Pine Hall Table Makeover Inspired by... a BUNNY?? Adorable Furniture Makeover

Welcome back everybody. In today's video I'm going to be taking this hall table, sofa table, whatever it is, and flipping this for the bunnies. Now what I mean by that is every now and then I take a piece of furniture and do a transformation on it and then we raffle tickets to benefit the rabbit rescue that I help with and foster for. I picked this specifically because it's small enough that most people could find a spot for it in their home. Sometimes big pieces don't bring in the best amount of revenue for the bunnies because it's just hard to find a spot for so this is perfect. This thing does need a lot of work though. There are a ton of scratches and marks on it. It's got a bit of a country flair to it which is not typically my jam but I'm going to be doing a pretty significant makeover on this. In this video you're going to see several iterations I go through this piece as problems come up but before I get into that we need to get this old cruddy finish off so 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 first things first I'm using my favorite stripper which as you know is circa 1850. It's the strongest one that I've found that is available commercially like anybody can go and buy it but I'm in Canada where you are there may be different options. Now some people looking at this might assume that this is just stained but it's a combination of a thick goopy finish so this is going to take a little while to get everything off. You can see already the color from that top layer is starting to drip down and that is because this piece which is said is pine was first treated with a dye stain and then covered in several coats of some sort of lacquer with a toner finish and what the toner does is kind of make everything a similar color. It kind of minimizes the contrast between the different colors of the wood. These especially on pine are notorious for being difficult to strip off so a lot of people choose to sand them. Let me just warn you though you want to be careful when you're sanding some of these because you might think it's solid pine but it isn't always. This side panel for example is actually a pretty thin pine veneer over pressed to it. Everything else on this piece is actual solid pine so just make sure you know what you're dealing with before you start sanding. These spindle legs are the bane of my existence. I hate doing chairs for this exact reason but what makes this even more complicated is the fact that these were treated with a dye stain before any finish came on so what I'm doing right now is removing all of the finish but as you'll see there is a lot of dye that remains in that wood. So what I mean by dye stain when you think of a typical stain that you go to the hardware store and buy most often that is going to be a pigment stain and it comes in the form of a penetrating stain or a gel stain usually. Both of these sit a little bit higher in the wood than a dye stain does even the penetrating stain which obviously penetrates a little bit deeper but it's not quite the same as a dye stain. Manufacturers love dye stains because it allows you to color the wood without obscuring the grain. Pigment stains by nature of their makeup will obscure the grain somewhat and it's especially noticeable on highly figured woods like bird's eye maple, quilted maple, anything with a really strong figure and contrast but the dye stains don't hide that so that's why they choose to use them. The problem with something like this especially on these turned knobby legs is that the front flat pieces are face grain but as those knobby bits curve up we move into end grain and that dye stain just soaks right in so that's why you're seeing me use a bunch of different tools. I've got a scrub brush I'm using, a blade here, some steel wool rolled up, anything I can do to try to get in and get as much of this crap out as possible. The problem is technically stripper doesn't really remove dye stain just finished so you're going to see me struggle a little bit with these legs. So when I first picked this piece for this particular project I pictured this being very light. I wanted to get all of this old dark finish off and sand it down. I'm not a big fan of the natural color of pine but I was considering doing like a white wash or a tan wash or pickling it or doing some sort of white or very light stain on it and pretty much up to this point that was the plan but things are going to change here once you see the rest of this finish come off. Now you can see that I didn't get all of the finish off but I got the majority of it to a point where it would be much easier to sand and like I said I could have sanded through this finish but it would have taken quite a while. It is pretty thick. This is just a better shot of that one side panel that I said was press wood. Everything else is solid pine. I don't know why they didn't do it here. I don't know if it's for stability which is normally why they use that stuff but yeah everything else is solid pine even this base. I am rethinking my life choices with this piece. These are taking bloody forever to sand off and I'm still not able to get all of it so I'm really wishing that I had decided to paint this piece instead. From afar these might not look that bad but there's six of these legs and each leg is taking me oh my gosh probably over an hour trying to get the rest of that dye stain out from the end grain. So I have this piece of sandpaper that I cut into strips and I'm trying to do it that way and it is helping but I'm having to sand across the grain which is not ideal either so I'm going to have to sand this again with a finer grit to then try to smooth out these ridges and scratches that I'm creating trying to get the dye stain out of this. There are other tools that you can use for this I know there is this thing that attaches to a drill or yeah I think it attaches to a drill and it's supposed to help get into these cracks a little bit but I don't have one of those so here we are. At this point this has been a few days working on this piece which if I was painting it would have been done within the first day so starting to feel a little bit frazzled but I just keep reminding myself this is for a good cause this is for charity just keep going. Time for my second sanding on the top you can see after I removed the rest of the finish there's still a lot of marks and scratches. I don't like to use my most aggressive grit sandpaper to try to get those out. I'll get off as much of the old finish as I can or that is left and just try to make sure everything is nice and smooth and then with my subsequent grits so as I move up in grit each pass is going to take off a little bit more of those marks. When you're sanding you're creating scratches in the grain so if you're trying to get all of those marks out with your most coarse grit even if you're moving up in grit the scratches you've made by trying to dig out those little marks um it's really hard to recover from that so that's my sanding tip for you. Now of course these pulls also have to be a pain in the a** because one of them is broken and they're very specific size between the holes so that's a bummer because I don't have any replacements that are going to fit. Hindsight is 20 20 and looking back now I should not have removed these plugs. I don't like the look of these plugs. I can't stand it and these aren't actually covering any screw holes which is normally the purpose of them. They are purely decorative and I chose to take them off. I figured it would be easier for sanding and finishing these drawers and I was just going to fill them but that turned out to be a mistake. But the plugs aside I also need to sand the entire interior and exterior of these drawers. They're bad. So why am I doing this if it's so frustrating? This is Fozzie. He's one of our bunnies who used to be a foster and this is Jack. Jack had a brother named Reno and that's Reno over there. Reno and Jack are our fosters currently and Reno was adopted a while back but it didn't work out so he came back to us. Not long ago I took Jack to a bunny meet and greet which is where prospective adopters come and meet all the bunnies and kind of see who they click with. Unfortunately Jack wasn't chosen. He's a very handsome boy but he's super skittish compared to some of the other bunnies. So Jack and Reno are going to be with us I think for a while longer. They've already been with us for two years. I do a lot for the bunnies. I love making things for them to sell and raffle. I used to do tattoo fundraisers for them but now I do furniture flips. So a couple of times a year I'll pick a piece and then stage it with the bunnies and like I said we raffle tickets. This little girl is Puff and Puff is actually the inspiration for this piece at this point because I've had to kind of change my game plan. I mentioned I removed the plugs from these drawers and I love how much smoother it looks but it's gonna be a pain trying to hide these filled holes with stain even for me and I say that because I'm usually pretty good at disguising those things but on this piece it's just not great. I actually went out and bought some decorative tacks to put there in the place of the plugs but I don't know if I'm gonna use them yet. We'll see how it goes. So when I say the bunny is the inspiration between the dye stain and some of the marks that remain on the table and trying to cover these plugs I've decided that instead of light I'm gonna have to go dark and I'm using the colors of Puff as inspiration. So I mentioned areas on the knobby legs where the end grain shows and just soaks up that dye stain but the same thing happens on the drawers here where it starts to curve up. It's exposing a different layer of the wood and that's why the corners are super dark and everything else sanded quite nicely. I tried to sand this by hand. I tried scraping it. I tried everything. Finally I gave the Dremel a try and it did work a bit but just not quite enough. Now I don't have to sand down and clean up the underside of the drawer but it's just something I like to do. You can actually see where the overspray from that dye stain came through the backside and stained the bottom of the drawer. I'm also not going to be re-staining the drawers but I am going to reseal them at the end. So quick look back at what I started with. Don't worry we're not at the end of the video yet but I just want to remind you of what this looked like initially. So my plan like I said was to keep this all light. Once I had everything sanded as much as I could really there's still so many marks and stains. Oxalic acid would take out some of these more organic stains but it's not going to do anything for the dye stains and those have settled into areas usually around the knots or in the end grain. That's where the worst of it is. On the drawers here it's quite pronounced. I'm still kicking myself for filling those holes. I should have just left those stupid plugs on it. Even on the bottom here there's a lot of old scratches and dings. So I mean I could put a paint wash over this but the likelihood of all of this stuff showing through is pretty high. So as much as it kills me I am going to be adding some more aniline dye stain to this piece after working so hard to get it all off. I'm opting to use a dye stain because it's water-based. It's easy to control how opaque or translucent it is and it's not going to obscure the wood grain in the same way a different stain would. Now I'm going to be doing a layered process. I'm going to be adding a dye stain to the whole piece and then I'm actually going to be putting a black water-based stain over part of the piece that's over top of the brown and then wiping it back so that the brown shows through a little bit. And again this is totally based on my rabbit puff. I've never done anything quite like this. I have no idea if this is going to look good or not but that's what we're going to do. So dye stain is super runny and as soon as it touches the wood that is it. So that is why I'm masking off the base here. You're going to see immediately how runny this is. This also goes on differently than a normal stain. You have to work exceptionally fast. A lot of people will choose to spray it. I don't have the setup for that and I don't want to deal with dye stain overspray in my workroom. So I'm putting this on as quickly as possible. You can actually see at the top of the leg there it's already starting to pull that liquid upwards. If I were to just move on to another leg and then come back to this and do that top section where it has soaked up on the bottom would show through because technically it would be acting like a second layer of stain over that area. So when you're using this stuff you want to keep a wet edge at all times and just work as quickly as you can. There's no smell to it. Like I said it's water-based and as it dries it's going to look really pale and kind of dull and it's only once you put your finish on that it really comes back to life. So small areas aren't a big deal but trying to put dye stain on a large table without a sprayer is quite difficult. I'm working as quickly as I can here trying to keep all the edges wet which means I'm shuffling around and just hoping I don't mess this part up. So you can see even in just this short time how much the color of the legs has kind of toned down and gotten dull. You can also see again where that end grain is on those knobby bits how much more the dye stain has soaked in. So as if I haven't been riddled with enough problems with this thing this is the SD card I was using to film one day and my camera shut off in the middle. I assumed it was a dead battery but what actually happened is my card malfunctioned and I lost this one clip and it wasn't imperative footage really but there is going to be a little bit of a gap for you guys. This is actually the clip that I was working on when it shut off. I got that open and then it just died so this next clip you see is me after having already put the black stain on. So this is a Minwax water-based stain. I believe the color is called True Black and I'm wiping it back as far as I can until I can start to see the wood grain underneath and you can't really tell here because it's still drying but when I put the finish on you're going to see a little bit of that brown come through from the dye stain. So I'm only going to be bringing the black down to where it meets the legs. This top section and the two drawers will be that darker stain. The dye stain part looks super light right now but once I put my vinyl sealer on it and a little bit of toner and I'm using the toner to kind of minimize the contrast between the dark areas and the light areas and get the lacquer top coat on, all of this is going to melt together a lot better. Right now it looks kind of clashy and very very dull and that is pretty typical of a water-based stain until you get your finish on it. So I knew because of how runny the dye stain was that there would be a little bit of seepage under the tape. Thankfully it wasn't too terrible. I decided to just go for it and go right over it and just see if I could blend it out. But I don't want to get it on the areas that I've already done so I'm using the tape now on the legs. Some of you guys that have been with me for a while are probably watching it and looking at at this point thinking what in the world is she doing? What is she thinking? This is going to look terrible and it's going to look different I'll say that much but no it's not going to look terrible in the end. It's just this is one of those things it kind of gets worse before it gets better and that's kind of how this entire project has gone. So here I'm doing my first layer of the Easy Vinyl Sealer and already you can see those legs darkening up a bit. I'm going to use this over the entire piece because lacquer is going to be my final finish. Back when I was planning to keep this light I wanted to have a nice natural oil-based finish but that's not really going to work in this case. So because pine is so bloody porous I'm going to have to do a couple of coats of this vinyl sealer. I believe I did three and I just kept going until it got to the point where I was spraying it on and it wasn't drying unevenly and blotchy meaning it wasn't soaking into some areas more than others. This is really important for a uniform finish at the end. Once my second layer was dry I went in with a I believe it was a 180 grit soft foam pad to just kind of lightly abrade the surface and then I applied my third coat. So the black areas are now sealed and ready for lacquer but now it's time to deal with the brown. So here is where I'm adding my first layers of toners and I'm just eyeballing this. It's not like I did four coats on everything. I did a light couple of coats on everything but then kind of spot treated where I needed just a little bit more to make it uniform. This toner color is called perfect brown and it is literally perfect for a lot of things. Once I was happy with the toner I used that 180 grit pad to lightly scuff everything top to bottom and wipe all the dust back and now it's time for the lacquer top coat and this is where you're really going to start to see that brown coming through especially on the black. Water-based stains are really unique in that you don't always get the full depth of it until you do your clear top coat. I believe I did four layers of lacquer over the entire piece. I used some Howard feed and wax inside the drawers which is a combination of orange oil and beeswax just to freshen this up and give it a little bit of a seal. This stuff isn't really meant to be a top coat but for drawers it's totally fine. It looks so much better than these drawers did originally. So I mentioned earlier about the plugs being a bit of a mistake. If you're looking closely you can still see the holes where they were filled. That bugs me greatly but it is what it is in this case and after spending countless hours on this piece spread it over two weeks. I have to just learn to accept things sometimes. As far as hardware goes I needed something that was kind of still on that country track but a little more refined than what was there before. So I found these two in my stash. I had a couple of them but I thought I would use these single pull per drawer and I think this looks a lot better. So as is usually the case the pieces I think are going to be the easiest end up taking me the longest and giving me the most attitude but this was a very special flip. As I mentioned I'm going to be raffling this piece off for the rabbit rescue that I help out with. We do sell the tickets online but please I know that a lot of you guys would love to take part but unfortunately shipping is not an option so this is going to have to be local in Nova Scotia only. If you're interested in the rescue though and want to donate in another way you can find them on Facebook under 10,000 Carrots Rabbit Rescue. Puff is really happy to show this off considering it's based on her coloring so I hope you enjoy the reveal and I will see you next time.