feel free to subscribe. I try to put out videos like this about three times a month. According to my channel analytics about 75% of the people that watch my videos aren't subscribed so you could be missing out. Don't forget to turn your notifications on as well. I wanted to add this clip of the buffing off process so you can see if I drag my fingers across the surface I can see faint finger lines. You basically want to keep turning your cloth or using clean cloths until you can run your fingers across the surface and you don't see any of those lines. Now this wasn't a complicated refinishing job like a lot of my other videos but this piece has been in my storage room for I think almost two years if I'm not mistaken. There's no maker's mark on it but it did come with a buffet that matched it and that was stamped as Punch Designs which is a Canadian company so it's pretty safe to assume that this is made by the same manufacturer. So in the beginning you saw a clip of these really fugly lamps. Now these were salvaged from a mid-century modern mansion that was scheduled to be torn down. Someone working on the deconstruction of the house had posted some things on marketplace and I went to pick them up and Andrea and I asked if we could walk through. Now this place was just dilapidated. There was about a foot of trash all over the floor, papers, and the place had been scavenged pretty much but there were these little gems here and there. We managed to get the wall sconces that we have in our dining room from that place as well as these. We didn't really know what we were going to do with them because the overall shape of the lamp just didn't appeal to us but these parts did appeal to us. I'm going to try to repurpose these into candle holders. I'm going to try to use those black pieces that were on the top but in a different way and I definitely want to keep that mid-century vibe but you know give us something that suits our home. So the first thing I'm going to do is clean these up because they are filthy. They've been literally sitting in my workshop I think since I started my YouTube channel. I really do think it's been that long. Although these had no maker's mark on them I was able to determine that these were made by Limburg in Germany in either the 50s or 60s. This black piece that initially sat on the top I'm actually going to clean them up and reuse those as well but as the bases for a pedestal. So basically what I would like to have is a piece of walnut about an inch maybe three quarters of an inch thick that I can bolt to this to make the pedestal and then this piece I haven't decided yet if I want it to go this way or to have the other side down probably this side down I would say but anyway that will be on top so it'll be three pieces the black base the walnut round pedestal part and then the glass on the top. So how am I going to make that? I have a couple of options. I have these pieces of walnut plywood it's basically walnut veneer on each side with an MDF core. What I would like to do is try because I'm still trying to figure out this laser that I got I'm going to try to cut this with the laser. I'm going to have it three layers thick and use some walnut edge banding on the outside to make it look like one piece. So why not just use a great big chunk of walnut like this? What I would do in this case is I would figure out what the measurements are that I needed cut it out leave a little bit of a lip of course say I'd cut that out and then use a rudder to route down a little bit and then that would just sit inside. That is one way I could do it but like I said I'm still trying to figure out what this laser can and can't do so I am going to try it with this. The first thing I have to do is figure out exactly how wide I want this I figure about a half inch lip around the outside should be okay. Then I just need to write down the measurements that I'm going to plug into the software. This is an X-Tool P2 you saw it in my last video where I did the unboxing. I've been having a blast with this so far. I haven't made a lot of really complicated things yet. I've done a ton of coasters for the bunny rescue that we're going to be selling for Christmas but I haven't made anything yet for myself until now. If you're wondering what any of this has to do with the table in this video when I was doing my staging I didn't have anything that just fit the period and I looked over and saw these hideous lamps that have been sitting here for years and thought no today's the day I'm going to make something with them. So I was able to cut out perfect custom dimensions for my pedestal base. You can see that fits right inside absolutely perfect. So I'm just going to give these a light sanding before I glue them together. I want to make sure that I have the grain running in the same direction on the top piece as well as that little middle section. I want to make sure that that looks like it came from that piece and once I have that all set I'm going to add some wood glue and glue these all together. Like I said there's a million ways you could have done this but what's kind of neat about this if I left out that little middle circle I could have really cool walnut tea holders. I'm not going to be using a flame candle in these I'm going to be using a flameless candle we have cats it's just safer. I clamp these up and let them dry overnight. I just used a little bit of tape on those middle circles so they wouldn't wiggle around while I was clamping them because I need them to be perfectly centered and that worked really well. And I just went in with my surf prep and sanded some of the charring from the laser cut around the edges because I need to adhere the walnut edge banding. Now this is pre-glued edge banding so I need an iron to apply it. I use this one only for edge banding I don't use our household iron for this at all. The pre-glued edge banding is pretty simple you've seen me use it on furniture before. This is a little bit thicker than my base so I'm going to have it set flush at the top and I will trim away the excess from the bottom when I'm finished. Now you're going to see me do something totally stupid here. Did not even think about it. How I didn't think about it I don't know. I don't know if you caught that but you'll find out what I did there in a second if you didn't catch it right away. Yeah that happened. I'm not shy about the fact that I sometimes cuss a little but what's really funny is in the original footage for that there's no sound. I didn't even make a I just stared at what I did. So it took a few minutes I had to let the iron cool off enough that I didn't burn myself but it still had to be hot enough to wipe all that off. I got my edge banding applied and at the seam I left a little bit of an overhang so that I could use this blade to cut down through both layers and get a perfect seam. It's okay though because just like magic it's gone. Overall I'm super happy with how this turned out in terms of the laser. It was actually easier than I thought. If you're at all interested in one of these lasers by Xtool there are links down below. They actually have some Halloween sales coming up between October 25th and November 2nd 2023. You can actually use my code to save yourself some money. They're so much fun I can't wait to do more stuff with it. So here's my new candle holders. I'm super excited with how these turned out. I kind of like having the base on one and the other one just sitting lower. Let me know what you think. They're not everyone's cup of tea but my mid-century love and heart is happy and I love trying to salvage and repurpose things rather than throw them out. Having a quick look back at what I started with, this mid-century teak table was not in terrible condition considering what I normally work on but definitely needed to be refinished. I love how this turned out. Can't wait to show you. As always thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.