Easy Night Table Makeover: Giving Big Box Store Furniture a Facelift

Hello everybody welcome to another video. I picked up these two nightstands from Value Village the other day and I don't often shop there for furniture I find a lot of their pricing has just gotten ridiculous but these were a decent price. They're not solid wood and I knew that immediately but I still felt like maybe I could do something with these. These are your typical big box store nightstands and don't let the somewhat subpar construction fool you. They are not cheap. That price is per piece. It's advertised as a cherry finish but I knew immediately that this was rubber wood. You guys know that I love to save good wood when I can. I have no problems painting over rubber wood so part of these are going to be painted and part of it is going to be wood. I'm also going to have to replace the hardware because there are pieces missing that I don't have extras for. These are going to look a lot different when I'm done so stick around. 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. Just before we get started with today's video I wanted to let you know that for the month of April any super chats received on the live chats during the video premieres on Sundays all of the proceeds are going to be donated to 10,000 Carats Rabbit Rescue which is the rescue that all of my bunnies are from, the rescue we foster with, and the rescue I fundraise for. If you don't know what a super chat is when you watch a premiere live on YouTube there's a live chat window and there's normal chats and then this here this is a super chat so you can donate any amount of money you want for the month of April. That would be videos on the 3rd, the 10th, the 17th, and the 24th. All super chats from those videos is going to be donated directly to the rescue. They're coming into one of the worst times of the year for them financially because of all the Easter babies that are purchased as pets and then discarded unfortunately not long after so just my way of doing what I can. I know I have a lot of folks from the States and the UK that often message and ask how they can help out but it's a little bit harder to to transfer funds so I thought this would be a good way to do that. Anyway, getting into the video now. So I'm removing what's left of the hardware. Unfortunately there are a few pieces missing that I don't have replacements for and before I get cleaning and painting I like to remove the hardware. Anyway, sometimes with these drawers if you have one that doesn't come out just slip your hand in underneath. There's often a little plastic flap that prevents the drawer from coming out. Just push that down with your finger. I always flip the drawers over and have a peek underneath just to make sure everything is tight and secure and I don't have any loose glue blocks or broken wood. This looks good. One thing I do when I'm working on multiple pieces with drawers is label both the piece and the drawers so that I know which drawers go with which piece and in what order. It makes a huge difference. I did find another little bit of hardware inside the nightstand but looking at it here I still don't have these two handles for two of the drawers so I have no choice but to put these in my stash and hope that someday I can find pieces to match. I also have to address this tear out here at the top. The actual top is rubber wood veneer over top of it's almost like an MDF sort of material so I'm gonna have to glue that back down. These aren't in terrible shape but they are pretty dirty so I need to scrub this piece from top to bottom inside and out get rid of all the dust and then I can move forward and figure out exactly how I'm going to redo these pieces. I was cutting up a full sheet of Scotch Brite scrub pad into smaller pieces and using my favorite degreaser which is Zep. It's really good at getting grime and waxes and dirt off pieces. The only caveat with that it's similar to TSP in that you have to rinse it off first so you put it on wipe the dirt off use a wet cloth to rinse and then dry it again. Because the substrate here is not wood I'm not using wood glue to glue this I'm using something called weld bond and if you've ever put glue or paint or anything on MDF you know that it's highly absorbent so basically what I did is I kept adding glue until it stopped absorbing then I put my little patch on and just used a piece of masking tape to hold it down and then set something heavy on it to harden up. A couple of the other corners hadn't completely separated but it had lifted a little bit so I just used this pry bar to try to get in there a little bit and then shoved some glue in the same way by putting it in letting it soak up and then adding more until it was saturated and then taped that down as well. So something exciting happened recently I'm not sure yet how Mr. Dewalt feels about it but don't worry he's not being replaced. I had so many people telling me over the years that I need to try this out so I decided to do it. I went for it I bought a surf prep sander. I also got this apron because I don't have one and I'm tired of my clothes being covered in paint and stain. So I ordered a kit which means I got the sander along with some variety packs. One of the red and blue boxes as well as the pieces here that you see wrapped those came in this package and the other red and blue box of foam pads I purchased separately as an add-on. I also have the vacuum attachment for my festool and initially I didn't think that it fit but after reaching out to them they told me that you have to really push hard to get it on there and I did manage to do that today so just opening up the box here quickly. I'm not going to go through everything but it does come with these great little hose clamps that help keep the cord attached to your vacuum hose which is handy it doesn't get in your way and yeah I bought the 3x4 electric ray. The primary reason I wanted this sander is to deal with curved surfaces and rounded areas tight corners that I can't get a round orbital in and for scuff sanding when I do paint and just to talk for a second about scuff sanding because I see a lot of people doing it incorrectly. Scuff sanding for painting is important because you need that adhesion but what you don't really want to do is sand all the way through the finish into the bare wood. To paint over something it doesn't have to be bare wood and you have to sort of think of the longevity of the piece down the road if somebody decides they want to strip the paint off and refinish it. If you've damaged that veneer and wood underneath by scuff sanding too aggressively then that piece then becomes useless which is a shame so definitely want to scuff sand just do the bare minimum you just need to scratch the surface literally. I decided I wanted to have the bases of these nightstands be wood grain and I'm going to be painting the top areas and the drawers and this finish would come off a lot easier with a stripper but I really needed to see how this sander works. I was impressed with how easily it cut through. I opted to start with the medium grit. I don't usually like using anything super coarse but where this is really going to shine is on those curved surfaces so let's have a look at that. Once I had done my little test I decided to use some chemical stripper on the rest just to make things go a lot faster. I'm using circa 1850 stripper here, a stripping pad, and some steel wool to get most of this gunk off and then I came in with the surf prep and it was just easy peasy from there. Now I'm ready to scuff sand the rest of the piece. I'm going to be painting the sides the top and the drawer faces so I'm going to do a very light scuff sand on all of those. I'm using a stain by Varathane called Gunstock and I have to tell you that the evolution of this piece from my initial idea to what it ended up as is a winding road. I went through several color combinations and scenarios in my head and all of them would have looked amazing. This is what I ended up doing. The whole way along I kept thinking oh I should have done a different color but you know what sometimes things just evolve the way they do and I just know that the person who eventually buys these is going to love them so that's all that really matters to me. I'm using this plastic mask and tape combination to cover up the bottom here so that I can spray on my primer. I'm not too worried about adhesion but because I don't really know what kind of stain or finishing products they used I just want to make sure that there's no bleed through into my paint so I'm choosing to spray a primer on and then we'll do two to three coats of paint after that. I picked up these brand new oak pulls a while back from a thrift store. I actually got all four for $1.95 which is a smoking deal. Anyway I'm thinking that these should stain up to be very close in color to the base so I'm using that same Gunstock stain on these and these will be the new handles. I was going to go for a metal pull but at the last minute I changed my mind. I saw these and thought these might be kind of cool. I'm using one of the spent surf prep sanding pads just to knock down this primer to make sure everything's nice and smooth and then I can get started with my first coat of paint. For this piece in addition to the Gunstock stain and the bellwood mineral paint I'm using Wise Owl Furniture Solve in Lemon Verbena just to go over the paint. It deepens the color a little bit adds a nice kind of low luster and aside from smelling amazing it actually adds a little bit of extra protection to the paint which technically already has a built-in top coat anyway. For the base, the sides, the drawers, and the pulls of this piece that'll be enough. For the top I'll do two coats. I like to leave this on the surface for about 20 minutes or so and then come in with a shop towel and wipe all of the excess off and then just leave it alone to harden up. I couldn't be happier with how these nightstands turned out. There wasn't anything terribly wrong with them originally but they were quite dirty and marked up and just a bit dated. They were quite heavy and chunky looking. My mission with these was to give them a little bit of an update maybe make them look a little bit lighter and definitely clean them up so that they can be enjoyed in somebody's house. I also wanted to share this with you to show you that it doesn't have to be an incredibly well-made piece of furniture to have a pretty dramatic transformation and oftentimes big box pieces of furniture can really do a 180 with a little bit of imagination and time. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you again next week!