Turning Cheap Pine Furniture Into High-End Decor: APOTHECARY STYLE

Hello everybody, welcome to another video. In today's video, I am tackling this piece that has been in my storage room for close to a year and a half. I picked this up on Facebook Marketplace. There was nothing about it that was appealing, except that I really wanted to try to save this and make it beautiful again. I know some of you are going to love these little wavy bits all over the place. I do not. I don't share that love, so I'm going to be getting rid of them. Obviously, this hardware is going. Literally every drawer needs some work, some rather interesting home repairs here. It is a solid pine piece though, so that's going to offer me a lot of options when it comes to refinishing. I'm going full industrial, apothecary style cabinet here. I'm going to be creating the illusion of more drawers than there's actually here, putting new hardware on, adding wheels. If I hadn't done this makeover myself, I wouldn't believe it. 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. I can't even tell you how excited I am to pull this hardware off. Normally, I save hardware that I pull off and don't use, but probably not these ones. At some point, these drawer bottoms bowed and they added this tape, I think, to try to keep it from sagging instead of just adding some more nails in the back. Almost every single drawer is like this, so I need to address that. Okay, wavy lovers, you might want to look away for this part. Luckily, this top overhangs enough that I can actually cut these wavy bits off and still have a bit of a lip there. All I'm doing is using this long ruler here to mark and cut off just the bare minimum. I'm going to be using a circular saw to cut these off. With the battery off, I'm just adjusting the depth so that my blade isn't sticking out any further than it needs to. I'm going to pop the battery back on and set up a guide. I'm using a guide so that I can cut a good straight line here. I'm not bad with a circular saw. I can usually get fairly straight lines, but I want really straight here. Once I figure out exactly how far my guide needs to be, I'm going to clamp it down, grab my ear protectors and eyewear, and I didn't show it for some reason, but a dust mask, and start the cuts. I was really happy with how this turned out. It was a nearly perfect straight line on both sides as well as the front. Now, some of you may be wondering why I'm cutting this detailing off. After all, it is what makes this piece different from every other boxy rectangular dresser out there. I guess my answer to that is A, that I'm doing something completely different with this piece, and B, that sometimes those added details, they don't actually complement a piece. I find sometimes they distract from the piece or confuse the person looking at the piece. My vision for this dresser, I'm basically turning it into sort of a faux apothecary cabinet on wheels, and these little wavy bits are just not going to flow with that, so they're going. I was trying to figure out how I was going to remove the waves from the front here under the drawers, and then I remembered I bought this oscillating tool from an auction a while back, but the wood blade attached here is obviously very well used, so I ran up the street. I'm fortunate to have a home hardware about a block from where I live. So, I grabbed a new blade. Most of these are universal. Popped it on. It's a slightly different shape, but it is the same width, and it's going to work just great. So, I drew a line to follow along here. This was fairly easy in terms of difficulty, but it was quite time consuming, mainly because I had to take little chunks at a time and be very careful not to cut into the main piece when I'm cutting these little things off, which you can see I did a little bit, but that's okay. Most of those are going to stand right out. Last but not least, I have to deal with the legs, which also have these bloody waves on them. The problem is that if I cut it here level with the bottom board, I'm still going to have a little bit of wave showing, so I ended up having to cut this board. Once I get the legs cut, I need to fashion some sort of assembly on the bottom so that I have something solid to attach the wheels to that I bought. So, this board on the front is just attached with some screws, so I'm going to do the same thing on the back for this little piece of wood that I'm going to put on each end, and I'm going to use pocket screws on this end to attach to the leg. I'm pre-drilling my screw holes here, and then I'm finally able to use these countersink bits that I was sent on my Amazon wishlist. I'm not sure who sent these, so if it was you, make sure you let me know so I can properly thank you. I'm using my Kreg jig to make the pocket holes. If you want to see a more in-depth look at this jig, I actually went into quite a bit of detail in another video. I will link that down below for you. I could have added a full bottom, like one big slab on the bottom, but what I opted to do was sort of build a frame, and two reasons for that. One, I wanted to keep the weight of this piece down, and two, the wheels will easily fit on this frame, so really there's no need to put a whole huge board on the bottom. I attach these pieces with just wood screws and a little bit of glue on the ends. I am not a furniture builder, and I am not a woodworker in the building sense, so there may be way better and more efficient ways of doing this, but I think this is going to work for this piece. Now it's time, finally, to get rid of this brown paint. I started by sanding with an 80 grit, and it was doing pretty much nothing, so I decided to switch to my scraper, which was extremely difficult. Doable, but definitely difficult because you're scraping through at least two coats of this thick brown paint, plus the original finish, which is usually crazy thick. The multi-tool I was using earlier, I decided to pull it out again because I remember that there was a scraper attachment, so I thought this might be a good time to try it out. I've never used one, so I set it up and gave it a go. It wasn't quite as efficient as I was hoping for this particular application. I'm sure in some situations it would be great, but it would have taken me an entire day to do this top. I only did a few little test areas and then gave that up. Now one thing I get asked a lot when I strip paint, because I strip paint all the time, is why I don't use a heat gun. I'm going to show you. First, I want to show you how well it works because it is quite efficient and it is way less messy than a chemical stripper. It's way less work than scraping, but there is a downside to it. First of all, I have no idea what kind of paint this is. I know it's not lead paint, but these chemicals and additives that are in the paint, they're not meant to be hot. Not this hot. So not only is there the risk of toxic fumes, this can happen and this is a real issue. This doesn't happen often, but it can happen with certain finishes and it happens quickly and it can be scary if you're not prepared or not even aware that this is a possibility of happening. This smoked for only a couple of seconds, but the fumes with it had managed to fill the room in that short amount of time and I actually had to take a little break because I was not feeling very good for a bit after that. And that is why I don't use a heat gun to remove paint very often. I just wanted to show you guys that that is a risk and I'm glad that it happened on camera because it would have been harder to explain it. So I was super excited about this. I finally got myself a surf prep after years of people telling me I need to do this, but I need to see if I can get a different vacuum attachment. So I'm going to have to save the unboxing for another video. I'm not using very much paint on this, but I am painting both side panels and that small little piece of trim at the bottom. The stain I want to use for this piece is going to make it quite dark and I thought the black would be sort of a nice touch with that. Moving on to the drawers, I'm going to sand literally everything on the drawers. I'm going to take it apart and get the bottom completely sanded. The insides, the outsides, they really need a refresh. Once all of my main sanding is done, I take the vacuum and clean up all the dust. Now here's where I'm turning this into sort of a faux apothecary cabinet. There's three columns of drawers. The two columns on the outside are both, they're both the same size and then the middle column of drawers is a little bit, they're not quite as long, they're shorter. So the two columns of drawers on the outside, I'm going to turn into boxy looking drawers and the stack of drawers in the middle, I'm going to cut horizontally to make them look more like map drawers. It's going to visually break up the piece a bit and make it a little bit more interesting. I set my blade depth to just barely over an eighth of an inch. I don't want to cut too far into the drawers because I don't want to sacrifice the stability of it. And this sort of dupe or hack, whatever you want to call it, this is not original. There have been many YouTubers that have done it. I did a version of it before. You can cut these strips with a router. I'm choosing to use a circular saw. It's just super quick and easy. But yeah, even though this has been done many times before, for some reason whenever I would go to the storage room and look at this piece, that's all I could picture doing to it. So that's what it's getting. This actually took a lot of time and I had to do it on all nine drawers, but it's so worth it to have a nice clean drawer. I'm going to be using a bunch of different products here for my staining. I'm going to be using Minwax gel stain in the color walnut, the color coffee and Brazilian rosewood, which might seem like a strange choice, but you'll see what I do with this here. I did a little experimenting on the underside to make sure I had the colors just the way I wanted, and then I added the wheels, flipped this upside down, and then I could get to work on staining the rest of it. Now you might be wondering why I'm not talking about a pre-stain conditioner, usually really important on porous woods like pine specifically. In this case, I opted not to. I wanted the stain to have a bit more of a dramatic effect rather than subdued. I wanted this piece to kind of have the feel that it has aged over time and patinaed, even though it's clearly a new refinishing. One of the reasons a lot of people don't like stained pine is because of something called grain reversal. Grain reversal is when the softest areas of the wood, they absorb more color than the harder areas of the wood, and that's especially pronounced in softwoods like pine, so it has a very striking and somewhat harsh look to it. I personally like it. I think it's dramatic, and I like striking wood grain, I guess. So I'm using that darkest color coffee to stain inside the grooves that I cut, and to give these drawers a little bit of variation, there are some drawers that I'm only using the walnut stain on, some drawers like this one where I start with the coffee base and then layer a different color on top of it later. For me, that's important to sort of sell the idea that this is put together with different drawers and it's a little bit aged. If I were to stain this all completely one uniform color, I think it would look a little bit monotonous and definitely faux. It is faux, but I don't want it to look faux, if that makes sense. Well, it's only fair to come this far and give you guys another rescue bunny intermission. So the two boys that are our fosters are doing well. They're loving this treat from Christmas time. I always show you the fosters, but I never show you our own bunny. So this is Flanders and his little bunny wife Millie. And we actually have five bunnies of our own, and they're all rescues. They all came from the same rescue that I helped with. This is my handsome Mr. Fuzzy Bear, and we have two other bunnies that I'll introduce to you in an upcoming video. Another thing about staining pine is that it often looks dull or flat. I'm going to use a stain and a polyurethane combo in the color antique walnut, so it's lightly tinted. I didn't see anything on the back that says you couldn't use this over top of another stain, so I'm going to try it. Wish me luck. This is going to really, really warm up the wood and seal it also, all in one step. And it's going to give the wood a little bit of life. Right now, it looks fairly dull. You'll see what I mean here as I put this on. I know this looks crazy right now. You have to trust me, this is going to look cool. I'm trying to be really careful as I go over the groove here that I don't get this stuff inside of it. I don't want to turn it this brown color. I want to make sure it stays nice and dark, so I'm just sort of skipping over that and trying not to get the very thing in it. And you can really see here how much it warms up the wood, so I'm really happy with how this is turning out. I need to cut some small pieces of paper to fit inside of the hardware that I picked out. I needed 24 pieces of hardware for this piece. I was fortunate enough to get two packs of it from my Amazon wishlist. One pack was from Alex, and one was from Harlan, so thank you so much for this. Literally couldn't have done it without you. One thing you may not know about me is I'm kind of a paper nerd. I make cards, like greeting cards. I love it. Anyway, I have this product called Distress Ink, and basically, I'm just using it to sort of age this cardstock and make it look a little bit older, not so stark white. And it's subtle, but it really does make a difference. So because I had taken the drawers apart and completely sanded them down, I needed to seal them with something, so I'm opting to use hemp oil to do that. It's really going to soak into that wood and just give it a refresh. Once I had measured out where my hardware needed to go, I'm using these center hole punches that I got from Gina and Kevin. I hope I pronounced your name right, Gina. And attached all the hardware. Holy smokes, you guys. If I hadn't done this myself and filmed it, I would not believe my eyes. I would never have believed that this piece that we're looking at right now turned into what you're about to see. This took me three and a half days to do. There were some frustrations along the way, but the majority of this was straight-up labor. If you like this video and want to see more like it, don't forget to like and subscribe to my channel. It really helps my channel grow and allows me to bring you more content like this. As always, thank you so much for watching, and I am so excited to show you this.