When a "Quick Flip" Goes Wrong: Frustrating Side Table Makeover

Charity has always been a big part of my life. From donating paintings to animal shelters, giving away pet portraits, doing tattoo fundraisers, raffles on furniture, it just feels good to give back. I wanted to create this charity challenge to support and encourage other fantastic furniture friends on YouTube to give back in a way that best addresses a need in their area of the world. I felt it would be a nice playlist of all talented furniture friends giving back in some way in a heartwarming and collective playlist for you to watch. So grab your snacks and cuddle up on the couch, this should be a fantastic playlist that is good for the heart. I'll link the playlist below and also at the end of this video. Now let's get on to my transformation. Around here single side tables are really hard to sell but I still saw potential in this mid-century piece. Little did I know that this little tiny table would nearly bring me to my knees and there were a lot of four-letter words being spewed around in the garage while I was working on this. I'm both excited and hesitant to show you what happened, stay tuned. My name is Angie and I refinish furniture. Sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom. So I chose this little table for this specific video because I thought it would be a quick and easy way to show you guys how to refinish a table. This is composed of veneer, pressed wood, and solid wood. There's veneer here on the front and these edge trim pieces are solid wood and the top here itself has a lot of finish issues. The legs are solid wood and the shelf is solid wood with veneer on both sides. This is a little Canadian made mid-century style table and it's typical of what I normally would work on. I have to partially disassemble this so I'm removing the shelf and I'm removing the legs from the top. I have to be careful taking the shelf off here and I'm just going to lightly tap it up. Now you're going to see a little area where the shelf used to sit. The wood is not damaged there, there's just no finish because this would have been assembled and sprayed at the factory so where the shelf's at you don't see any finish. Now this is pretty typical of a finish that I would like to scrape. Generally I'll give it a go and if it's too thick and it's just not working I will switch to a chemical stripper but I like scraping, being careful around the edges of course. And within the first pull of my carbide scraper I realized this is not going to work so I'm switching to my favorite chemical stripper. Circa 1850 is the best stripper that I've ever tried. I know in different parts of the world there's different brands and I get often asked what I would recommend in place of this and to be honest I haven't tried other strippers other than what is available in Canada. I can only go by what other people say on Facebook groups but I haven't tried those products for myself. Circa 1850 is a methylene chloride free stripper. It doesn't require neutralizing like some other strippers do so that's a time saver. And in terms of disposal, which is another question I get asked a lot, the bylaws here state that if the stripper is wet it needs to go to a hazardous waste depot but if it has dried out it can actually just be thrown out. If you've never used a chemical stripper before you might be watching this thinking oh that's coming off nicely. It's not. Very little is actually coming up and that's not typical for the stripper. It's a pretty good stripper. One thing that's super weird too is that it's turning it from a gel into a liquid. You can see that liquid running. That's only happened to me a handful of times and it's only on specific finishes. I don't know exactly what the finish is. Normally these are just lacquer but it's not behaving in a typical lacquer way during stripping. So the chemical stripper didn't do much the first time around so I thought I'd switch back to scraping because sometimes the stripper will soften the finish enough that you can scrape it. And it looks like it's working. Look at all this stuff I'm getting off. That's just top coat. I'm still nowhere near the raw wood of the veneer yet. So I'm going in with another coat of stripper hoping to get through those layers. I'm going to leave it on a little bit longer this time. Going back in you can see that basically the same thing is happening. There's just very little coming off. And again I'm going in with a scraper and trying to get a little bit more off and it's still just... it's not coming. I don't know what this finish is. It's gotta be some sort of varnish or possibly like an epoxy coating that someone put on it at some point in time. I don't know. I even switched to a card scraper which barely put a dent in it. No pun intended. I'm opting now to try something that I don't normally do except in certain situations and that is try to sand off a thick finish. I have no problem sanding off finishes that are failing or flaky and you know not very intact but on veneer it's generally not a great idea to try to sand through a thick finish but I'm running out of options here. You can see the 150 grit which is what I normally would start with is hardly doing anything. So then I move to an 80 grit which is a little bit harsh for a veneer but again you can see it's just barely even touching this. Switching back to the scraper now. This is the point where I started to throw some not so favorable words around. I'm really glad that I don't record shop sounds in my videos. At this point I started to think well maybe my scraper needs to be sharpened again and there are some that say you can't really sharpen a carbide scraper. I've done it many times. I'm still using the same blade that came with my scraper well over a year ago and you guys know I scrape a lot. There's different ways to do it. You can use a file. I have another video where I have used files. Generally when I try to do a really good sharpening I use these waterstones varying grits and normally after sharpening like in this clip here you see I get a nice wide scraping path but here nothing. It's no better which means it probably wasn't built to begin with and yeah. So I'm really putting some gusto into this now. Using a scraper is not hard. I know a lot of beginners are afraid of it because they're worried about gouging the wood which you definitely can do but once you get the hang of the angle and the motion and the speed you can put a lot of pressure without gouging anything. Here I'm giving as much downward pressure as I possibly can and I finally got that off and I'm able to start sanding. The problem with the trim pieces around the edges is that they're curved so I can't scrape them because you always want to scrape along the grain and I can't scrape a curved surface with a flat blade on. So I'm going back in with that 80 grit and it's actually coming off a lot easier on the trim than it was on that centerpiece so whatever finish was on that middle section I don't know but I never want to do it again. No exaggeration it took me over three hours to get this top stripped and sanded. Had this behaved like a normal lacquered tabletop I would have had this done stripped and sanded within an hour I would say at the very most. So now that all the old finish is off and we're having a good look here you can see the different tones of the wood. These side pieces are walnut but some are sapwood some is heartwood so there's different colors. We've got different colors of the veneer and this shelf is interesting because it's walnut veneer on the top part the bottom is just whatever and it's solid wood in the middle but it's not walnut. So we've got multiple colors here that I'm gonna have to try to deal with. Thankfully though all of the staining came out of the top. The issue with the top there was one corner where everything was very chipped and the pressed wood substrate had swollen a bit. There's no way to deswell that for lack of a better term. So my only option here was to try to sand it flat. So to do that I had to sand down through the walnut veneer through the substrate veneer and into that pressed wood to get it completely smooth and flat. A straight up veneer patch was not an option in this specific situation. Then what I have to do is seal that and I'm just sectioning it off here. I'm going to put a couple of coats of vinyl sealer on there and then I have to try to paint on new wood grain which is never fun over pressed wood but I've done it before. So when I take the tape off there's going to be kind of a box around here. I'm going to soften the edges of the vinyl sealer with a light sanding and then I'm actually going to apply vinyl sealer to the whole piece. The reason I sectioned it off is I just wanted that area to have a couple of more layers of vinyl sealer versus the rest of it. And actually as I'm adding the vinyl sealer here you can really see all the different wood tones and it doesn't look that great. There are some instances where variation in the wood is actually desirable. This is not one of them. So there's multiple ways you can cover up damage like this. You can use acrylic paints. Lately I've been using these pigments. These are Mr. Cornwall's Creative Colors. It's part of the Odie's Oil brand and sometimes I'll mix this up with some Odie's Super Solvent and sometimes I will suspend the pigment in Easy Vinyl Sealer and that's what I'm opting to do here. I'm using four different colors. I'm using titanium white, yellow, walnut, and espresso. Now when you're doing this you can definitely mimic wood grain. You can get different tones. What you can't really recreate is chatoyance of wood. So when you're holding a board and you're moving it you know side to side and you see it almost looks like the wood is shimmering. You can't recreate that with paint. So that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm gonna have to use toners on this anyway but we might have to go a little bit darker than anticipated initially to hide this damage. Now this is not ideal and it's not at all what I initially pictured for this table. I pictured using Odie's Oil on the whole thing but that was having the whole thing stripped down to bare wood and that isn't happening because like I said I'm not spending four days stripping the base to match everything. Instead I'll be trying to get the top and the shelf to match the base. Basically I'm just working this up with multiple layers, multiple colors. I'm going to go in with some graining markers and try to put some faux grain in. And once I have it at a point where I'm satisfied with it I'm going to go and reseal it and then I'm going to add some toner. The finish on the base was actually in pretty good shape aside from some dirt and a few small marks here and there. The only reason I was initially considering stripping the base was so that I could do it all and make sure it was all one cohesive color but it's a lot of work for a single side table to do this when really just with a little bit of toner you can get a pretty close match. The edges of the lower shelf that were exposed wood that wasn't walnut I went in with some Ceman water-based stain in the color Antique Walnut and finally I was able to seal everything with Mohawk pre-catalyzed lacquer. I get asked quite a bit why I use aerosol instead of spraying with a pneumatic tool and the main reason is I work on such small pieces that the setup to do that would just it would take so long when I could actually just be done. So unless I'm doing a big like huge dining table or something where I need to lay down the lacquer a lot faster because I don't have a permanent spray setup this just works better for me. Time to finally retire the old gray blanket and red's not my first choice but these shipping blankets were quite cheap at Princess Otto and they're the exact size I need for this so red it is. Putting this all back together overall it turned out okay it's not quite what I was anticipating. I had a really hard time with this table which makes no sense because if you've been following my channel I deal with a lot of hard cases and I've never had to finish that stubborn before. Am I happy with the results? I'm happy enough um but no this is not one of my favorite pieces for sure. I am glad that it will remain in use instead of getting tossed which is where it was headed. Someone will definitely be able to use this and it will raise some money for an important charity here in town. In addition to donating this little piece if you remember from my last video that art deco vanity I decided to actually donate that as well to Ten Thousand Carats Rabbit Rescue so we are going to be raffling that off. Well I hope you enjoyed watching me squirm my way through this super simple yet very complicated little furniture flip. Make sure to check out the playlist below so you can watch everyone else's. Mine's not going to be obviously for multiple reasons in the running to be a winner of this challenge but everyone else's fair game so make sure you watch, like, and comment on the videos and everybody wins. Much love as always and I will see you next time with a new video.