My grandparents gave me this set of bedroom furniture longer ago than I can remember! They purchased new furniture and passed this on to me when I was in elementary school. I’ve never loved the color and over the years the bleached mahogany veneer has seen its share of ware.
The nightstands were badly chipped in a few places and very scratched up after at least 30 years of use.
As we’re getting closer to the “light at the end of the tunnel” on our renovation, I knew I didn’t want to put these back in the house as they were. I was considering using different nightstands, but was torn because these have a great size!
That’s when I ran across this blog post at Wills Casa- she talks about how to stain and paint veneer. I loved the idea and figured, since I was considering selling these pieces that I had nothing to lose!
First step was sanding these down WITHOUT going through the mahogany veneer. This was certainly the hardest part- trying to make sure I removed all of the varnish without destroying the, already in rough shape, veneer.
There were a few places where the veneer was already chipped and there unfortunately wasn’t much I could do about that.
I made sure to wipe everything down well and added a coat of stain. I chose Ebony by Minwax for two reasons- I love the richness of dark wood and more importantly I already had some 🙂
This is just after I applied the stain:
After wiping it off 15 minutes later and allowing to dry I learned there were a few spots where I was so careful about the veneer that I had missed getting all of the varnish off.
One option was to re-sand the entire thing and start over, but I knew that wouldn’t work with the veneer. So, I decided to lightly sand the trouble spots and then re-stain, while feathering in the stain.
I also used a stain pen in the hard to stain areas.
After staining and adding three coats of polyurethane to the drawers and top, I used a foam roller to paint the body in a high-gloss white. I added three coats of this as well, allowing it to dry 4 hours between coats.
I struggled with this project to find new drawer pulls. The original pulls had two holes close together, so I searched and searched and searched for something that could cover the holes. I considered filling them, but knew that with the veneer this would be difficult.
Here are a few of the options I considered:
First Row:
Second Row:
After scouring the internet and coming up with lots of great, but expensive, ideas I decided to try and rescue the original hardware.
I scrubbed them down and then painted them with Rustoleum’s gold spray paint.
And here they are now! They look brand new!
I’m in love with how these nightstands turned out and can’t wait to get them in the house!
There are a few places where if you look closely you can see the damaged veneer- but I love them, because it reminds me of the love they have provided over the years!
Now that I’ve finished the nightstands I can’t wait to do the rest of the set! These turned out better than I imagined!
Thanks for reading!
