Unbelievable Dresser Makeover - Extreme Furniture Flip

Welcome everybody to yet another video. Today I'm going to be transforming this pretty ugly curbside find. It has a lot of issues and a lot of work that needs to be done. You can see that the finish here is completely shot. Some of the legs aren't sitting properly and the bottom drawer is completely stuck as you're about to see. But it's a good brand name and I have hope for this piece so 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 so as always I'm going to start by removing the drawers, having a good look at the piece. This is a perfect time to have a look at the frame, make sure everything is sturdy and intact, assess any repairs that need to be made. And in this case I notice as I'm about to pull the drawer out that it won't actually come out all the way. I'm pulling and I'm not pulling too hard because I don't want to break anything. Just trying to coax it out and it is really stuck and I'm about to find out why in a few minutes. In real time this took me about six minutes to remove this drawer as I was afraid of breaking things but what I learned as I pulled this trim piece off is that the bottom board, the bottom frame piece, was completely warped and pushing upwards into where the drawer would track so it was preventing the drawer from either pulling all the way out or pushing all the way in. I'm taking off one of the wonky legs now to get a better look at this broken area. There's a screw with half a head and you can see someone has driven a nail in there and split the wood so that'll be fun to try to figure out. At this point I have no idea how I want to get that screw out because there is nothing to pull it into but I ended up just prying the piece off very carefully so as not to break it further and then I was able to remove it from the bottom and have better access to it. And I'm just using a pair of pliers here to turn that old screw out and get it out of the way. As you can see here the other side was way easier to remove no problems there and this is a great little tool it's a little ratcheting mini screwdriver thing I don't know the exact name of it but I use it all the time it's great for areas that you can't fit a full-length screwdriver in and sorry for the shaky video here this is handheld at the moment but I just wanted to show you taking off this glue block and just giving it a little pop so I can get this warped piece off and figure out what the heck I'm gonna do. This side needed a bit more coaxing but we got it off. Before I move on to replacing the warped part I'm going to glue and clamp this broken piece here. I was just going to try to get the glue in that crack but it was just hanging on by a thread so I decided to just pull it off and start from scratch making sure there's glue on both sides. I don't normally spread it with my finger I do on occasion but generally you don't want to do that just because your fingers can sometimes have oil on them and it can interfere with the bonding but in this case my hands were squeaky clean and I wasn't worried about that at all. So I'm just pressing it into place here getting it lined up I'm going to wipe off some of the spillage here and then I'm going to glue the other side and then clamp both sides together. Whenever you're getting ready to glue up two pieces of wood that have been torn apart you want to make sure there's no little fibers that are folded over because that is going to interfere with how they sit together so I was just brushing those aside. We're all good to go now so I'm going to glue it up put it in place again wipe off any sort of glue that comes out of the seams and then we're going to clamp it. I just realized I say we all the time in these videos it's only me here I don't know why I say we I guess it's just because you guys are following along and I don't know I guess in a way I feel like you're part of the process so you know we. Once these are clamped I'm going to set this aside and let it dry for a good part of the day I want this bond to be nice and strong so the longer the glue can sit in the clamps the better. Okay so I think I have a solution for this piece that needs replacing. This is a solid wood hardwood piece of a hutch top that I don't need anymore and it's the exact width on the ends as the piece I need replacing so I'm just going to cut this along the length here watch how strong I am look at that here I go again ready oh man that's awesome I might want this little trim piece later so I'm just sort of carefully prying it off and this is interesting I don't know if this is original or if someone took a sharpie and made this design I don't know the only reason I think it might be handmade is just because it's quite irregular but who knows it's going either way I'm definitely keeping the original hardware from this piece so I'm just going to remove it set it aside until I'm ready to paint oh tricky drawer look at that it's on the inside now I am so excited to get this old karate finish off I shouldn't even call it a finish it's not a stain or anything like that it's some strange plastic-y I don't know if it's plastic or not but it's plastic-y coating that they put on these old dressers and they usually do it over top of wood that's not the most desirable sometimes it's poplar or birch and then they put this coating on thinking that it looks better but to me I would much rather have the normal wood so I'm scraping all of this off it's way more difficult than a normal finish as you can see here I'm having to use my paint scraper be very careful if you decide you want to use one of these because you can gouge the wood pretty easily as I'm scraping off the last bit and getting ready to sand some of the the worst bits away here with 100 grit sandpaper I'm realizing this looks a bit like birch veneer so I'm just going to be a little bit careful with it I'm not going to go too deep I'm just going to take my time and do a couple different grits to get to where I need to be moving up now to a 180 grit to sand things down a little bit finer and then I'm going to do a final sanding with a 220 grit sandpaper I'm going to be painting the sides and well the base of this piece so I'm going to do a little scuff sand now I believe this is 180 grit as well and all I'm doing is roughing up the surface so that my paint has something to adhere to sometimes these weird coatings are a flick and you can have adhesion problems if you don't do this first so I was initially thinking I was going to do this drawer wood grain as well which is why I'm pulling this off to make sanding a little easier but the funny part is I end up not sanding it down to bare wood and I end up painting it so I have to put that piece right back on after here I'm getting that coating off the drawers I could have used stripper on the drawer but honestly the drawers are actually solid wood through and through so I'm not as worried about sanding through like I was on the top which was veneer as opposed to solid wood I'm doing the same process here where I start with a heavier grit and move up to a lighter grit and I'm slowing this clip down to regular speed so I can show you what happens right here when you try to reuse a pad in this case I had only used a little bit of that sanding pad before and thought I'd pop it back on and yeah sometimes the little closures it's kind of like a velcro it just doesn't catch as well the second time and you'll lose your sanding piece halfway through sometimes I like to give the sides of the drawers a little refresh I don't do it all the time but if wood is quite yellowed or murred I'll often give it a little refresh at this point I'd already decided to change my mind about this drawer going from wood to painted I just thought the painted would look very pretty with the details so I just gave it a scuff sand as well and now I'm going to give the whole piece a good cleaning just to make sure there's no excess sanding dust or dirt that's going to get into my finish vacuum any bits from inside here I always check the dovetail joints to make sure everything is nice and tight and in this case there were a few drawers that needed some extra attention so I'm just going to lightly pop that up and slide it over and put just a small amount of glue in each little section here you don't want to put too much because you'll never get the drawer apart again if you need to but just enough to tighten things up and make the drawer more secure and firm just wanted to take a minute and say thank you for watching if you guys are enjoying these videos please feel free to like share leave a comment subscribe it all helps I'm fairly new at this but your comments are so helpful and if you have any suggestions on how I can make these videos better please feel free to reach out I definitely appreciate it these are the two pieces of the long handle that goes on the bottom drawer I'm going to be staining these because the drawer is now going to be painted and I think it would be a great contrast these are the little wood pieces that I popped off before I realized I was going to paint the drawer so I'm just tapping those back into place full disclosure here and a little disclaimer even I am not a woodworker I don't have a table saw to make these adjustments I need to make on this piece don't follow my lead here I'm just trying to get it done with what I have to work with I change the depth of my blade here so that it only cuts down as far as I need to to make these identical to the original piece so it'll all fit in place I'm just sort of chiseling it out to flatten it out like I said guys this is some backyard stuff here please don't judge me too harshly a table saw is on the list of needs and wants but it's just not in the cards just yet so just trying to make do I'm choosing to add a bit of wood glue when I put these pieces together I just want to make sure that this is going to be nice and sturdy with my little handmade replacement piece here and help keep it sturdy in the years to come oh boy so here's the piece it's not terrible I actually did a fairly good job considering my limitations with the tools here I'm kind of proud of myself it definitely turned out better than I expected I don't have a single clamp big enough to stretch the whole width of this dresser so you can see what I've done here is just use two clamps back to back and they just put pressure against each other and keep this piece in place while the glue dries up and I just put on the top trim piece here it's glued down as well as screwed I'm sorry I missed the process for that but I'll show you how I did it on the bottom it'll just help keep it on better than those terrible staples did but before I attach the bottom trim moment of truth I need to make sure this drawer will now work with my little fancy piece that I put in and oh my gosh it works it slides easily it goes all the way in and all the way out I don't need to be too exact here with the sanding as it's going to be painted and covered by the trim anyway but I'm just making sure it's smooth with no big bumps and here we go this is the bottom trim piece I'm going to do the same thing I did with the one above it I'm going to glue the back clamp it down and while it's clamped and glued I'm going to put some screw holes in the back just to help keep this on I find those little staples they work for you know a few decades and then the trim piece tends to start to fall away so I just want to make sure that doesn't happen you can see here that every time I put a clamp on I get a bit of a squeeze out of glue that's a good thing that means there's enough glue in that joint it's a fully loaded joint if you don't have any glue coming out when you clamp something you probably didn't use enough glue another thing I don't have yet is a countersink bit so what I'm doing here is just using a slightly larger drill bit to make a small indent and then I'm going to use my regular drill bit to make the screw hole itself and that will just leave enough room at the top for the screw head to sit down flush I find birch veneer is sometimes difficult to stain well it tends to be blotchy or patchy so I'm just applying some minwax wood conditioner here it's easy to use you just apply it wipe off the excess and let it soak in for the recommended amount of time it's written on the can there and what it actually does is just allows your stain to absorb more evenly and while that's drying I'm going to get on finally with my first coat of paint this piece had so many repairs it honestly felt like I would never get to the point where I was able to paint which is my favorite part but here we are first coat this is a custom mixed color it is fusion mineral paint it's I think four or five different colors blended together it's a nice sort of gray with a bit of a greenish blue tint to it it looks very different when it's dry than it does right here I tend to apply my paint in whatever direction best suits me at the time but I always make sure that I pull my brush all in one direction before the paint gets too dry to manipulate it has a much more professional and polished look than it does if you've got paint going in 15 different directions I'm giving this a light 220 grit rub down here the water-based wood conditioner tends to raise the grain a bit so you just want to make sure you flatten that out a little bit before you put your stain on and I'm using general finishes gel stain in the color nutmeg here it's one of my favorites for mid-century pieces it's got a nice warm glow to it this isn't the fanciest wood or wood grain even but it is a hundred times better than what they had on there don't you think here's a great view of what I was talking about how the color of the paint wet looks very different than it does when it's dry I'm going to be giving these a modern matte black spray finish I'm going to do the backsides first the pulls do stick out from the wood a bit so those little posts you see will be exposed so I just want to make sure that those are painted and I don't show it here but I do after that dries flip them over and do the front sides as well I'm top coating this piece with minwax polycrylic I ended up doing three coats on it this is coat number one this is another example of me putting something on in a million directions but making sure that I go through before it dries to pull everything in one smooth direction it just looks so much better I am so not using these ugly feet that it came with I have these left over from another project they're quite similar in tone to the stain that I used on the drawers and the top and they're in good condition so good to go I'm going to put these drawers back in and add the hardware everything is looking great I am super excited with how this piece turned out I know that the people I got this from would never in a million years dream it could look like this considering what I started with or they probably wouldn't have tossed it to begin with thank you guys for sticking with me so far in this video I know it's a little bit longer there were a lot of repairs but it's going to be worth it when you see this piece