Repairing a Toy Chest - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice old box. It's just that, just a box. The owner's grandfather built it and probably as a utility box of some sort, but as a child it was used as a toy box and so we're going to call it a toy box. And the main thing that's happened here is that the hinges broke off, the back board broke off where the hinges attach. So that's what's got to be repaired and it looks like it's been maybe kept in a basement for a while and so it really needs to be cleaned inside now. It's got what looks like might be some mold issues on this side. I'll be mixing up paint to do the touch-ups in the back after I've repaired it and I'm a little unsure what we're going to do about the paint. I'll do the repairs, mix up paint to touch that up and see if we do anything else to the front of it. But it basically needs to be cleaned inside now. So I got some paint from the hardware store. It's not the exact right color. I'm going to have to adjust it, but in the meantime this evening I'm going to put some paint on the, you know, just the first coat to get this sealed. I'll have to fool around with the paint more tomorrow. All right, the paint has dried overnight. I'm going to sand it and let's see if we can match, get a better color. So this is acrylic interior house paint and I have acrylic colors and I'm going to see if I can bring it closer to what we see on the back here. I'll try some black. That seems the most obvious choice. Getting there. More black and I think I'll put raw umber in also. I think I better transfer to a larger container here. I'm going to put some paint back into the smaller container, just a little bit, and I'm going to mix my umber in that. I think I'm really good. I won't really know till I paint some on and let it dry. I'll let that dry. All right, this is dried. I think it looks good. The color's good. I'm kind of wondering if it's not a little bit too dark but it's darker down here. This is the worst side. I'm going to paint this and see what it looks like. I'm just going to give it a quick sanding. I'm not trying to get rid of defects. In fact, I want to leave all the defects in the paint. I'm knocking off the loose stuff. I'm even going to wipe this off with a damp cloth and then I'll paint it. Now see, I could kind of wipe the paint off, some too, but I wanted that look. I actually kind of like that. I'm really liking this, the way it looks, how all the defects look. It comes across as not being as dark as the back but I can always just darken up this edge a little bit, transition a little bit better. The thing I like, I like this. I don't know if the customer's going to like it or not but I can always put more paint on. In fact, eventually, if I wanted less, I could scrub off less too but I'm kind of liking this a lot. Of course, I've got to go over the back to get all these raw wood painted too. The back and the other side definitely have more paint on them but I'm going to do it like this. I can always paint it again if we decide to. I like this. Okay, I need to just clean the sawdust out of the interior. I need to stain my new wood back here and attach the lid. This is why we save old screws. Now I want to add a chain to this lid to keep it from falling all the way back which is probably why it broke. I saw some indication that there used to be something on here. That should do it. So here we have it, this nice antique box. I say antique, we don't really know how old it is. The owner's grandfather made it. The kids used it as a toy box, hence the sentimental value of grandpa's toy box. It came out of the basement. We got it cleaned up. I ragged this paint on. We're not sure if that's the final finish or not. We have to figure a way for the owner to come in here and we're going to discuss this and see exactly what we want it to be. It looks great now. It's nice and clean. I added a chain. I think it looks pretty good.