Night Nightable, sleep better in your new Home!

Another Jog through the misty morning neighbourhood in October finds another piece of furniture at the curb.   A poor abandoned Nightable waiting to goto the landfill.   All those years of love and service for its owner, and this is where it sat,  at the curb on the end of their driveway 

:(No need to worry,  the boys and I rescued it and gave it some love and a new home.  After some bathing, and good care it looks brand new again.  This is the story of another curbside rescue saving yet another piece of furniture.   Waste not Want not.

Now I never quite understood how the valuable pine species got such poor care and under delivered finishing in this great world of home furniture,  but those challenges are easily corrected.   This lovely nightable had solid structure.  Hell I could stand on top of it and it wouldn't fall apart.   Obviously given the shape of this piece someone had tried standing on it and played hockey, around it,  probably even fixed a few small engines on its side.  This nightable had some good bruises.

So we started by stripping it down with Circa 1850 stripper.  $11 from Walmart and a few handfuls of steel wool.

The doors get a good sanding and so does the interior

Then its time for a bath to puff out all those old dents and lift the fibres ready to take stain.   You can smell the pine sap come right back out of the wood like it was trapped for years.

The original casing of this door is kind of rough so we are going to give it a finish with character.  Leave it masculine looking.

 Start putting on the first coat of stain on the interior of the door.   I was also testing this side because on the interior I did not remove all of the previous polyurethane.   The www.Goudeymfg.com  stain goes on just fine over top of the previous finish.  Just have to give a little extra TLC to make it work.

 Applied carefully by hand,  and lightly rubbed off.

 See how the grain jumps after the first coat of stain is applied,  makes a handsome young boys piece of furniture.

Here is the door with two coats.

About that time we went to a great estate sale and found a lovely mirror for $30.  The colour was not for my spouses liking so we decided to do a makeover and match it to the dresser already done below in my blog and the nightable being completed today.

 Tape it up good first.

Now we apply a 2nd coat

And some more consistency shows

Clean all of the sanding dust off the mirror before staining it. 

Apply stain to this different species of wood in the mirror, with a different pressure and find the same colour pattern going on the nightable.

Starting to look good.

Now we start applying the second stain colour of Classic Grey.  This gives a more formal look to the furniture rather than being to Country looking for our home palette.

   The finish on the doors is starting to look refined.

  Oh SH?!  small error.  This is the start of the spraying  hvlp polyurethane process.   I had placed a little too much Saman waterborne polyurethane on this one and so some drips came down.   Not to worry,  We wiped them off here, let it dry and gave it another sand to make it disappear.   This is the picture of the zig zagged picture before I had it corrected.  Note to self - very thin layers next time and don't do it at 2:00 AM.  LOL.

Here are a few shots of the polyurethane coming on the door and how nice the surface is coming along with the HVLP sprayer.  Titan capsprays are a fantastic piece of equipment to have in the tool shop.  I cant do that with a brush,  or a foam roller!

  

So after 3 coats of Saman - polyurethane, on top of three coats of stain,  the boys are getting antsy to put it back together and get it in Jacks room.  He wants to put his books in it and his "Trash man toys".

•   Jack is concentrating heavily on the screwdriver so that he doesn't markup the surface!

Above is an overexposure to illustrate the depth of the finishing on 6 coats and the nice variance in colours you can achieve when taking the time to apply the finishes properly.  The sanding however is what really makes the difference.

 

 The boys love to help out if it means they can delay their bedtime.

 And Luke and Jack are really proud of their assembly work.

 We bought some new satin silver hardware for $9 to replace the old rubbed bronze hinges and it made a nice difference on the new furniture.  This overexposed shot shows how clear and smooth of a surface you can achieve with HVLP spraying on old cabinetry.   Kitchen cupboards or bedroom furniture,  it all turns out the same.

We left some imperfections on the top on purpose to make the furniture look lightly used, No bare wood showing though.    Its going to get a good workout from Jack over the next few years anyways I am sure, and given there are a few dents left in it,  albeit nicely stained over,   we wont mind so much the new dents that are added in a day or two ,  LOL.

 

I'm so jealous -Jack has nicer furniture than my bedroom does now.   But we had a lot of fun bringing this baby back to life.