How to Refinish Old Furniture

My mother bought a sideboard when I was a boy. It was covered in layers of paint... green, white and yellow, to be exact. She liked the way it was built and thought it might be old. We discovered later it was built in 1899! The first thing she did was dismantle it, taking the back section (with the lead mirror) off and separating it from the side braces and shelves. Slowly, painstakingly, she used paint stripper and a scraper to remove the old paint from each piece. It took weeks for her to finish stripping the old sideboard. The shelves had beveled edges and one of them was hopelessly stained with black ink. She turned both shelves upside down to solve the problem! The old hardware was damaged so she bought new handles from the hardware store (antique-looking metal handles to keep the sideboard looking its age). With a little sanding and some varnish, it became a treasure that in still in our family.

Remembering her success with the antique sideboard, I bought a desk many years later. It was painted over in both black and white and looked really ugly. The wife thought I was crazy to buy it. We pulled the drawers out and used paint stripper and scrapers to clean up the first few layers. The top was scarred by many years of rough use, its edges badly damaged. I borrowed a book on antique furniture from a friend of mine and discovered that the desk style was popular around 1920! We decided it was worth repairing. From the local lumber yard, I got a piece of thin veneer cut exactly to the size of the damaged top and we used Elmer's Glue to secure it in place rather than trying to nail it. The stripper worked pretty well, but there were gouges all over the drawers, sides and legs. The old layers of paint filled many of the deep gouges, so we had to dig it out, making some of them even bigger. Wood spackle comes in several different brands and all works about the same. We filled the cuts and gouges with wood spackle and sanded them smooth. Then we used Minwax to darken the wood to a rich brown and give it a gloss. We replaced the broken hardware with brass (like my mom had done on her sideboard) and it didn't even look like the same desk. I had paid $25.00 to buy it and sold it for $250. when we were done!

My daughter and son-in-law gave us an old coffee table recently. It's pretty rough, having been on their porch for several years. Next week the wife is going to restore it. It was probably built in the late 60's or early 70's and is still quite sturdy (all wood.) She's already taken the old handle off the drawer under the table and will replace it with a shiny new one when the restoration is finished. She'll use find grained sandpaper to remove the old varnish and layers of time. Fortunately, there are no cuts, burns or gouges on the coffee table so it should be pretty easy. Then with a medium sized paint brush, she'll apply a coat or two of Minwax and it should look like new! She gets all the easy ones!