Rescuing a Victorian Chest of Drawers - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice Victorian chest of drawers. It's all solid walnut, probably from the latter part of the 19th century and it's still, it's never been refinished. This is the original finish and that's good. I think it can just be restored with some oil and wax and basically the whole cabinet is just falling apart. In fact, when it came in here the first thing I did was tape it together and now I'll carefully take the tape off and it also came with a lot of parts. A lot of these are interior parts. I do have this part goes down here. Basically, I've got to take it completely apart, put it back together again. You can see on the back here these light areas. So there used to be brackets that held an upper section. We do not have the upper section and here's some writing. Kind of difficult to read right now. We'll have to see if we can figure that out later. figure out, you know, what holds this together and I see that there's nails here. These are original. They're the old square cut nails going in this way and I also see nails this way. I think maybe I'm tapping this. Sometimes if you can get this to back out a little bit and then hit it back in, the nail will protrude enough so that you can get it. I'm kind of going this way hoping that this nail, might be the smaller nail, might bend and allow this to come apart. And that doesn't seem to be working too well but I can also just worry this thing. Worry it, worry it, trying to get something to give here. Starting to see this opening up a little bit here. That's just what I was hoping for and yeah you can see that these these nails that went in through the front bent over. The nails that were through the sides remain free floating. I don't want any glue to get on them. All right this is the other side. I've already noticed that there's a piece of wood missing. There should be a piece of wood right here that you know makes up the cheek for the other side of this tenon. So I've got to cut this out put a new piece of walnut in there. And I should be able to glue this new piece on while I'm gluing up the whole panel. So I've got both sides glued up now so we can glue up the entire case and I'm getting my cross pieces here and figuring out where they go. They're all marked and this is the second cross rail in the front and it's got a big chunk of wood missing. It's kind of odd but I've got to repair that before I do anything else. So while that carcass is drying I'll check out the drawers. Boy they seem remarkably tight. I think this this drawer is good and the drawer sides don't look terribly worn either. Now this drawer this must be the top drawer. The drawer sides here are badly worn. As much as I can I like to use the the old nails the same nails that I took out of here. Now this bottom board I'm not sure how it was attached. I think that I'm going to take these blocks off. These definitely aren't original and I think I'll glue this into place for what it's worth but then I'll add larger blocks underneath this. I remember now because I taped this nail and one of the ways that this back rail was held in place was they had a nail right through the outside of the cabinet. This is the same nail. I'll put it back where it was and if I don't have the original nail to use I have a pretty good collection of old nails and new nails that I buy from a company that's been making these nails since 1820. So it's with the same machine so it's even conceivable that these original nails could come from the same company from which I buy replacement nails. So now I've got to fit the drawer runners and drawer guides back where they belong. The ones that were here I marked. Others I'm able to determine where they went by matching up the the glue blocks. This is the molding that came across the front of the cabinet between the first and second drawers. It's all chewed up. I'm going to repair this with epoxy putty. Now as this hardens after just about three minutes here, maybe five minutes, you can start to shape it a little bit with a little bit of water on your knife. I think I'll leave the line until I try it out. So now I've got to sand my putty on this molding. This molding sanded up fine. It doesn't look like nearly as many teeth marks in it as before. There's some kind of strange adhesive on the back. It doesn't want to scrape off but I think heating it up will I'll be able to get it off. All right I'm going to brush a coat of shellac on this molding. All right while I'm waiting for a few things I've glued to dry, I've got to address the marble here. The marble's not in bad shape. I mean it's not cracked or anything. It is missing a chunk in this corner but it's basically just kind of dirty and so I'm just going to clean it. There's not really a lot you can do to marble. There's a lot of a lot of information online and things that you can do but basically all you really can do is clean it and then maybe I'll wax it. So I'm going to mix up a very mild solution of Dawn detergent with just a splash of bleach in it. Well this really did clean it well and really brightened it up. It's funny that first little rust mark when I hit it went away almost instantly. These marks and one over here unfortunately aren't going away instantly but we'll let this sit for a while. See what happens. Okay so I've still got this baseboard to glue on and I have a bunch of glue blocks. I've got to figure out where they go and I might make new make new blocks for the back of the bottom here. I've got these three nails I can line up in the same original nail holes there. All right the shellac on that molding has dried so I'll glue this down now and I also left you know some of these old nails here. I'll put them right back where they belong. Upside down like this is a great way to easily see where all the glue blocks need to be. A lot of glue blocks stayed in place during the disassembly and then reassembly but other places like these corners here you can see where there were glue blocks. On the bottom of the case here I've made four new corner blocks and I've made them big enough that they could accommodate casters should we decide to put casters back on. Wow that's the first time I've tried this drawer. Worked pretty well first time out. I don't think that's ever happened before. I'm going to wash this down now with a mild solution of Murphy's oil soap. I'll use a gray scotch brite pad and just try a small area first. Yeah I think it's doing a good job. Okay I've got a few things to do here. This top drawer is missing the escutcheon. I need to fit the drawers, make sure they work correctly, install drawer stops, and put the back on. I have this memory of buying wooden escutcheons a long time ago. There they are. Yeah that'll work fine. I made new drawer stops which are just blocks of wood. On this cabinet it's unusual the drawer stops are glued to the undersides of the rails. So this top drawer it's still got a lot of these scratching and bite marks in this corner which you know corresponds to this corner that I've already you can see I've already puttied up a lot of the tooth marks there. This is more scratching. There's some wood missing here. I think I'm just going to have to fill that with some wood putty. Okay the putty's dried for a couple hours. Now I'll sand with 150. You know I'm trying to do as little as possible to the to the surface of this piece of furniture but there's always something and in this case there was these really bad scratches here there's scratches across the front. Now this area was also badly chewed and I filled that and sanded it just with 150 and then 220. It seems to be retaining the same color. It looks good so I'm hoping that the drawer file will be the same. I'm not trying to get all these scratches completely gone. I'm hoping that when I recoat this they'll blend in. I'll be able to find four casters in here. I'm going to put some stain on the new wood these new blocks the new blocks and the new wood that I put in that rail there. I can see that that patch I did on the rail may need something stronger than an oil stain. I may have to hit it with dye stain. After sanding that top drawer so you know I sanded it with 150 because of all the defects. I sanded the other drawers too and now I'm just going over the whole piece just with 150 just real lightly just looking for any problems. I'm going to give it a coat of this satin tung oil varnish. It's an old-fashioned type varnish and this piece there's no way of knowing what was on it originally but you know it's like from 1865 1885 and may very well have had a similar oil varnish on it. All right this is dried overnight. You know I was really hoping just to give it one coat and then wax it but it has soaked in so much. I'm going to sand it with some 320 and give it another coat. Before I do that though I've got to stain some more new pieces little knits and stuff on it. I'll go over it with four zero steel wool and the orange oil beeswax polish. Okay now I've got to install the back. It's funny when I took this back off I thought there was a piece missing but some of these boards were split. Now that I've glued them back together and put them in here I can see that it wasn't a board missing. These two boards overlap each other. They don't have a strip like this between them. Well there we have it. This is a nice little Victorian cabinet. The owner's grandparents brought it over from Ireland. We think 1865 to 1885 although I think probably the latter. This hardware is an Eastlake design which is the 1880s and I've ordered a new piece of hardware very similar that hasn't come yet. I apologize for that but if you remember what this looked like when it came in it was just completely falling apart held together by tape. I rebuilt it. I really like doing a minimal restoration like this where I just cleaned it and recolored it with a couple coats of tung oil varnish. I think it looks pretty good.