I Tried to Save the Wood… Then I Painted It Anyway 😅

Dougie is out walking the dog and he just texted me that there is a dresser sitting out on the curb so I'm gonna go pick it up. I think it's been about a month now since I grabbed this and it's been sitting out here in the shop collecting even more dust ever since. I feel like I want to describe this as Ikea adjacent. It's definitely not an Ikea piece but it's kind of built in the same way as their Rast collection with a super simple solid pine exterior and these bottom mounted drawer slides. Nothing fancy or valuable at all but still useful if it's not broken. The inside rail from the top drawer has fallen off and it looks like they may have tried to reattach it but I think the holes are stripped out so I'm gonna need to fix that. The handle on this one has also been swapped out and the one on the second drawer is broken. I strongly dislike this style of handle altogether so I'm not sad about it. I am a little sad about how obvious the sun bleaching behind these is though. That might be a bit of a chore to rectify because I do think I want to try and keep a wood finish on here, just a less orange tone, but I guess we'll have to dive in, get started, and see how we go. Drawers out and handles off not just because I'm not keeping them but because the amount of dust and gunk that collects behind furniture hardware is honestly astonishing. I need to give everything a really good degreasing clean before I do anything else so that I'm not inadvertently spreading contaminants around or sanding them down into the wood and causing problems with my new finish later on. See? Gross. But you'd never know that all of that was hiding under there unless you took the hardware off. Lots of little cobwebs hiding on the inside too so I'm just going to spray everything down with some simple green and wipe it clean with a microfiber cloth and some nice warm water. This is my favorite cleaner for this task because it does a really good job at cutting through grease, oils, and old furniture polish residue including the silicone that you can find in a lot of the spray-on polishes that everybody seems to use. I want as much of that stuff off of the surface as possible before I start with any sanding along with all the regular dust and dirt that whoever owns this piece next is definitely not going to want in or on their furniture. I'm going to roll this over onto its side and start on the fix for the drawer track. The original screw holes are all stripped out which basically just means they've gotten too big and damaged to hold screws in there anymore so I'm going to fill them back in with some new wood. I've got these little wood skewers from the kitchen that are about the right size so I'm just going to snip off a few little pieces, dip them in some wood glue, and jam them down into those holes. A little bundle of wooden toothpicks works really well for fixes like this too. I need to coerce these down a little further into the holes with my hammer and once this wood glue is dry I'll just come back and sand everything that's sticking up so that it's nice and flush with the surface. This has basically just rebuilt the inside of those holes with some fresh solid wood so that when I go to reinstall that track the screws will actually have something substantial to bite into again. While that's drying I think we're ready to get started with sanding. The existing finish on here is pretty thin and pine is a super soft wood so instead of going through the extra time expense and mess of using a chemical stripper first I think I should be able to get down to the bare wood pretty quickly with just some medium grit sandpaper. I could start with something as coarse as an 80 grit but I really don't think I need it on this and because pine is so soft a grit that aggressive can leave some pretty deep scratches or those annoying little pigtails from the sander and then I just have to spend even more time working up through finer and finer grits to get those marks back out again. So I'm just going to start with 120 grit it should be aggressive enough to chew through this thin finish pretty quickly without unnecessarily beating up the soft wood underneath. Yeah four minutes to completely strip this entire side. If I had used a chemical stripper first I would still be standing here watching the clock waiting to be able to scrape it all off. To go over these edges I'm going to pop a medium grit foam abrasive from Surf Prep onto my sander. It's nice and squishy so it's going to flex and conform around all these little ridges and contours to remove the finish without flattening out all the details like a regular flat sandpaper disc would. Okay this glue is dry enough for me to sand it flush and then I'm going to drill some little pilot holes right into those spots that I filled in so that I can get some new screws in there easier and I'm probably just going to use a little bit of masking tape to hold the rail for me because I have a feeling I'm going to need both hands to get the screws in place and this thing reattached. Okay 120 grit sanding is done so now I'm going to go over everything one more time with the next finest grit which is 180 grit to buff out any swirls that were left from my initial sanding and get the wood to a smooth enough state for new stain. I was really hoping that the hardware ghosting would disappear or at least lighten up a little more once all the dark finish around it was gone but nope it's still pretty bad. This is basically just the result of wood aging differently over the years. The pine that was exposed to the light and UVs naturally changed the color and the wood that was hidden underneath the hardware didn't change color or at least not nearly as much. These cup pulls that I was thinking might cover a lot of this pattern and let me not worry too much about filling or hiding the existing holes but they're not quite big enough to completely do the trick and since these lighter spots are still so obvious I'm going to try a treatment of oxalic acid to see if I can even things out a little bit more. This stuff is particularly good for removing darker discolorations and stains in wood like the stuff that you see from water marks or rust stains but it can also help brighten up an uneven surface like this. In this case the problem is really that the wood underneath the old hardware was protected from years of sunlight exposure while everything around it changed color so I don't really expect the oxalic acid to magically make the difference disappear. I'm just hoping that it's going to lighten and brighten the surrounding wood enough to make the contrast a little less noticeable. This comes in a powder form or I guess these are crystals and they get dissolved into water according to the measurements and directions on the side of the can and then I'm just going to brush this solution over the entire surface of each drawer face rather than trying to spot treat or paint around anything. Then I need to let it sit and do its thing for 15 or 20 minutes come back and rinse each surface completely clean with some clean water to remove the residue and any remaining acid and then I need to leave the wood alone and let it completely dry out again overnight before I can decide whether it's actually helped or not. All right the oxalic acid treatment has had all night to fully dry back out and do whatever lightening it's going to do. It has lightened the wood a little bit but really not that much. It's pretty much the same color as the body of the dresser stills. Certainly not enough to have done anything for the ghosting situation that I was trying to work on. So I think now I'm just going to keep plugging ahead and put some stain on this. I have chosen a pretty dark rich color which, fingers crossed, will camouflage this a little bit more. If it doesn't, I don't know what my next move is. I'll just have to keep troubleshooting and experimenting until I get these in a spot where I feel good about putting the new handles on. That's just how it is sometimes. I haven't tried this stain before but I've heard good things from other refinishers so I thought I'd give it a go. Since it's water-based it's not stinky and it's going to dry a whole lot faster than an oil-based stain so I won't have to wait so long to seal over it. I'm going to section off the top so that I don't get any stain on the sides before I'm ready so I don't have to worry about any overlapping or weird marks. And then I'm just going to follow the directions on the can. Again, apply a nice liberal layer and then wipe back all the excess going in the direction of the grain. All right, that went on okay. I'm going to do one drawer face too just to see what happens to the mark. Look at that! Nice! Okay, well the rest of it looks terrible but I think I hate it. It covered up the hardware really well. I just hate stained pine. It just never looks good. Okay, I am officially changing directions and painting. I think I get caught up with all of the comments that I see every single day all across social media about how terrible it is to put paint on furniture and cover up all the beautiful natural wood grain so I try and force things sometimes and I just have never liked the look of stained pine and this is reinforcing that for me. The stain went on beautiful. I think that Varathane water-based gel stain is going to be a great go-to product for me. I just don't like the look of the stained pine so I'm going to switch and go to paint even though I just spent a full day really carefully stripping this back to bare wood. I am going to need to prime it because we've got lots of little knots that are going to bleed up their brown-orange resin forever so it's going to need at least two coats of binchelac-based primer to lock that down. I should probably fill in the hardware holes, hey? Because now it doesn't matter if I need to drill new holes and then I can put whatever hardware that I want on it. I'm not stuck to the ones that fit. So I'll fill in the holes, sand that smooth, primer, and then I need to pick a paint color. That's the new plan. This is my color line-up based on what I've got in the pantry. I think I'm going to do Newell, this pretty kind of sagey gray-green. I think that'll look good on there. I've just popped a piece of masking tape over the inside of these holes so that I can really pack the filler all the way through without any of it oozing out the other side. And I'm going to use Bondo to fill these. It's a two-part filler so you have to mix the main putty in the big can with this blue cream hardener to get it to set. And once it's cured it will be rock hard and I can sand it flush. I know I'm going to be spraying my paint finish. That's just my preference for applying paint. So I'm going to wrap these drawer boxes with some plastic to keep them protected and clean. And I also need to pop some paper down on the floor and then I can get into primer. Pine knots are notorious for bleeding up through paint. They contain a ton of natural resins that will migrate right up through most primers and paints and eventually show up as little yellow or brown stains, even if everything looks perfectly fine when you first paint it. So I'm using Bin Shellac Base Primer to prevent that. Shellac is an excellent stain blocker and on something this knotty I'm going to do two full coats. One coat might be enough but with this many potential problem areas I'd rather take the time to seal everything really well now than have little spots appearing through my paint in a few weeks or months down the road. And I'm going to roll this on with a little four-inch microfiber roller instead of spraying it. Bin is really thin. It dries incredibly fast and shellac is not something that I particularly enjoy putting through my sprayer and then having to clean back out again. For me, using a roller that I can toss when I'm done to get two quick coats on here is just a lot easier. And once this is sanded I'll get a nice smooth surface for my paint to sit on top of. All right, my two coats of primer have had a few hours to fully dry so now I'm going to go over everything with a fine grit foam abrasive this time to smooth out any orange peely roller texture or little lint fluffies that have dried into the surface. Bin turns into a really fine powder when you sand it so it's actually very easy to get super smooth without much effort at all. Once I've gone over everything I'll dust all of that powdery stuff off with another clean microfiber cloth and then I can finally load up my sprayer with paint. I'm using my Gravity Fed HVLP pneumatic spray gun which runs off of my big air compressor and I always pour my paint through a strainer as it goes into the cup. That's going to catch any potential little chunks of dried paint, clumps of pigment, or any other debris that might have a chance of making its way into the gun and potentially clogging things up. And before I point this anywhere near my furniture I always like to test out my spray pattern on a piece of cardboard. I'm looking for a nice even finely atomized spray with enough paint coming through that I can get good coverage and wet enough of a coat for the paint to flow together smoothly but not so much paint that I'm flooding the surface and creating drips and runs. There isn't really one magic setting that works every time for this. Every can of paint can behave a little differently and things like temperature and humidity in your workspace can also affect how things spray and dry too so I'm always making tiny little adjustments and tweaks to the gun as I work. That is completely normal. Once I'm spraying the actual furniture I try and keep the gun a nice consistent distance from the surface and keep it moving at a really steady speed. I'll start my spray just before I reach one edge and then carry that pass all the way across and continue spraying until I'm just past the opposite side. Then each new pass should overlap the last one by about 50%. That helps keep the amount of paint that's going onto the surface nice and even without getting any heavier or lighter strips. There definitely is a little bit of practice and finesse involved in getting comfortable with a spray gun but once you do spraying makes the painting process so much faster and gives such a pretty smooth finish. At this point I almost never pick up a paintbrush anymore unless I'm deliberately trying to create some brush stroke texture. Fusion needs about two hours of dry time in between coats and this first layer is already looking really nice. I do have a few little fluffies that landed in the wet paint so I'm just going to knock those off before the next coat and I can still barely see a few of those old hardware holes. They're filled but there are still some tiny imperfections showing through the paint so I've just smeared on a really thin skim coat of drywall compound over those spots and because it's such a tiny amount it should dry really quickly. Then I can sand those areas smooth one more time and get my second coat of paint on. This is an acrylic resin based paint that dries to a beautiful matte finish and cures to a super durable water resistant surface. It's designed specifically for furniture and generally doesn't require a separate top coat which is one of the things that makes it so easy to use. You absolutely do not need a spray gun to get a nice finish with this stuff. I just prefer spraying whenever I can. I really love how soft this silvery sage green is looking now that it's dried down. It's much prettier than the poopy brown stained pine that we started with. I think two coats is going to give me full coverage so I can't see any of that white primer underneath and enough paint on there to create a nice durable finish. Once it's fully cured but because this is a matte finish and I have no idea where this chest is ultimately going to end up or how heavily it's going to be used I am going to add a few coats of polyurethane on top. Fusion like I said doesn't technically need it but for a piece that I'm sending off into the world I just feel like I need a little bit of extra protection insurance. This soft touch from verathane is what I reach for when I want to add a little bit of extra durability without losing that matte finish. It's a water-based clear coat so again really easy to work with. Don't have to worry about fumes so much. It dries really quickly and it's just going to give me that extra little bit of protection without making everything look shiny or plasticky which I think is the appropriate finish for this kind of country or cottagecore-esque style piece. I got my sprayer all rinsed out so just like I did with the paint it's going to get strained into the cup and then I'll need to readjust all of the settings on my gun. This is a much thinner product than the paint was so I definitely can't leave everything set the same way that it was. All right the poly is dry enough for me to get these drawers unwrapped and figure out where I want the new hardware to go. I think it'll look better with two knobs instead of that one little handle in the center and these are the three styles that I've got enough of right now in my little hardware stash. The gold balls are too shiny, too bright and these aged brass ones would be okay but I kind of feel like these little porcelain guys that I thrifted a few years ago suit the really sweet cottagecore feel we've got going on here. So I'm just going to give them a quick scrub down in the sink and then I'm going to use a hardware template to measure and mark where I need to drill the new holes for these. This poor little pine piece got kicked to the curb with a few broken handles and a ripped out drawer track. It's nothing prestigious or collectible but still a perfectly usable piece of furniture that's got lots of life left in it after a few fixes and somebody please remind me the next time that I decide to completely strip and stain a basic pine piece that I never actually like the way that it looks and I should probably just go straight to paint, okay? Because I love this soft sage shade so much more and these sweet little porcelain knobs add just enough detail and charm without trying to make this into something it's not. It's still a simple pine chest of drawers. It just looks pretty and fresh again. It works properly again and hopefully now I can find a new home instead of ending up in the landfill. This one took a lot longer than it should have or longer than it needed to anyway but that's how these projects go a lot of the time no matter how long you've been doing this. Thank you so much for following along with me through another makeover and I will catch you next time with a brand new flip.