Furniture Restoration FAIL!

I'm trying to sell a piece of furniture on craigslist this week, and I thought I'd talk about it here.  Record it for posterity, as it were.

It sounded great at the time:  an Art Deco-style dresser/vanity from the 30s, complete with mirror and hardware to attach.  The finish had been "updated", but it still had all the original hardware and woodwork.  And it was free - a gift from a family friend.

I love refinishing and restoring old pieces - that's actually how I started out, when I was in my early twenties.  So much history in old furniture, so many stories to tell!  Repaired bits, layers of old finishes, gorgeous wood grain hidden under a grubby patina, children's graffiti, cat scratches and dog chews - this one had burn marks in the back, and the original manufacturer's mark!  It'd also been painted several times through its life...obviously.  I couldn't wait to strip it down and reveal the wood underneath, and put the *perfect* stain on it.

But the various paint jobs it'd received over the years turned out to be a huge problem: as I tried to remove the paint layers, I found that only once had the piece been stripped or scraped or prepared in any way prior to painting - it'd mostly just been covered over and over, and was all full of bumps and smears, bubbles in the finish, hairs and brush bristles painted into the finish!

Most recently, someone had lacquered the CRAP out of the piece- and I mean really lacquered, with layers and layers and sanding and poly-coats and the whole nine yards, not just the "looks like lacquer" spray paint or top-coats you can buy nowadays to achieve the effect easily and quickly.   It looked like whoever did the lacquer job had tried to remove the old paint, but had given up halfway through and just primed then started the lacquer job over a half-painted vanity.  The primer dried really thickly over the painted portions, but soaked almost completely into the bare wood where it'd been sanded. 

That made it impossible to get all of the finish off so that I could restore the wood.  I sanded by hand and with three different machines, I picked and scraped, I used every chemical and natural stripper I could get my hands on, even some new miracle treatment I ordered from TV because I was desperate.  Some areas - one side, the drawer fronts, and most of the top - came completely clean, but only at the cost of the wood veneer that'd originally covered the piece, which, sadly, had to be removed completely from the top, because of this and also because some of it was rotting - and therefore from the drawer fronts, too, so they'd match.  Fortunately, the wood underneath the veneer was pretty decent quality, and sanded up really nicely.   Most of the piece, though, was completely beyond salvage.  I just could not get all the paint off without completely destroying the wood underneath and trashing the entire piece.

So I removed as much as I could, and sanded the rest smooth so that it would take a paint job and still look nice and slick, and painted the whole thing black.  I repaired the joinery on two of the drawers where the dove-tailing had split and separated.  I replaced a scrap of wood on the bottom that'd been used to repair a falling drawer support but which had started to rot, and was failing itself.  I buffed the insides of the drawers smooth again (the grain had warped with age and was very rough), cleaned and oiled the wood to make it nice again and remove an..."interesting" smell in one of them.   The supports that held the mirror onto the vanity, and the mirror frame itself were almost completely rotted through.  I have no idea what happened to them, but at some point they'd suffered some pretty major water damage that the vanity itself hadn't been exposed to.  I threw the mirror frame and supports away, and hung the mirror over the dressing table in my bedroom.

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Art Deco, but it's sad, to me, that someone ruined what was once, and could have been again, a gorgeous, quality piece of woodwork.  Sigh.  It looks alright now, and it's in good shape, for all it's been through, but...it could have been so much more.  I never even replaced the missing hardware - there are duct tape flaps on it so you can get the drawers open.  I never had the heart to even look for new hardware, the thing was so screwed up.  

Its only hope is that some nice person on craigslist will fall in love with it - or at least say to him or herself, "Hey, that could work, for now," or, even better, someone will want to paint it and put spectacular new hardware on it, maybe turn it into an art piece.  Of course, there are a crap-ton of these on my local craigslist right now, so who knows.  Here's hoping.

Poor vanity. I hope it finds a good home. 


Update 7-6-10: It did!   It took a while, but I finally found a buyer for it:  a woman who's buying seven of these old vanities, painting them and updating the hardware and feet to match, and using them as work stations in the salon she's opening up this year!  How cool!  Good luck, Salon Woman! 

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