Antique Furniture Challenge: How I Refinished It without Stripping It
The dining room has been a never-ending work in progress. We’ve tried to do SO much in this room at once that we haven’t been able to get it functional, even over the course of a few years. I think we’re finally getting sick of eating on the kitchen floor and having our guests use TV trays on the couch during mealtimes, (plus we have baby #3 coming quickly this summer), so we’re jumping into dining room mode with gusto (at least I am, and prodding my poor, weary husband along the way).
One thing I wanted to get sorted in the meantime was a storage solution for my tableware and entertainment dishes. I had a small space challenge to work with, even in our decently-sized (re-purposed) dining room (it used to be the formal living room). This is because we want to dedicate the majority of the room to a long, 8′ farmhouse table to keep our hosting options open. (Getting there soon, I hope)! That being so, we couldn’t put a traditional, behemoth china cabinet in that room and have adequate space for comfortable dining, so I once again went on an hours-long antiquing quest for a very specific item:
- Cabinet deep enough to hold dishes but no more than 13″
- An ideal width of about 40″ to allow easy entry into the room (this piece is by the staircase entrance)
- Within my budget of $150 (I sold my refinished buffet to fund this project)
- And, of course, aged and antique but sturdy and beautiful in every way.
That’s not asking too much, right? 🙂
I had been eyeing a few glass-front bookcases on Facebook marketplace and in the stores, and finally landed on one that was only $100 (I guess that’s reasonable for this rather pricey furniture item, if the antique store prices are any indication)! I found one that was the perfect size and shape, and clearly had some signs of antique character (those hinges!!), so I went for it. I knew I would need to clean or touch up the piece based on the listing picture, but I wasn’t expecting it to have been as sadly abused as it appeared in person.
As I cleaned and worked on it at home, I found more and more signs of the bizarre things done to it over the years: scratches and gouges galore, lines and numbers scrawled into the wood, nail polish splashed across the glass and exterior, scotch tape and thumbtacks in various locations, and some kind of flaking veneer or mystery substance covering the base. It needed some MAJOR LOVE. Thankfully I have some of that to give when it comes to antiques. 🙂
I knew I wanted to keep the original dark wood finish, and this is the kind of sacred furniture item that I would never paint, so I had to figure out how I could camouflage the scrapes, gouges, and graffiti without resorting to stripping and refinishing the whole thing from head to toe. I saw good reviews for a product called Old English Scratch Cover (for Dark Wood), so I grabbed some of that from Home Depot to try. Supposedly it will magically resolve the wear, fading, and scratches on your dark furniture with one easy application. I tested it on a small spot of the cabinet and didn’t get a strong enough result for the damage I was dealing with, so I reached for my stain pen and began filling in some of the biggest problem spots.
But the whole cabinet was a problem spot, so I stopped wasting time with that and grabbed a brush and a can of a similar color stain (I didn’t agonize over this or make extra trips to the store – I knew any dark stain with a red tint would fill and blend into the scratches well enough for my purposes. If you’re dealing with a lighter piece of furniture, you may have to do more precise color-matching).
First, I sanded the worst scratches lightly to level them out a bit, scraped the mystery film off the base with a putty knife until it was smooth, and then I basically bathed the whole cabinet in the stain and wiped off the excess, as though I were staining a fresh, stripped piece of wood. And much to my surprise, THIS WORKED! It was immediately concealing the gouges and revitalizing the color and shine of the wood. The piece must not have had any finishing sealant on it, because even the undamaged areas were able to absorb a lot of the stain; so much so, that the entire piece does look a shade darker now (which I don’t mind).
I did this to the entire piece and then sealed it with 3 generous coats of my favorite protective finish, Minwax Polycrylic (I used the satin sheen).
I then used the Old English Scratch Cover at the end to polish it and see if it would cover any remaining discoloration, but again, this seems more like a tinted polish than any kind of stain repair solution, so I think it mostly just added some shine in my case. That’s fine, though! At this point the bookcase was looking WORLDS better to me and I was already in love with the results from the stain and poly.
It still has loads of nicks, scrawls, and imperfections in it that you can see if you look hard through the layers of stain and poly, but that’s actually quite alright with me. My goal with a piece this damaged was to camouflage and conceal the issues more than strip and rehab it entirely. It was too detailed and beautiful to blast with our orbital sander, so I wanted to use a delicate touch, and much to my joy some simple re-staining and sealing seemed to do the trick.
I’m also always okay with signs of wear and age in my antique furniture (in this case I just didn’t want nail polish, pen scribbles, and large numbers graffitied across the front, haha). From the outset I was looking for something with age and character, and now the piece looks the way I wanted our new furniture acquisition to look originally: definitely old and weathered, but also cared for and loved.
