I Turned This Broken Handmade Games Table Into a One-of-a-Kind Mid Century Style Gem

Welcome everybody to another video. This is a cute little handmade game table that I picked up from Facebook Marketplace. As you can see the top here is pretty rough. All of these little inlaid pieces are uneven and it's going to take some work to get this looking its best. But you want to stick around because you won't recognize this when I'm all done. And let's get into it. My name is Angie and I'm the one behind Transcend Furniture Gallery, a business created from the love of vintage furniture and the desire to take broken, dated, and unloved things and turn them into modern treasures. Sometimes I paint, sometimes I don't, but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom. Okay and right off the bat here this is a perfect example of a bad repair. There's a big crack in this leg and what they did is they put a mending plate on it and used that to hold it together. But I'm going to be taking the legs off anyway as well as this sort of scalloped skirting here on the bottom. It's all going. Took a little bit to get this off but I can't wait to see these terrible legs gone. Just a heads up before you start going to town with a rubber mallet trying to take something apart make sure you know how it's put together in the first place. This one was just held on by some finish nails so I had no problem taking the mallet to it to take this apart quickly. Once I take these off I need to separate the decorative piece from the trim piece because I need to put the trim pieces back on which I've already done here. So now what I'm doing these are just sitting on top. I'm going to drill some new holes to attach this to the top. If you're drilling holes for screws and you don't have a countersink bit that's okay you can just use a bigger bit just to go down a tiny bit enough to hide the head of the screw. These screws are holding these pieces on nice and tight now which is great but I want just a little bit more support so what I'm doing is cutting a base from quarter inch birch plywood that I'm going to screw onto the bottom here. It'll also give me a bottom which is a good thing to have because we don't want your checkers falling on the floor. One of these days I will get a table saw but for now this works just fine. I left about a quarter of an inch approximately all the way around just because I don't really want to see the plywood even though it's there. I'm adding long mid-century tapered legs to this piece so I need to apply these leg plates first. This hardware is not going to match what I'm doing at all so it is going. I'm leaving the top of the piece wood but I'm going to paint everything else so I'm just giving the rest of it a bit of a scuff sand here. Oof and on to this disaster of a top. What makes this so difficult is that all of these individual inlaid pieces are kind of at varying heights like it's not flat so the challenge here is to get it flat without sanding through the veneer. There was a few spots I didn't really have a choice. It was either sand through the veneer a little bit and hope the stain hides it or leave it sticking up and I didn't really want to do that so it was a bit of a conundrum. These little pieces weren't perfectly squared up against each other either so I'm using some walnut wood filler here to just fill in the gaps. I'm going to let this dry, sand it down, and then the stain will go right over top and you won't even know the putty is there except that you won't see all these gaps. I really like thrifting and salvaging hardware wherever I can so I'm just going through this bin to see if I can find something that works. I've got a few maybes here and the pool I ended up choosing has different size holes than what's already in the drawer so I'm going to fill these with some wood filler and drill new holes for the hardware. Even though this bottom won't be seen I don't really want it to stick out like a sore thumb so I'm just using a bit of black spray here to blend it in as I'm going to be painting the piece black. I'm just sanding down these wood legs. They were salvaged from another piece so they've got some dings and dried glue and all kinds of nastiness on them so we're going to sand it down and stain them to match the top. With orbital sanders you usually don't have to move them around too much. You typically just keep them fairly still and slow when it does the job but when you're doing legs like this or anything round you don't want to leave it in one spot too long because you'll end up with flat areas. I'm using a 220 grit sand pad to finish sanding this smooth and get rid of the rest of the dried wood filler that I just put on. It's coming along now, it's starting to feel a lot smoother on the surface and I'm super happy with how this is turning out. I'm applying a general finishes gel stain for this. This particular color is nutmeg and it looks great but I can immediately tell it's not the tone I'm looking for so what I'm going to do because I'm already in it at this point, I'm going to finish applying it and before it dries and starts to set in I'm going to go over it with antique walnut which is more the tone I'm going for and what that's going to do is sort of blend these two colors together and give me a little bit of a cooler tone and this is definitely more the color that I was going for. I'm super happy with this top. I'm doing my first coat now of fusion mineral paint in the color cold black. I'm going to do two coats on this piece as there's already a primer coat so I definitely won't need a third. This was the pool that I felt suited the piece the best but I'm going to give it a little bit of a gold colored spray paint. Excited to put these legs on and lift this baby off the ground and I always like to add some felt pads to the legs. On to coat number two of the cold black. It's looking great so far. I'm in the home stretch now and my honey popped in for a few minutes and decided to give me a hand just because because why not? That square blue plastic piece you see on the floor there is actually a hardware template which is what helped us line these holes up for the new bowl. I'm just applying some odies oil now to this top. It's a great product. It's non-toxic. It's food safe. It's highly water resistant when it's cured. It goes on as an oil but dries as a nice hard wax. Basically apply it in a circular motion. Let it soak into the wood usually somewhere between 20 minutes and two hours is kind of the best time frame and then you just buff it off with a nice absorbent towel and you're good to go. Fusion mineral paint is nice because it actually has a built-in top coat but every now and then I like to add a little bit of extra protection which is what I'm doing here. This is fusion beeswax and hemp oil combination and now I'm just wiping the odies oil off and I'm going to give it a little buff. Thanks for sticking with me through this project. It's not a big one but it was definitely a fun one. I've enjoyed it and if you've enjoyed it feel free to give me a thumbs up, leave a comment below, tell me what your favorite part is and I'll see you in the next video.