hello furniture friends katie here from salvaged by k scott with a
pretty impressive trash to treasure furniture makeover
if i do say so myself last week i showed you how i found this set of nightstands out of the curb
in someone's trash and gave you a few tips to check out if you are trying to get the stink
out of some old furniture but this week i am actually getting down to work and undertaking
a massive transformation on this set so that i can use them in our new basement guest suite
this pair is mostly a laminate veneer over particle board which is peeling off all over
the place they were absolutely filthy inside and out with a very strong cigarette smell and full
of mouse poop so i ended up taking them apart and giving them a really thorough scrub down and then
i primed the inside and outside of the drawers with some shellac based primer to really seal
in any of the residual odor now i want to make some modifications to the bodies to
give these an entirely new identity i started by flipping them over and unscrewing the bases
this part is actually solid wood but i'm going to be building my own new bases a little later on and
i was very pleased that the bottom structure of these nightstands is also solid wood so i've got
some really good material to attach my new idea to to help modernize these boxes i wanted to remove
the overhang and make the sides flush so i grabbed a straight edge and marked off where i wanted to
cut and then i grabbed my circular saw and ran it down as close to the side edge as i could
my cuts were definitely not precise i am not good with the power saws
but i was able to grind any excess down flat with my orbital sander and some 80 grit sandpaper
next because these are particle board and i now have a bunch of that exposed
i mixed up some heavy duty two-part wood filler so that i could fill in that particle board texture
and make them just as smooth as the laminate on the rest of the surfaces this filler is an
epoxy and it has a really strong smell so i like to wear my respirator when i'm working with it
it also starts to harden up and cure really quickly once you mix the two parts together
so i only mix up a little batch at a time and try and work as fast as i can
i also want to fill in all of these drawer details and make myself a nice
smooth surface so i filled those in as well
once all that filler was dry i used some more 80 grit sandpaper to start smoothing it out
i did need to mix up another batch and do a second pass on the drawers which is really common when
you're filling large areas like this just to get any air pockets or bubbles that you missed
on your first pass so i did that and then sanded everything flush once it was all dry
after i was done with my second pass at the drawers i realized that i needed to cut the front
lip off of these as well and doug already had the table saw out for his own project so he offered to
zip the nightstands through there for me and i'm never going to decline an opportunity to not
have to use a saw now that i had everything cut down and smoothed out i was ready to
prime i used my usual bin shellac based primer with a four inch lint-free roller
and covered the drawer fronts and the bodies of the nightstands in two coats of primer
and because of that really strong smoke odor i needed to prime all of the inside surfaces as well
as my primer dried i got myself ready to move on to the new legs that i had stuck in my brain
i am not good at this sort of stuff so i sketched out what i wanted to do first and then
picked up a few 1 by 2 by 8 pieces of poplar from home depot i used our chop saw to cut all
of the links that i needed and then i used my little kreg jig pocket hole system to attach
all of the pieces together in a way that should hide the screws from view
and i'll say it again i am not good at this kind of stuff so it was definitely a very
fiddly process that took some trial and error with my clamps and shims and a lot of swearing
to get these pieces attached together into a rectangle but i made it happen
because of the way that i want to screw these to the bottom of the tables once they're finished
i needed to drill some holes with a countersink bit before i attached the
top of my rectangle structure and i'll show you how all of that works coming up in a bit
once i had all of the new legs assembled i gave them a quick sand with some 220 grit
and then stained them all in bears water-based wood stain in the color early american
i am painting these in fusion mineral paints victorian lace which is a gorgeous bright white
and will be a great neutral moment in the bedroom which i'm planning on putting lots of colorful
accents in i loaded up my wagner flexio 590 with the paint and fusion is already a great viscosity
to spray so i didn't add any water to it like i do with a lot of the other paints that i use
i did a little test spray down on my drop cloth to make sure that everything was
flowing nicely and then sprayed my first coat onto the nightstands upside down
so that i could get into all of the hard to reach spots then i called it quits for the day
the next morning i flipped my tables over and sprayed on two more coats of
paint to the boxes and the drawer fronts leaving about two hours in between coats
do fusion has a built-in top coat that is super durable once the paint is cured so
i decided to skip adding any additional top coat for now but i may come back a little while later
and add a few coats of fusion's matte tough coat once i'm ready to put these in their new home
because nightstand tops get a lot of traffic while my paint was drying i had a few other things that
i needed to work on for these i found these four rectangular poles in my stash that i saved off of
another piece of furniture so i cleaned them off and gave them a quick spray to even out the color
i also need to seal up my new wooden legs before i attach them to my piece
and i decided to use up the rest of this can of wise owls furniture salve in the scent
righteous rain this is a hemp oil and wax product that you really just rub onto the wood
let it soak in for a few minutes and then i came back with a shop towel and wiped away the excess
once my paint was nice and dry i was ready to flip the nightstands over again
and attach my new legs so i put down a soft blanket so i didn't scratch up my new paint job
and then got to work this again was a little bit of a fiddly tedious process but here's how it went
i've got some screws and because of the way that i've constructed these i can't just screw them in
with a drill or a regular screwdriver so i set my screws into those holes that i pre-drilled
added a tiny drill bit and then used a ratcheting wrench to screw those down far enough that i could
use a 90 degree drill attachment to screw them in drive them in the rest of the way into the base
to figure out the placement of my new hardware in the center of the drawers i put down a little
piece of painters tape and then used a straight edge again and just went corner to corner to find
the center point once i figured out where the center of the drawer was i'm not gonna lie i
eyeballed it from there and just used a pen to mark off where i needed to drill my new holes
these nightstands are completely unrecognizable from the trashed curbside state that i started
with and i'm really excited to start pulling together the rest of our guest
suite with more found furniture but since i am working with what i find when i happen to find it
that might take a little bit of time so please make sure that you are subscribed to the channel
so you never miss out on a new furniture project and i will catch you all next time