Woman Repairs Stained Solid Wood Mid-Century Modern Desk to Original Glory

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Everything old is new again, and that certainly goes for the current craze for mid-century modern furnishings, these sleek, stylish pieces are prized not only because of their elegant simplicity in design but also because of their relative quality. Compared to today’s short-live, mass-produced particle board creations, most furniture from six decades ago is made with solid woods and construction details meant to last.

Unfortunately a lot of these vintage pieces also come with a fair amount of damage, which leads most furniture renovators to reach for their cans of primer and paint, covering up all the beautiful vintage wood finish… and making antique furniture enthusiasts despair. But there are other options for saving your vintage wood pieces, and this woman shows you how it’s done.

In this video, a woman painstakingly refurbishes a gorgeous mid-century modern wooden dresser she picked up for the low, low price of sixty dollars at a thrift shop. She knew that properly taken care of, a piece like this could fetch more than a thousand dollars on the resale market. It just had to be refurbished first—and not with a can of paint.

How To Remove Spots From Wood Furnishings

First, she thoroughly cleaned the piece to see what kind of damage she was dealing with. Next, she sanded off the old varnish. The old finish came off relatively easily with a sander, but there were some dark spots on the surface of the desk which gave her pause.

She tried removing it with a bit of oxalic acid wood bleach, and then with some applied wet heat from an iron. Neither did much to remove this particular mark. Other solutions for dark stains on wood include peroxide, which she did not utilize in this instance.

Undaunted, she treated the piece with a conditioning wood oil and then restrained it with a gel stain to capture that vintage, golden look.

Now, how to cover up the mark?

Covering a Stain on Old Wood Furniture

To get at a stains as stubborn as this one, she decided to take advice from the realm of makeup and cosmetology. If she couldn’t remove the blemish from the surface of her desk, she would conceal it, just like she might with a blemish on her face.

She says that she figured that because she used an “orange-red pigment” under her concealer to cover up dark marks on her own face, the color theory would hold when it came to covering up the mark on this desk.

She mixed up a bit or orange paint and carefully dabbed it over the stain. Then, she tried to cool match the exact shade of the wood finish and painted over the stain. Her final step was to try her hand at drawing on a bit of fake wood grain to match the rest of the surface.

It’s a lot of work, but you can’t argue with the results. After covering the whole piece with a sealant in the form of a spray lacquer, she ended up with a gorgeous, shiny vintage piece with a top that looks like a uniform, unstained piece of wood—that is, if you don’t look too closely.

“It’s not perfect,” she admits, “but it was a learning experience.”

Still, talk about turning trash into treasure. An identical piece was just sold on Etsy for a thousand dollars, and she should be proud of all she accomplished with bringing this stunning piece of furniture back to its former glory.

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