About seventeen years ago, when I bought my first house in America, I acquired a few bits of furniture as part of the sale. Most of it was crap the previous owners couldn't be arsed to move, but there was one nice piece in there that I still have. Mostly it has been used as a bedroom dresser, although it was also a TV stand at one point, and I used it in my office for storage when we lived in Berkeley. This is what it looks like with two thirds of the drawers removed:
Over the years it has suffered some damage, most notably at the right side of the top panel, but there are dings and scratches all over the piece.
At the start of the Christmas vacation, I emptied the dresser and, with some help, moved it downstairs to the workshop. I started by sanding the top panel to 120 grit; this made relative quick work of the varnish and wood stain.
There were numerous imperfections that cannot be removed this way without sanding through the veneer:
The rest of the cabinet was sanded to 120 grit next...a lot of the sanding had to be done by hand which was super tedious, but Amy Sheep was keen to help and that kept me motivated.
The next step is treatment of the top panel with an oxalic acid solution. This is a technique often referred to as "wood bleach" which is very effective for removing stains from wood. After a thorough application, particularly in the stained areas, the dresser was left to dry overnight.
The next day all the stains were gone. The oxalic acid residue was removed by rinsing the top of the dresser with copious amounts of water and left to dry. The cabinet was always a two-tone piece, which we intend to keep. The sections which will be darker were all sanded to 220 grit in preparation for staining:
We tried our best to tape off the areas where the darker stain meets the lighter stain and then applied Varathane classic black™ in the appropriate areas.
Overall, it came out well:
There was some bleed where the tape didn't quite perform as hoped for; these areas will have to be sanded later.
While the stain was drying, we moved on to the drawers. The three (3) flat-front drawers were straight forward to sand down to 120:
The others were a bit more complicated. I started with the raised perimeters. One down, eight to go...
That's better....
The Dewalt™ random orbital sander is too big to fit inside the inlaid drawer fronts, so I broke out the pneumatic sander I typically use in the garage. The pad size ranges from one to three inches in diameter, so I was able to get right into the corners.
The tiny bits I couldn't get to were sanded by hand, and then all the drawers were sanded again to 220 grit:
There were a number of examples of damage at the drawers including chips and dings, several loose dovetails and one broken runner. All such issues were marked with blue tape at the initial sanding stage, and then I worked through all the various fixes.
By this point in the project the black stain at the dark sections of the cabinet was long since dry, and the small sections of bleed over mentioned above had been sanded clean. But there was a problem! While using oxalic acid on the top panel successfully removed all the stains, the moisture also lifted a section of the veneer. I tried to glue the lifted section back down and clamped it overnight.
It sort of worked, but there was still a section of the veneer which was proud. Keeping the very thin veneer and making this area flat would be extremely difficult:
Instead, I sanded all the way through the veneer until the top of the cabinet was perfectly flat. Then I went down to MacBeath Hardwood in Berkeley and picked up a half sheet of flat sawn white oak veneer. Back at the shop the veneer was trimmed to the precise length and about half an inch wider than needed:
The underside of the veneer and the top of the cabinet were covered with contact cement and left to dry; the veneer was very porous so two coats of cement were needed.
The main section was installed first:
The end pieces were added with perpendicular grain alignment to replicate the original cabinet top:
There is an overhang of about 0.25 inches at the perimeter of the veneer which will be removed with the router and a flush trim bit after the contact cement has fully cured.
There were tiny gaps where the sections of veneer meet which were eradicated with white oak wood filler:
Time for the rest of the stain. The sides and front-facing edges of the cabinet were stained with Varathane English chestnut. The veneer we used on the top of the cabinet was a slightly different shade to the remainder of the piece, so this area was stained with a 1:1 mixture of Varathane gunstock and English chestnut which gave a closer match.
Came out nice:
The drawer fronts were stained with Varathane English chestnut:
The brass hardware was cleaned up with a mixture of brasso™ and two (2) tins of elbow grease:
This is a few weeks later after suitable curing time:
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