Stripping & Refinishing my Scratched Up 1960s Walnut Dining Table

This video is sponsored by Blueland. Welcome everybody to our mid-century dining room. First of all, before we get into today's video, I want to apologize for my voice. I'm still healing. I have moments where it's fine and moments where it just completely goes away, so that out of the way. This is our dining table. Now I picked this up on Facebook Marketplace a couple years back for about $250 and from afar it looks pretty good, but once you get up close you can definitely see some issues with it. First of all, we've got this really scratched high gloss plastic looking coating, which I don't like. The reason we got this so cheap is that the previous owners had a puppy who definitely left its mark on a lot of the chairs and even the table corner. Both the table and the chairs need to be refinished. The upholstery that you see here, the stripes, that is what came with it when we got it from the previous owner. It's not original, but they didn't do a great job and we honestly just don't like it very much, so that's going to have to get done as well. It's too much work to do in one video, it's going to take too long, so in today's video I'm going to be tackling the table and in an upcoming video I'm going to be doing the chairs. Most of the furniture we have in the house is a satin finish, so that is kind of more what I'm looking for here when I redo this. 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'm just having a look here to see how this is put together and it's honestly super simple. There's four screws on each side and that's pretty much it. Yeah, this should come apart pretty easily. It's not like you've got four separate legs that are bolted in and you have to be careful how you tip it. I basically just unscrew it and lift the top off. It could not be easier. This is a Canadian-made piece. It is walnut veneer on the top and the underside of the top. Poplar framing. The sides of the legs are solid walnut and that stretcher in the middle is poplar with walnut veneer on the outsides. And as I get this into the workroom you can start to see better what I'm talking about by this plastic looking super scratched up coating on the top. It is just not very attractive. It has definitely run its course and it's time to go. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind some sheen on a piece. I just find this a little bit too shiny. It's like a semi-gloss almost or a glossy finish and I like more of a satin finish. So I am going to be removing this and I'm going to be replacing it with something that's a little more subtle and a little more to my liking. Even though the finish is scratched it's still pretty much intact so I'm going to be using a chemical stripper to quickly cut through that rather than trying to scrape it off. This is a pretty large table so I'm going to be doing this in two passes. The first coat will take off basically the clear coat that is on top and then I will do another bit of stripper just to remove anything that remains. Now one of the most common questions that comes up in regards to stripper is what we do with the that comes off and this is going to vary depending on where you live. Here our local bylaws say that if the stripper is in liquid form it needs to be taken to hazardous waste in a sealed can kind of like an empty paint can with a tight fitting lid but because this is methylene chloride free stripper that I use if it is allowed to dry out then those flakes basically just are rendered inert and can go out with the garbage. So just check your local bylaws if you're unsure what to do in your area. Now I don't have to refinish the underside but you know me so yeah I do actually. Now to some people this might look like it's solid wood it's all the same color you see wood grain but it's not. The top and the underside of the top is veneer and then all of this around the edges is the solid wood that is underneath. Now if this was all solid wood you see these lines in between the boards you would see that continue up over the top. So this really screws up a lot of first timers with tables in particular simply assuming that something is solid wood just because it's all the same color and you see wood grain. So whether it's a dresser or tabletop if you're just starting out pay really close attention to the edges of things because that will often tell you the full story. So just before I sand this I'm going to cover up this patch because I still need to strip the leg assembly. If you remember one of the legs had a bit of a chip out here where this puppy chewed it I'm going to deal with that later once the stripping is complete. I'm very happy and relieved that these legs are solid walnut because if this was ash or birch or elm which is very common in mid-century furniture I would have to deal with trying to color match and thankfully I don't have to do that. I'm using 220 grit sandpaper here. I don't want to remove a lot of the wood fibers all I'm doing is just cleaning up any residual stuff that's left on the surface and smoothing this out. Now for the edges because this is going to be a completely different color wood when I put my clear coat finish on I am going to have to stain this with another dark opaque stain so I'm just using a foam pad here to remove most of the color. I don't have to get it perfect I just need to get it smooth and I did run into a couple of divots here these are compression marks and while it's not the end of the world I mean this is a vintage piece I am going to try to steam that out once I get the rest of this kind of lightly sanded. Now there's a couple of ways to do it I'm just using a solder iron here and some water and of course my hand screwed up the focus there so apologies on that and if you're thinking I'm burning the wood here I'm not I had a little bit of wax that was still stuck on the end of this so that's what that dark mark is for but basically all I'm doing is trying to swell those compressed wood fibers back out and then I just used some air to kind of dry this quickly and then I can go ahead and try to sand over it and that actually did a pretty good job you can see it didn't really take much here to get this flat and there was a few areas on the surface as well that I opted to do so these two marks I'm going to try to do it here as well as this scratch this will show up in my finish and this is what it looks like after the fact so you can see it's not perfect but it did raise it enough and any of the spots here on this chew mark that didn't come out I just added a little bit of walnut colored wood filler and I will sand that smooth in a bit so you can see here I'm using a different sander on the top it's just going to help me cover ground a little bit faster now just before I show you how good this is going to look I want to take a moment to say a huge thank you to blueland for sponsoring today's video now we've been using the dishwasher tablets and the hand soap for a while now they've sent me a refill on the tolabo cleaner tablets these are fantastic they smell so good but I'm really excited about this box now speaking of boxes some of you may have received your cutting boards in blueland boxes because in the name of sustainability which is what this company is all about I like to reuse them and of course the cats love them as well cats and boxes you know how it is now this is their holiday box this is what I'm super excited about these scents are amazing so you're going to get a refillable pump for your hand soap and then this really pretty tin with all of your soaps every one of these packages is a full jar of hand soap so if you're buying this for someone else you're basically gifting them months and months of hand soap and you're not having to buy and throw out a plastic bottle for every refill it's the best thing about this company now the soap is super easy to use basically you just fill up to the line here with water take your tablet oh my gosh this smells so good drop it in and it foams up and in a little while you're ready to use it now these tolabo cleaners I love the peppermint eucalyptus smell it smells so good I'm really sensitive to normal cleaners so this is perfect for the house you drop it in your bowl after a few moments you take your brush give it a swish flush it down and you've got a sparkly clean bowl that smells amazing we've been using the blue land products now in our house for it must be close to a year now I will never go back to a normal dishwasher tab after using the blue land ones just feels so fresh there's no weird sort of chemical film on the dishes when it comes out everything gets super clean the hand soap is amazing but best of all I love the fact that waste is completely minimized having a little soap refills in paper and continuing to reuse the same jar over and over again just totally jives with what I like to do in my house we spend so much time in our homes during the holidays this is one change you can make to help reduce your microplastic intake getting highly effective cleaning that is gentle on your family and the planet all you have to do is click my link below to get 15 off your first kit blue land is sharing a special offer just for my viewers even the packaging of the refills is compostable or recyclable can't recommend this enough so like I said the sides of the table are exposed poplar so it has to be stained I'm not going to be putting a stain on the veneer underneath or on top but this has to be stained and I'm going to be using a dark walnut opaque water-based stain I actually do two coats of this to make sure it's super dark and that will do the trick I really really like this cement stain for this specific application it works great I'm just mixing up a little bit of wood epoxy to fill in that bite mark on the bottom of one of the table legs I'm just going to try to feather it out here a bit and with the dull side of a blade I'm just kind of making some lines when I go to add a little bit of stain in this this will look a little bit like wood grain and just kind of help it blend a bit more I'm doing my final hand sanding of 320 and then just trying to remove as much of the dust as possible with both some compressed air and a tack cloth now here's something that is hotly contested using well basically anything other than lacquer on these tables I love Odie's oil for multiple reasons number one I don't need to wear a mask while using it it's completely safe to breathe it smells amazing and even though I have gloves on here you don't actually have to even have gloves on it's completely safe for your hands in fact it tends to make your hands super soft while you're using it now the reason this is super contested is partly the fact that a lot of people don't really understand it they don't really understand what the finish is how it works and the actual hardiness of this finish I've been using this for years now I absolutely love it especially on pieces with walnut or teak it just has a way of bringing up the beauty that no other finish really seems to be able to touch the other reason some people hate it is because there's this ideology I guess for lack of a better term that mid-century furniture needs to have its original finish replaced so yes sometimes things need to be refinished but you know returning it to factory condition is ideal and that is true in some situations with you know higher end pieces that in fact would be more valuable with a version of the original finish reapplied I'm not concerned about that with this piece this is my table this is what I want to do with it Odi's bonds molecularly with the wood fibers it is super resistant to water spills oil grease chemicals it's a really hardy finish it was originally developed for hardwood floors now I am not sponsored by Odi's they don't pay me to say these things this is just a product I've been using for years on my own furniture as well as pieces to sell and I just absolutely love it there's a misconception that this is akin to applying like a mineral oil or some other inferior oil to wood it is not the same thing this is a tongue oil based product it has been specifically formulated to be actually hardier than just regular tongue oil and usually the people that cry about it especially on mid-century furniture they just don't actually understand what it is it wasn't really meant to be a rant it's more an explanation because I do get a lot of questions about well shouldn't you use lacquer on these and the short answer is really it just depends on the piece now a bit ago you saw me using my surf prep sander with a white pad I wasn't sanding and the vacuum attached to the sander was turned off what I was doing is helping to buff this into the fibers and I'm doing the same thing here after I used the sander and the white pad I rubbed off as much oil as I could with some rags and now I'm using a buffer now the vibration and heat here is going to help just activate those ingredients a little bit more and saves my hands I'm still healing my thumbs so my hands are a little bit sore but this is not meant to remove the oil it's more of a polish if you will so you'll see here when I'm done with that if I drag my fingers across you can actually see there's a film and that is that oil film and this is how you know you still have way too much oil on the table so once I'm done with that I'm going to go in and I'm going to buff off all of the remaining oil until I get to the point where I can drag my fingers across and I don't see any residual oil trails this is something that beginners with odies struggle with a lot they either use way too much product in the beginning and have a hard time getting it off or they just don't take enough off in general it's a process and there's no shortcuts but it's worth it in the end eventually we finally get to this point where I bring the tabletop back in and immediately you can see how much better it blends with that beautiful teak sideboard once I get everything attached I'm just going to give it another quick light wipe here with some cloth just to remove any fingerprints from bringing it in and I can take a look back at what I started with now it's funny is that in the dining room a lot of this mess on the top wasn't as visible as it is here in this bright light but it doesn't change the fact that this finish was failing in several areas and just looked I don't know it just looked like there was a coat of plastic over the top not to mention the chi marks now I still have to do the chairs this will be an upcoming video I'm not sure if I'm going to get to it before the end of this year but if not it will be January it's gonna be a time but I'm gonna be refinishing the wood and also changing out this pretty terrible fabric that's on it you can see the contrast between the new finish and the old plasticky finish if you look at this chair here it's just not a look I particularly like in general I would much rather a new finish but it's not completely mad if you look at it from this angle you can see there is a nice level of sheen it's just not as in your face as that initial lacquer coating now that shoe mark on the leg here it's not perfect but it blends in way better than it did before I just used a little bit of stain and honestly unless you're looking for it it's not something that's going to stand out I love how much better it matches that teak cabinet that I have there looking at it before I mean it wasn't terrible but it just looked kind of awkward in the room with that shiny surface much prefer this more satin sheen and natural look and Freya seems to be happy back in her chair so stay tuned for that chair video thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time