I am bringing you along as I take this mid-century style chest of drawers that I
found in the garbage and turn it into something modern that I can sell for a profit [Music]
hello Katie here from Salvage by K Scott if you are new here I have been flipping Furniture full
time for the past six years and I am here making over one piece of furniture at a time one two
save it from contributing to the millions of tons of furniture waste that ends up in our
landfills every year and two to show you how I do it and hopefully give you some ideas for your own
Furniture whether you are an avid DIY or or have your own refinishing business my favorite place
to find furniture to make over is at the curb waiting for the garbage truck which is exactly
where I found this little chest of drawers and I can see why it was there the top drawer front is
completely busted off it's got a peeling paint job it's missing all of its Hardware this laminate top
is water damaged and swollen and it looks like it's been sitting outside for a while this all
seems pretty bad but I'm just gonna work through it one problem at a time and I'm sure with a
little bit of tender loving care I can turn it back into a useful piece of furniture I'm going
to start by flipping the dresser over so that I can unscrew this base I really love the shape of
it but I want to sand off this faux wood finish to get back to the natural wood and while I've got it
upside down I guess I may as well unscrew this pressboard top with the corner of this being as
swollen as it is I don't think it's worth any sort of attempt to save it I'm just going to replace
it with a new piece of three quarter inch plywood I'm also going to pry off all of these decorative
panels from the drawer fronts I'm just tucking my flathead screwdriver in where I can see any little
gaps and then tapping it in a little further with my hammer so that I can get some leverage
and get these off of the little finishing nails that are holding them on and then I just grabbed
those with my needle nose pliers and pulled them right out of the wood foreign [Music]
I suppose I should also vacuum up all of these grass clippings and cobwebs and then I'm just
going to scrub everything down inside and out with some simple green to remove as much of
the dirt and grease as I can I found it in the garbage so yuck but getting up close and
personal with a piece like this while I'm cleaning it really helps me to get into all
of the nooks and crannies and I find a lot of hidden damage or repairs that I need to address
this way I checked out all of the nylon drawer guides and Runners inside the dresser and they
all seem to be in really good working order but the bottom of this drawer that is missing its
front is full of Staples that aren't even holding it together so I am just going to
pluck these out and then hammer in a few Nails once I get the front piece back on here foreign
it's actually not as bad as it seems I used a box cutter to scrape away any old glue from
the dovetails and then I have this little glue syringe that was still full of glue
for my last project to make sure that all of the surfaces on these joints have some fresh
glue then it's just a matter of fitting everything back together and I clamped
it up once I had everything back together so that those joints could dry in place [Music]
thank you [Music]
next I need to do some sanding so I grabbed the base and my little surf
prep sander with some 80 grit sandpaper to grind away this faux wood grain and
the brown primer that's underneath it and then I sanded all of the finish off of
the drawer fronts and cleaned up any paint mess that was on the sides foreign [Music]
once I had these down to the bare wood I covered the insides of the hardware
holes with just a little piece of painters tape and then filled them in along with all
those tiny nail holes with some of this dab color changing wood filler it goes
on pink and dries to a natural color but I don't really love this product if I'm being
honest I'm not even sure why I have this little pot but I need to use it up before
it dries out on me so it's gonna have to do this stuff says it's non-shrinking but
it does shrink up a bit as it dries so I made sure to really pack it down into these holes
but I did need to come back after about 30 minutes and apply a little bit more where it had sunken in
well that continued drying I moved on to sanding the body of the piece these sides are the same
faux wood finish over Brown primer but they're over hardboard instead of the wood that's on
the drawer fronts and I'm just using my orbital sander with some 80 grit again on here to blast
through all of this paint I did end up with a lot of that bare board exposed but that's nothing that
my primer won't be able to handle in a little bit if this paint job had been a little smoother or
better adhered I could have just scuff sanded it like I do on any Factory finishes but that just
wasn't going to cut it here I picked up a small two foot by four foot sheet of three quarter inch
birch plywood and had Doug cut it down on the table saw so it would be flush with the sides of
the dresser instead of having the same overhang that the original top had I refused to get near
our table table saw and if you're also not into making these kinds of cuts you can do the same
thing with a circular saw and a straight edge or even just get Home Depot to cut it for you [Music]
I line up my new top and then screwed it back on with the same screws but since it was so hard to
get my drill in there and get good leverage I ended up grabbing this super long bit from
my pocket hole kit and that made my life so much easier now I just have the tiniest lip
on either side of the top so I grabbed my sander again and just removed enough material on both
sides so they were perfectly flush and then I ended up mixing up some Bondo to fill in that
layered plywood texture on the exposed sides I could have used this same filler as the drawers
but like I said I don't like that stuff it doesn't sand down particularly smooth and
I could have should have just used this Bondo on the drawer fronts for those Hardware holes too and
skipped the pink stuff all together but this is where we are now [Music] the bonda was dry enough
to sand in about 15 minutes another benefit of it so I sanded away all of the excess and then went
back to sand the excess filler on those drawers since they'd already been sanded with 80 grit to
get the old finish off this time I used some 120 grit which is coarse enough to handle the filler
but will also start out the smoothing process of the rough wood grain foreign [Music] Depot
grabbing my wood for the top I also picked up a few of these half round dowels I want to cut
these down and use them to flute the top drawer of this piece I'd love to do the whole thing but
wood is expensive and the last time I did it it took me forever I measured out the height
of the drawer and then used our miter saw to cut down enough of the dowels to fit across it then
I just laid out some wood glue on the drawer a section at a time and place down all of my pieces
[Music] thank you once I had all of the dowels in place and straight I put a few scrap boards
across them and clamped them down so that there was some nice even pressure while
the glue dried and then I got myself set up to paint the rest of the dresser [Music] thank you
[Music]
foreign I wiped down all of the surfaces with a damp microfiber cloth to make sure
there wasn't any sanding dust on there and then I loaded up my gravity fed HVLP pneumatic spray
gun with some of this kills restoration primer this is a water-based primer that
blocks odors and stains it provides extra adhesion power when it's needed but most
importantly for me this time it's going to give me a nice uniform surface to apply my
paint color to it's not recommended to thin this primer but it's a little too thick for
me to get a nice spray so I did add about an ounce of water to the eight ounces of
primer that I strained into my gun I put on my respirator and sprayed my first coat of primer
[Music]
[Music] thank you [Music]
this stuff needs about an hour to dry and after that amount of time had passed I got
a good look at all of the imperfections that I had missed with my first pass of
filler white primer is great for that it makes all those little boo-boos stick right out this
time I am using some drywall spackle to fill since these are all really shallow marks I
find that this is what works best and Sands out nice and smooth that wood filler that I
used in the holes it tends to just kind of fall out of these little shallow flaws when
you sand it so once I was happy and all of the surfaces looked good and smooth as good as I
could get them I sprayed on one more coat of primer to seal all of that in [Music]
while I waited for Layer Two of primer to dry I grabbed my orbital sander and some more coarse
80 grit to grind off any bit of overhang on these dowels on the top and bottom edges of the drawer
I haven't painted anything pink for quite a while so I grabbed this muted one from melange called
Sophie's pink out of my cupboard gave it a really good shake up and then strained it into my clean
gun I did add a little bit of water to this as well about the same ratio one ounce of water
ish to about eight ounces of paint and then I proceeded to not record the application of the
entire first coat of paint I'm sorry guys but it looked a lot like the primer coats only pink
I want to stain the base and this new top drawer but I am terrible at choosing stain colors they
never look like what I have envisioned when I put them on I have a bunch of these water-based
stains from my faux wood finishes that I did a few videos ago so I thought I'd test out a few
on a scrap piece of dowel I did a little bit of golden pecan and early American and neither was
quite the look that I had in my head so I thought maybe I could layer the two to end up somewhere
in between so I brushed on the golden pecan which turned this Pine a horrid orange color and then I
put on a layer of early American over top just to bring in some more Brown I did the same process on
the base and I really liked the way that it looked on that wood which I think is either Elm or Maple
but the pine on this drawer I don't know it just looks awful so I decided to leave it for a little
bit and just think on it and I gave my first coat out of paint a really light sand just to
smooth it out and spray it on my second coat look I remembered to hit the record button this time
[Music]
I think the problem I'm having is that I don't like pine wood grain I mean it's not too far
off from the warm tone that I want but it's just not right I remembered that I had a can of toner
lacquer in my cupboard so I thought I'd give that a try on the drawer and the base and see if I
could make the two Woods match a little bit better and even out the kind of stripy look in the pine
I ended up spraying three coats on the drawer and two coats on the base and then I was pretty happy
with the way that both of them looked foreign that is sorted out I'm ready to top coat my paint
I pulled out this very thing Diamond wood finish which is pretty much my go-to poly sealer and I
give it a really thorough stir the sheen component in sealers like this tend to settle to the bottom
so you want to mix them back together really well every time you use the product but you don't want
to add any air bubbles to your top coat so you've got to stir it really gently for a little while
you cannot shake it up again I cleaned out my gun and filled it with about eight ounces which will
definitely be enough for two coats of top coat on this piece and I did also turn down the flow
on my gun so not as much of this product is coming through this is a lot thinner than my paint so if
I don't adjust it I'll get way too much top coat coming out and end up with tons of drips and sags
[Music] thank you [Music]
after I'd sprayed my second coat I left everything to dry overnight and the next morning I flipped
the body over again onto a towel so that I could reattach the base to the frame [Music]
thank you before I could put the drawers back in I needed to replace these two missing guide pieces
these keep the drawer bottom from rubbing against the wood frame and I've got a ton of these left
over they come in a kit with the nylon drawer guides that go on the back of the drawers I
nailed these in and then I tested out my drawers I decided to lay the whole chest on its back to
measure out where I needed to drill holes for my new hardware and then I measured and mapped all of
that out on some painters tape I always have some of these little knobs from Amazon on hand because
they work with so many different styles and I just think they're a great fit for this piece [Music]
thank you [Music]
the last thing I did was just touch up a few edges on the drawers where my spray didn't
reach and then this one was all finished up and ready to pass on to its next owners I found this
chest in the trash I've got about a hundred dollars in materials invested into it and
it's something I'd list for sale for between 350 and 400 dollars now I don't sell these
flips anymore so this one will be given away to someone locally who can put it to good use but I
hope that this makeover gave you some inspiration for your own projects if you want to see some more
epic Furniture makeovers check out this video next and I will catch you all next time [Music]
thank you