Restless Hands' Projects - 1

During the second summer of the pandemic, I picked up a new hobby – refurbishing and refinishing wood furniture. In the first pandemic summer of 2020, I polished my life-long knitting skills and art of knitting without patterns, just from my head and hunch, which I wrote about here on Vocal as well. I loved discovering new natural yarns and experimenting with them, but then I decided I needed something completely new to do. Something that years later I could boast about, “I’ve picked up a new hobby during the pandemic.”

My grandmother used to say, “restless hands will always find something to do.” I love working with my hands, so refinishing furniture seemed like fun and something I would enjoy doing.

My first project involved refurbishing an early 1920s dresser and two nightstands for my guest room. They were very eclectic, not in the set and landing in my hands at different times and circumstances: one nightstand was left behind by my tenants, one I bought years earlier and it got pretty badly beat up in my numerous moves, and the dresser was my first significant thrift store find. I wanted them to look matching if not in style and shape then in color, so I decided to refinish them and paint them ivory.

Like any first try, it was tedious as I was an insecure novice and didn’t know how it would turn out. One thing I knew: if they turned out bad, I wouldn’t cry over disposing of them. So I sanded everything thoroughly by hand and gave each piece three coats of paint (I’m a perfectionist, and know how to paint, so I wasn’t satisfied until I saw a nearly perfect streak-free paint distribution). Here is the picture of that guest room with the two of three finished pieces:

After that, I started to pick up interesting furniture pieces from various thrift stores and lay my restless hands on them. Some only required thorough cleaning and waxing, some – taking the old lacquer off and sanding the surface, then staining it and giving it a layer of polyurethane. All of that I was still doing by hand. Here’s an example of a lamp that I also had to thrift a new shade for, but the most important part was the second tier that had some red stains and damaged protective layer on it. Here’s the final result:

My latest find was an adorable Amish-made children’s rocker. I don’t have little kids in the family right now, but I was drawn to it. It was only $2, made of natural high-quality cedar, but it was covered all over in tiny dots of white paint, as if it had been forgotten next to a spray paint job. It stood in my apartment for months, waiting for me to have time to clean it up. I wish I had taken pictures of it before I decided to work on it, but unfortunately I forgot.

So the time came when I am on a summer break. I also picked up a pretty beat-up cedar chest at my local thrift store and decided that it was too large of a surface to sand by hand. I have finally splurged on an electric sander and a ton of sandpaper to go with it.

I’ve used the rocker as a testing object for figuring out how to work the sander. The sander has various replaceable tips that allow to get to the toughest angles and crannies on the furniture. It took all those white paint spots off the rocker easily. I also acquired confidence to work with this power tool. Here’s the rocker after cleaning and sanding:

Then I asked my friends on Facebook whether I should stain and polyurethane the rocker or just wax it with bee wax to preserve its authentic look and grain. Most of my friends said to wax it, so I went with that. I’m glad I did because the rocker now truly rocks:

I couldn’t be happier with this job. If you would like me to tell you how the cedar chest is coming out (I’m almost done with it), please let me know in the comments.