When Old Makeovers Come Back to HAUNT You...

Oh, what is that? Sometimes we as furniture refinishers don't always make the best decisions, or at least those decisions change over time. Like this. I painted these years ago when I was just starting out and obviously somebody loved them. That same somebody reached out to me recently saying that they were moving and didn't have space for them and would I like them back to flip for the bunnies. So of course I jumped on that. My first question is why in the world did I paint these tops black? Do I even want to know? Now if you've been on my channel for a while you're going to know immediately that the quality of workmanship here is not quite where I am today. This piece was done in the first year or two of flipping furniture and obviously, I mean I tried, but as with anything you get better over time. After evicting our little friend here, I was able to have a better look at these. Now these are very, very common end tables around here. You see them everywhere. A marketplace is full of them. They are a difficult sell pretty much unless they're painted. So when I originally flipped these, I wanted to do something that was very unique and I think I accomplished that. My pink lovers in the house are probably going to love these, but it was time for these to get a new look. Now while I don't remember everything about this flip, I do remember this color. This was a Martha Stewart chalk paint that I bought from Michael's, and then I used the Michael's black wax, or first clear wax, and then black wax on top of it to kind of give it that sort of grungy effect. And it is kind of neat, but where this is a flip for the bunnies, I need this to appeal to more people than this pink would. Now the paint on the underside of these tables was actually pretty easy to get off. I just used a stripper and a spatula initially, then a stiff bristled brush to get into these grooves. And lastly, this little stripping pad to kind of get into the bigger grooves. Now here's where things went sideways on me. I didn't realize, and I should have double checked, because I've run into this before. These little escutcheons here, these little carvings, they're not wood, they're plastic. And the stripper melted them, so I can't reuse these. I'm either going to have to fill these holes, or come up with some other thing to put in its place. Now as unbelievably satisfying as this stripping is, don't get too comfortable because these tops were a mess. I don't remember why I initially painted these, but I very rarely will paint the top of something like this. Normally I would leave it wood, so there has to be a reason. You can probably immediately tell this is a lot more difficult than the painted areas below, because not only am I stripping the paint off, I'm also stripping off the original finish. So I had to use a couple layers of stripper here, and I'm not quite through it here, but what in the world is this? This, I'm guessing, is probably why I ended up painting these tops. And once I remove the original finish, you can see underneath that is this kind of stained area, and then this little bit in the corner that is all chewed up. It looks like there was some damage to the veneer here. I don't know if somebody tried to sand it and immediately went through. Maybe that was me, I don't remember. That would be kind of unlikely, because I was always very gentle with my sander, but clearly something happened here, and I just at that point decided, you know what, I'm just going to paint this. Now at this point in time, I hadn't fully decided what I was going to do. My initial plan was that I wanted to make these nice and light, almost like a light paint wash. I thought that would really kind of be a reversal from its original dark finish, but that's really going to depend on what I can do with these stains on top. So on this piece, we've got this dark ring, obviously, and then these little spots where the veneer has lifted. It's bubbled a bit, but it's not just the veneer. The substrate underneath has actually lifted up, so I can't really fix that. So I'm just going to apply some oxalic acid, hope for the best on the dark stains, and we'll see where we're at. The other tabletop is the one with this chewed up edge. I applied a little bit of filler in there, and I'm just going to give this section here a little light sanding, and then we're going to apply some oxalic acid at the top of this, avoiding that area that was chewed up. I don't really have a lot of hope for these stains. I've been using oxalic acid a long time. I kind of know what it's going to work on and what it's not, but we're going to try it. But I do know for sure that I'm going to end up having to paint the bottom of these, because doing a paint wash on the entire thing is not really an option now. So I've got it down to these three colors. Oakum is a favorite. I've used it many times. It's always a top seller. Tapestry I've had for a long time, but I've never used it. And then this is a different line from Fusion. It's almost like a chalk paint. So Oakum is kind of a gray with a bit of brown in it. It's got some bronze undertones. Looks really nice with walnut usually. I always have a few viewers that complain about the greens and grays and browns, but you know, they are the top sellers. We paint those colors for a reason. Tapestry, a green twist to a classic beige. Sounds beautiful, but I don't think it's what I need for this piece. So it's kind of between those. And once I go to rinse off the oxalic acid, I can see that it's done pretty much nothing. It may have lightened it slightly, but just nowhere is near enough to keep these tops light like this. And same thing on the other one. It didn't budge that stain at all. So obviously I decided to go with the darker paint underneath. May as well make these kind of moody and sort of sophisticated looking. That's my goal rather than more of a farmhouse vibe, which would be like the walnut top and the light base. So I've got my first scratch coat on all of the pieces that are getting painted. And I'm going to turn my attention to these tops. Now, this is that section where there are a few bubbled ones. You can see I nicked the top of the veneer on one that was sticking up just a little bit. And yeah, there's a bit of a mess here. A lot of people would just paint them again. And honestly, I don't blame them. This is going to be kind of a lot of work for very little monetary gain. But I'm going to try. And also, like you can see, the two pieces are completely different grains and thus completely different colors. So there's a couple of things we need to do here. We need to camouflage the damage. And we need to try to get these two pieces closer together in color. A dye stain would be great for that. But because of the damage, I want to use the heavier pigment load of a gel stain. Dye stains are great for shifting the color, but they really allow the wood grain to show through. We don't necessarily want that so much here. We want some to show through, of course, but we need to hide that damage. Now, this isn't the end of the road here. Once this gel stain dries and I've touched up the damaged areas, we're going to go in and do some lacquers and toners to try to bring these even closer together. What's a little bit poetic about a flip like this where, you know, you're just trying your best is that the rabbit rescue that I help out with and I'm fundraising for with this flip is kind of the same thing. You know, you're taking in little souls that have had a rough start and you're just trying to make life better for them. And, you know, that's what I'm doing with this piece. So it kind of fits. Once my second coat of paint had completely dried, I went ahead and added some of my favorite Fusion beeswax finish. Now, Fusion has a really hardy built-in top coat. You don't necessarily need to do a top coat, but I really like this because you can see here it just changes the sheen slightly and deepens the color a little bit, which I love. So I really like using it. But as for the tops, we're going with a lacquer-based system. So first, I'm doing a few coats of Easy Vinyl Sealer. And this is just a base layer. This acts a little bit like a primer. And we're going to start with one coat of toner. And we're just going to assess. Now, the one on the left here has nothing yet. The one on the right has two coats of Easy Vinyl Sealer and the first coat of toner. And that one on the right was initially the lighter one. The one on the left still has a lot more red in it, so I'm going to have to probably account for that at some point. But the goal here is to make them both just as dark as this ring. I don't really want to go darker than that if I don't have to. So we're just going to go one coat of toner at a time, shift the color if I need to to a different toner, and see where we end up. Now, this looks incredibly orange because we're outside in the sun here. But inside, it's not as bad. This is the first coat of toner on this piece. And you can see that ring is starting to slowly fade away. Now, bringing it inside, you can see that we're getting close here. We've still got a little bit more red on the one on the left. So I'm going to switch my next coat of toner for the right one to have a little bit more red in it. We're going to keep the one on the left the same color toner we've been using, and hopefully this balances out. Now, as the finish builds, you can start to see those little areas that are raised. Again, there's nothing I can really do about that because the substrate, the pressed wood underneath, has bubbled up a bit. The best I can really do is just reseal it so that no more water gets down in there. We're getting really close here. I'm going to give this a nice light scuff sand, and then we're going to add some lacquer. And that should do it. Now, I didn't forget about the escutcheons. I ended up making some out of black limba wood. I used the laser to engrave some hairs on it. I thought that would be sort of a neat look with the more classical, you know, shape of these end tables. I'm going to finish assembling these while the laser is working behind me. I love having these in the shop. They're so useful for recreating parts. So once they come out, I'm just using a little bit of soap and water and then the fan to dry them off. And that's going to remove any of the residual sort of residues from the laser. And you can really tell how, you know, embossed they are as I'm pressing these into the paper towel to initially dry them off. It actually leaves an indent. I think that's so cool. I'm using a little bit of a dark wax here on the hardware to just kind of tone down the shine a little bit. I think this is going to suit it a lot better. And it's also going to allow these little wood plaques to kind of play off that color a bit. Now, I'm not 100% sold on the choice of wood here. I mean, it's a beautiful wood. I'm just not sure it really goes super well with the reddish and the walnut tops. But once I get a little bit of wax on them, they are going to darken up a little bit. And I just think they're super unique. Now, looking back at where I started, there will always be people that prefer this original look. It's really, really bright. You know, not something you normally see in an end table. But it's really going to limit who wants to purchase these in support of the rescue. And that's really the whole point here. Now, as far as the stains on the top, the ring is still there. You can still see it if you're looking for it. But I hope that I've camouflaged it enough. Thank you so much for watching. Enjoy the reveal. And I'm going to let our newest foster show these tables to you.