The Literary Workshop Blog

When I visit antique shops, I’m always pulling out drawers and looking underneath pieces to see how–and when–the thing was built. Most of the older, handmade pieces are way out of my price range, so I’m just looking appreciatively.

But once in a while, I find something I can’t pass up.

My wife and I found this old sideboard at a local thrift shop. After giving it a quick once-over, I decided it was well worth the $120 they were asking for it.

Although it was pretty beat up (more on that below), I could tell there was something really good underneath the grime and the old, dark finish.

And I’m going to spoil the ending for you right now, in case you’re more interested in the product than the process of the restoration.

This is what was under all that:

Getting from here to there took a lot of work, and it was totally worth the time and effort.

In this post and the next, I want to walk you through some elements in the process of examining, repairing, and refinishing this sideboard.

Why I Chose This Piece

What first attracted me to this sideboard was the construction. Everything about it says late 19th century. There are no maker’s marks or factory markings on it anywhere. I think it was probably made professionally somewhere in the eastern USA, but there’s no telling exactly where. I have not seen furniture in quite this style before (note the carved drawer pulls, for example!) but all the construction details suggest it was made sometime the 1880s or the 1890s.

The first thing I do when examining an old piece of cabinet work is to pull out a drawer and look at the corners. These are hand-cut dovetails. As soon as I saw them, I knew I had to have this piece.

Predictably, the ones in the backs of the drawers are a little rougher than the ones at the front. But they’re all still solidly together. You can tell they’re hand-cut not only by the shape but also because a couple of the lines are over-cut.

The wood, by the way, is all poplar, except for the oak fronts.

Drawer bottoms are full of interesting information. I will admit, though, that I’ve never seen one quite like this.

The drawer bottom is solid wood (not plywood). It’s uncommon to find a multi-drawer unit this old with intact drawer bottoms. Drawer bottoms are often split or otherwise damaged, but these are all in great shape.

Most such solid bottoms drawer bottoms are either rabbeted or planed on three sides to fit into the groove in the sides. These drawers, however, have both. Each bottom panel is rabbeted on two sides and then beveled (with a handplane) on the third side. I’ve never seen that before.

There are two other things to notice. One is the use of cut nails to affix the drawer bottom to the back. (Cut nails generally predate the more modern wire nails we’re familiar with.) The other is the saw marks from a rotary saw blade. Notice that the panel is a single, wide board, but it was cut from a thicker board in two passes: the board looks like it was passed through the saw once to cut halfway through. Then it was flipped end-for-end and passed through again to finish the cut. The two cuts didn’t line up exactly, but they were good enough for drawer bottoms.

The back of the case also had some interesting information.

The back panels are all solid–not plywood. These boards are also rabbeted on each end, even though there’s no reason for them to be. They don’t fit into any kind of groove. I begin to wonder if the maker was working with boards that already had a rabbet machine-cut into the edges for some other purpose. That would explain the drawer bottoms.

All these back boards are attached with wire nails, not cut nails. I was surprised to find both kinds of nails in this case, but the presence of both suggests the sideboard was made at a time when both kinds of nails were in widespread use, which is the end of the 1800s.

After we got this sideboard home, I discovered a fun feature. It has a secret compartment attached under the top!

To access this secret compartment, you just remove one of the drawers, and then you reach underneath and slide your money or documents into the compartment. (Unfortunately, it was empty.) There are also the remnants of some decals on this compartment, but it’s too bad they aren’t in better shape.

Here, I’ll save you the trouble of flipping the photo upside-down.

At first I thought perhaps this was some kind of maker’s mark or factory identifier for the sideboard. But after looking at it for a while, I realized the secret compartment had been made from a bit of an old cigar box. I didn’t have much luck searching the Internet for information on this stamp, but if you know something about how to identify and date old cigar boxes based on factory stamps, let me know in the comments!

Anyhow, despite the cool features showing that this whole sideboard was handmade in the 19th century, I have to admit that it was also in pretty rough shape.

The biggest problem was the top.

Not only were there a lot of stains and burn marks all over it, but there was also one place on the right where the top had been almost entirely burned through! (The extent of the damage only became evident once I did an initial strip of the finish.)

This hole had been filled in with some sort of putty or plaster, which had long ago come loose. After removing much of the remaining filler, it became clear that some kind of burning liquid had once spilled onto the wood and run down the front, eating/burning almost through the top and leaving char and burn marks elsewhere. I don’t know what sort of chemistry would have done this. The damage was severe, but localized. If you have a guess on the cause, let me know in the comments!

I knew I was going to have to repair this damage somehow.

Also, each of the three door panels had cracked, and all of the cracks had long ago been filled in with the same sort of putty.

When I first opened the doors, I saw why they had split. The panels were solid pieces just screwed onto the backs of the frames.

But the insides of the doors also gave me a clue as to what kind of wood was underneath the old, murky finish. The whole case is indeed made from solid oak. I knew it was going to take a few days’ work to get this sideboard into working shape, but I hoped that the results would be worth the effort.

Repair the Wood and Remove the Old Finish

The first step was to remove the door panels, clean out the splits, and glue them back together. Fortunately the patches were shallow, and the splits were still fairly clean deeper inside. So I was able to glue everything right back in place.

I also enlarged the screw holes on the sides so as to allow for a bit of wood movement–which had not been done as originally constructed. That’s why the panels all split in the first place.

I did some other little repair work–reinforcing a loose piece with a screw here and a nail there. My goal was not to fully restore this piece to like-new condition, but to make it stable and functional for the next hundred years or so.

The major work was taking off the old finish. I haven’t done this much before, so after reading some online tutorials, I just experimented a little bit to find a process that worked for me. After a couple missteps I got pretty good results. I don’t have enough experience to tell you how to go about your own job like this, but I will tell you what worked for me.

First, have the right the tools. This includes…

• A cheap, natural bristle brush to apply the chemical stripper
• A couple plastic/nylon putty knives to scrape it off. (Lowe’s had the blue tool shown above, which I found really useful.)
• Coarse steel wool
• Lots of paper towels
• Nitrile gloves (not pictured)

For the stripper, I used the “Kleen Strip” brand. I also found it really helpful to use the same brand of “After-Wash.”

I did the whole job in my garage with the door open and the wind coming in. Even so, the fumes were strong at times.

After disassembling the piece as much as I could (e.g. removing doors and drawer pulls), I applied the stripper liberally over just one surface (like the top or the door panels). Because there’s a limited timeframe in which to work, it’s best to do a section at a time, rather than try to do multiple surfaces at once. After letting the chemical sit 15 minutes or so, I scraped the sludge off.

On most surfaces, I scraped off as much as I could, then immediately applied a second coat of the stripper and let that sit another 15 minutes to finish the job.

This is after an initial strip and scrape.

This is after the second application.

I used the steel wool, as well as the corners of the scraping tools, to get into corners and into moldings. Make sure you loosen every bit of sludge, especially in corners.

Once I had scraped off as much as the gunk as I could, but while the surface was still somewhat moist from the stripper, I flooded the surface with the after-wash and wiped off the residue with more steel wool and lots of paper towel. Again, go over every surface carefully to make sure you’ve gotten off every last bit of the sludge.

As it turned out, both the drawer fronts and the door panels were veneered with figured oak!

Part of the fun is getting a first look at the wood grain underneath.

I learned that it’s much easier to do this kind of cleaning work on horizontal surfaces. As you can see above, I set up a folding table and wrapped the top with cling-wrap, which provided an ideal work surface for the drawers and doors.

To clean each side of the case, I tipped the whole case on its back and then onto each end in order to work on each respective surface horizontally. I’m very glad I went to that trouble. It’s much easier to do this work on a horizontal surface than on a vertical one.

Once I had the old finish removed, I was able to move on to the major repair issue.

In my next post, I will show how I repaired the gap burned into the top, and I’ll give a short account of the refinishing.