Restoring an Art Deco Nightstand // Vintage Side Table Restoration

Hey there! I'm Sami and welcome back to my channel. In this week's video, I'll be restoring an Art Deco nightstand, so join me in this journey of bringing this piece back to life. I hope you really enjoy this video and without further ado, let's jump into it. This is the Art Deco nightstand that we are starting off with. I could tell by looking at this that this piece had a lot of potential, but as you can see, she was very dusty, lots of cobwebs, and really needed to be brought back to life. It had one door on the bottom in a storage compartment and then a drawer up above. This thing had some very good bones and just needed a little more tension. It has dovetail drawers and overall in decent shape. The top wasn't too damaged. There were some watermarks on it and just needed to be refinished. All right, I moved this into the garage because it was starting to sprinkle, but I still want to work on this piece, so we're going to try and do that with the lighting that we have. And first things first, I'm going to go ahead and remove this hardware and set it aside because I'm just not sure. I know one of them is missing a piece, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet, so we'll save them. While I was removing the hardware, I had an unexpected inspection and this was a close call, but we did end up passing. Next, because this piece is so dirty, I'm going to go in with my vacuum and give everything a quick vacuum to collect all of the dust before we go in and clean it. Then I'm going to go ahead and remove these hinges as well so I can take the door off. It'll just make things a little bit easier. It'll make the door easier to sand and then we can restore the hinges as well. Okay, we've got the door removed, hardware removed, we've vacuumed all of the dust and cobwebs away, so now I'm going to go in with my Simple Green and give this a very thorough cleaning before we go ahead and sand. We're going to jump right into sanding. I'm going in first with my orbital sander. I'm going to cover all the surfaces that I can, which is like all the flat surfaces, with my orbital sander because it's just a lot more powerful. It can remove much more than my Festool sander. That's more for detailed areas, which we will use later on, like on these rounded edges, and hopefully that will remove the majority of this old finish. But first, we're going to start with our random orbital sander with a 120 grit sandpaper. I've been getting a lot of questions asking how you can support me and my channel, and I've now added the feature where you can buy me a coffee. This is one way where you can show your support that allows me to keep creating content for you guys to enjoy. And just so you anytime I get my coffee, Melino does get his pop cup. If you are interested, this will be linked down in the description where you can check it out for yourself. Now I have switched to my Festool sander, and I'm going to go over all of the rounded, kind of more difficult to reach areas with this, and hopefully I'm able to remove all that old finish. And I'm using two different pads. So I have a thinner one that I'll probably use more for just the larger rounded areas, and then the larger, thicker pad will be better to get in these more detailed areas without damaging them. So I'm going to go in with these. I'm still using a 120 grit sandpaper, and I'm going to try and remove all of this old finish to multitask. If this is not top level multitasking, I'm not really sure what is. So my Festool sander did great work at removing the finish on all these rounded and grooved areas, but I wasn't able to get into the really tight grooves right here, which is kind of what I suspected. So I'm going to go ahead and hand sand that really quickly. I say quickly, but I don't think it's going to take that long. This finish comes off really easily, and I'm still using a 120 grit sandpaper and my gloves as always. All right, it is the next day. I did a lot of sanding yesterday. The majority of it is done, but we're going to wrap this project up today. And before I finish up on the sanding, I'm going to go ahead and fill all the areas that need to be filled. Some of the veneer is missing. There's just some nicks in the wood, and do not come at me for this, but I'm filling the hardware holes because I decided I needed different hardware. It's just not salvageable for me at this point, but I did find some really cool hardware, so just wait till the end to see that. But I couldn't find hardware that was the same dimensions as these holes are, so I'm going to fill them. They're just slightly bigger. It will get covered and we'll color match it at the end. This epoxy putty is also colored, so you won't be able to tell. Don't worry. So we're going to get started mixing some of this putty and getting these areas filled. This stuff really, I just, it really stinks. You know, why does it have to have such a stinky smell? It's really nifty to use though. It's very easy to use. So it comes in a tube like this. The hardener is in the center and the putty is in the outside. And essentially, you mix this together until it is well kneaded and one color, and then you apply it to whatever area you need it to. And it will harden within about 15 minutes or so, similar to bondo, and it gets just as hard. So if you have areas like this that need to be more color matched than others, then this is definitely what you want to go for. And they have all sorts of different wood tones that you can buy this in. All right, I'm going to switch this up and see what I can take off with this detailed Ryobi sander, because some of these curves in the front here are just so tight that it's very annoying to hand sand. So we're going to see what I can do with this. I also went in and sanded the inside of the nightstand with my vestral sander. All right, now that we have everything sanded, finally, I'm going to go in with a 220 grit sandpaper over everything. So one, we can prep the surface for whatever stain we're going to use, and two, remove any excess filling that we have on the drawer front and door. Then I grabbed my 220 grit sanding pad, and this just made it easier to get in those tiny grooved areas and smooth those over. Then I grabbed my air compressor to blow everything off and remove a majority of that dust before going in with a wet cloth and wiping everything down. This is going to help ensure that we collect all of the dust off of the surface before we go in and stain it. At this point, I was so impressed with this wood grain, and I was getting so excited to finish this piece. All right, everything is sanded, dusted, clean. Now we are ready for stain. So we've got a lot going on here with different types of wood, wood grains, wood tones. It's just kind of chaotic. So what I'm going to go with first is early American wood stain, and I'm going to do this all over the base and see where that gets me. If I'm really uneven still, I may go in with a gel stain, but I want to see where this gets us first, and then we might do something different is definitely not dark enough for me on the base of this nightstand, so I'm going in with a mahogany gel stain over top of that, and I may touch up some other areas as well. You'll come to notice a lot of art deco pieces of furniture will be a mixture of different types of wood. Like you see here, the edges are a little bit lighter than the center. The door and the drawer face are a little bit of a different type of wood. That's your typical art deco wood, but they're just different all over this piece, and so when you're restoring it, that's something that you have to work with. And so I'm using this darker stain to kind of blend it all and make it have a more uniform look. This is the new hardware I picked up, and I think it is just absolutely beautiful compared to the before. I think it's gonna look great. So I went ahead and measured out my new holes because these were just a smidge larger than the previous ones. I measured the center, and then I used this super cool drawer hole guide and made my marks for my holes, and then drilled those with my drill bit, and everything was good to go. And then I went ahead and reattached the door hinges. All right, so before I can go ahead and seal everything off, there's a few areas on the front of the drawer that need to be touched up. I'm going to do that with my Varathane touch-up pens. These are amazing. They're like no mess. It takes just a few seconds to touch things up. I love using my paints as well, but I think these will work just fine in this situation. So we'll touch these up really quickly, and then everything will be ready to be sealed. And then it was time to get a top coat on this nightstand. Here I'm using a polyurethane in a satin finish, and I put that in my sprayer so I would get a nice even finish. Then it was time to do the finishing touches. Number one, that was getting the hardware put back on. All right, lastly, we are going to go in with some beeswax polish finish to go inside the door here and inside the drawer, as well as the drawer glides, so it glides in and out super easily. Then it was time for staging, and I added just a few items here. And just to give you a look what it looked like when we started so that we can really appreciate what we're ending with. Thank you all so much for watching. I hope that you've really enjoyed this video. As always, I will leave a profit breakdown in the description below, as well as a list of the tools that I used to restore this piece. Don't forget to hit that thumbs up button so I know that you liked this video, and leave me some comments letting me know how you think this turned out. But as for now, I'll see you in the next video. Bye!