Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Just like new: beautiful old cupboard


So, my friend found this old piece of beauty for me in a furniture thrift store. He said, if i don't buy it, he will. Even if he has nowhere to put it. It cost 25 euros and i got it down to 20. You have to haggle in a thrift store even if your heart is already jumping for joy. I have no idea, what kind of wood it is, but it's a beautiful dark tone, which is harder to come by, than all the light yellowish coloured pieces from 60's and 70's. However it was quite ragged - lots of scratches and rather faded in colour. The scratches didn't even bother me that much, but there was also a chip missing from one of the drawers, which was quite visible.


I got inspiration from designsponge blog and decided to give the cupboard a makeover. Got teak oil, wood wax and wood cleaning solution and got on it. Cleaned it first. Then the instruction said: "apply oil on wood, let it soak and wipe off excess oil". What excess oil, i ask? The wood was so thirsty, i applied altogether 4 layers of oil and it ate it all. After that i decided it was already overindulging and moved on to waxing. The oil really does bring out the beauty of the wood and makes it look very fresh. Oil and wax together make all the scratches a lot less visible. Now the only problem left was the chip missing from one drawer. Mind you, i am not a professional, so i do not have any wood markers or wood fillers at home, and the filler i bought was 100 tones too light for this beauty. But since i also have no patience, i had to do something right away, so i peeled off some material from inside of the drawer, glued it on with wood filler and smoothed out the edges with....wait for it...with my brown kohl eyliner. Can't even tell it from distance and if someone gets too close to my beauty, i will politely ask them to take 2 steps back and admire it from afar. But i doubt anybody will even notice. So, after a bit of muscle work and around 15 euros spent on materials  et voila: