Removing tough paint from a trashed sideboard | Antique furniture restoration

Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. In this episode we are working on this very old sideboard buffet piece that I found on the Facebook marketplace. The overall condition was questionable. This drawer was completely chipped and cracked up and this detailed area was full of like mold and mildew. It was pretty gross and you can tell there was a ton of paint slapped on this thing over the years. The top had some damages throughout. The edges here were peeling up and you could see like chips in the top. I didn't know if it was paint or veneer. There's a bunch of wax on this side. It's like someone threw a burning candle at it. On the back, this piece said it was fumed, which is a process that uses ammonia that darkens the wood. It does like a chemical reaction with the tannins. Apparently it was popular in the early 1900s on oak furniture to highlight the grain. It's likely what's going to be under here. I guess we'll find out soon. Let's get started on this piece. We'll take out these drawers, which I thought were the grossest parts of this piece. You can tell this piece was left outside. There were dried up leaves on the inside. Let's take the old hardware off and begin our furniture restoration. Before I forget to mention, this video is part of the It's Literally Trash challenge in collaboration with a bunch of great creators. Make sure to check out the playlist link in the description below. You'll see a bunch of other creators videos similar to mine. Make sure to check them out. When working on a piece of furniture that's been painted many times over the years, you really want to use a lead test. This one's really easy. You just use vinegar and you swab it. Rub it for 30 seconds or so. It looks like we're in the clear. Now let's continue removing all the hardware. Weird hack. I took this little wax heating tool thing. It just heats up on the tip here. There's paint all over these screws. I just let it heat up and then just put it directly on the paint and just let the paint melt and chip off. It actually helped get the screws out. We got all the paint off and then the screws would start spinning. Interesting hack. Apply lots of pressure back here. This thing rotates here. Push as hard as you can. It helps get some of these screws out sometimes. There we go. I'm just going to quickly scrape this wax off. Whoops. Sorry, I smacked you guys. Let's try that again. I'm starting off trying to remove this paint with a paint stripper. This is Easy Strip. I'm just throwing paint stripper on all over this piece and making it pretty thick. We're going to let this sit overnight. I'm going to wrap them in plastic bags and some plastic film I picked up. We're going to see if this paint stripper will do anything to this paint. I just put it on like one minute ago and it's bubbling everywhere. At this point in time, I thought this paint stripper was going to work awesome. I was excited, but the top part was the only part that started bubbling. I was a little confused. I started scraping the top right away. I scraped away the Easy Paint removal on top, but there was that weird material underneath the paint, which could be an oil-based paint or something strange like that. I've dealt with it before on a piece a few years ago and it was not easy to remove. I had to use my carbide scraper. It was the end of my workday and I threw some more stripper on it and I wrapped it all up. Am I crazy? That is a lot of tape. I tried to seal this thing off. There's not that much paint stripper on it because I ran out. We'll see what happens tomorrow now with these guys all bagged up until tomorrow. It's officially the next morning. I'm going to check these out and see if the stripper dried up or not. Can you see on top here? It kind of bubbled up here. It's pretty dry, so I'm probably just going to have to throw on some more stripper for an hour or so. These ones should be pretty sealed in the garbage bags. This one I tried sealing my best with tape and plastic but it seems to dried up a bit. Let's take this plastic off and see what we're dealing with. When I started looking at the sides, I noticed that the paint stripper did nothing to bubble it at all. The paint was still rock hard. I was a little concerned here. I was wondering what was going on with this paint. The fronts of the cabinets were like the sides and the paint was rock hard still. The paint on the back of the cabinets came off a bit but it was still pretty challenging. The paint stripper was still wet and it should have activated it but it's likely due to the type of paint that's on this cabinet. Now let's look at these drawers that were on the inside. They were pretty disgusting because there was paint all over the insides and the outsides. So theory one, the stripper wasn't strong enough. Let's try this. That was at my nearby hardware store. It's basically just like liquid and it says five minutes acting so I just wanted to throw it on and see if we can get any bubbling in this paint. And after about 20 minutes it did absolutely nothing. After my strippers have failed me, I have moved on to mineral spirits and a just a 3M scrubbing pad and I just clean up all the stripper and the residue so we can move on to a carbide scraper. Typically on smaller pieces, a carbide scraper would be my first option over paint stripper. I just don't love paint stripper and the mess that it makes but on large pieces and detailed edges like this one, this piece has, I think the carbide scraper just would have been a lot of work. So I tried stripper, it failed and now I'm gonna have to work very hard with this carbide scraper so watch the process. It may look like I was scraping the paint off pretty easily but this is a very fast forward edition of the work I did. This was the hardest paint I've ever had to scrape off. I spent a couple days doing this just scraping paint so I appreciate you guys watching. I do it for you guys so make sure to hit the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and let's carry on with the video. This was the toughest part. It felt like I was scraping glass. It was very strange. So this hide scraper tool is pretty good. You can swap out the blade heads so I took off the teardrop head and put on this nice rounded tipped one. It worked pretty good for this part here. My arms were hurting at this point so I tried to find an alternative option to remove some of this paint on the detailed edges and this rotary tool worked out pretty good with this brush on the end. It's a wired brush. And now on to the cabinets and the drawers. Can't really tell but the front of the drawers were a lot harder to scrape than the back. It must have just been the type of paint that was used. I feel like this clip here you can kind of see my arm and wrist fatigue. These drawers were pretty nasty and warped and I'm going to take the bottom panels off here so let's take these drawers apart. This thing was really warped and had some mold on the back so it was pretty gross. Taking these apart was the best way to scrape and sand them. I don't know if you can tell but that's all paint and not wood so let's remove it all. This one had glue in it because the front chip in the drawer so I had to separate it and then remove it piece by piece. I thought these drawer bottom panels were disgusting. The ink, red paint, and white paint was just sticky and it was gross. Now let's do some sanding to clean this piece up. And I use pick tools to remove paint out of the corners and any areas that are just hard to get the paint out of. It helped out a lot. You may be wondering what I'm going to do with the paint on the inside and no I'm not removing it all because I do not want to spend multiple days removing it. So you'll see me clean it up later anyways. It'll look good. Then I sanded all the drawer sides and every piece just to clean it all up. Now it's time to fix this broken drawer piece. Let this dry until the next day. Now I'm using walnut wood filler to fill in the cracks. Now I'm sanding everything to make sure all the paint is gone and going up to 240 grit to make sure it's smooth for stain. Now I am just using a chisel and I'm just cutting out the area just to make it easier to add a new piece of veneer. You may be wondering why I'm using such a darker veneer. This is walnut veneer. It's just leftovers that I already have so I have plans to match it up later anyways so you'll see that soon. This area of the veneer was just coming off so I threw a ton of glue in there and clamped it all down. You can tell I did a handful of veneer patches. On the corners they were pretty beat up. Instead of veneer I just threw some walnut wood filler on them and kind of shaped it just around the edge. Now it's time to glue these drawers back together. Okay I'll let you know what I'm doing on the inside now. So I sanded where the paint meets the wood completely smooth with a high grit 400 and then I added my tape line and we are going to paint the inside of this completely black to make it look clean. I just did not want to remove all that paint. While I let coat number one dry I went around and removed all the paint I could see one last time just before we start staining this piece. Oh and I sanded the doors too and of course the door needed a veneer patch as well. Eventually I got to coat number two on the inside and that was the final coat as well and here's how it looks on the inside. And finally it's time to do our final sanding. I'm using this osculating tool just around the corners here and then I use 240 grit on my random orbital sander just to make everything nice and ready for stain. I realized the wood filler was super smooth so I took a utility knife and just added some wood grain. Here I quickly tested two stains. This is Kona by Varathane and this one was antique walnut by General Finishes. I liked Kona it was darker and kind of matched with the black and the wood grain so I used that one and wiped it on. I decided to spend some more time on this project and paint using the gel stain on the dovetail drawer sides. Also added some grain texture on the top wood filler as well. And finally I was ready to start staining. I take a tack cloth to remove all the dust on the top and we are ready to go. And here's the if anyone's interested. I tape over the paint just so the stain doesn't mess it up at all. Now I'm using mohawk blend old powder stains with some shellac and I just brush it on with a lighter color and then I wipe it off by hand just to try to match the color as best as possible. I also grabbed a black grain marker just to see if I can make it even match more with the grain. When you take a step back you really can't tell. Now I attempt to blend the broken drawer. Then I add some gel stain on top of it just to make it darker. Now it's time to make these drawers drawers again. I picked up some quarter inch ply and we are going to cut it up so we have the bottom panels in our drawers again because the old ones were gross and warped. It's finally time to seal this piece. I'm using varathane diamond wood finish water-based polyurethane and I'm just using a foam applicator sponge and I just wipe it on. You really want to do an end-to-end pass-through on the wet poly so it leaves a nice smooth finish. Before we can say this piece is finished I need to clean up these old cabinet hinges. I throw some paint stripper on them and I install some new hardware and also the old hardware on the smaller drawers I kept because they were awesome. Then I also picked up some new caster wheels and I installed them on the bottom because this piece already had caster wheel holes installed. Here I'm using barkeeper's friend but first I just scuff sand and clean off all the paint on the little lock pieces. Barkeeper's friend and water will scrub the dirt and grime off Then I used a wire brush and just scrubbed off all that old paint. I also used barkeeper's friend on the hinges as well. Now I'm just going to attach them. I just add a bit of glue on the backs of them put the nails back through the little holes and just hammer them in. Put the cabinet doors back on this piece and the ball catches on the bottom and we are finally completed. Before we can take a look at the after let's look at the before one more time just to see what we started with. Now finally what we've all been waiting for here is the after. Whenever you find a painted piece online you never really know what type of wood is going to be under it and this is one of my favorite ones yet. I have to say the wood is beautiful. This tiger oak pattern looks so good and right when we threw the stain on it just looked amazing and I knew it was going to look awesome so I'm happy with how this one turned out. Here's a few shots from different angles and here are the fresh drawers. I'm also going to add some Howard feed and wax wood polish and I have that ordered so I'll throw that on before I sell so I'll throw that on my Instagram so make sure to follow me there. I want to thank everyone for watching and if you enjoyed this video make sure to hit the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on my future videos and let me know what you think this piece is worth now after it has been restored. Thanks for watching and see you in the next one!