Nursery Dresser Restoration

Well we had moved to new house with more space for me to pursue my restoration hobby. It has been raining pretty hard these days and I didn’t have much work to do so I decided to get started on the restoration of this old nursery dresser that we got from hubby’s sister before she left for Canada. She also gave us this piece that I restored last December.

I, unfortunately, forgot to take a photo of the cabinet before I worked on it, so it would be difficult to show you exactly how run-down it looked like. The veneer was basically peeling off in several areas and I just had something to cover the top part.

The first thing I did was strip the veneer off. There really was no way to salvage the veneer and I did hesitate to peel it off at first because this is my first peeling job

but I did find some good resources online. Because the piece was already a bit rundown, I didn’t have a hard time taking off the veneer save for some areas where it was really glued on. I read some tips to use a flat iron and a cloth but my flat iron is way too precious for me to use it on this restoration job. I just took a flat chisel and hammered my way inch by inch until I had everything peeled off. I only worked on it for about 1-2 hours a day and it took around 4 days for me to finish the peeling.

There are some disadvantages to using this type of chisel though, so make sure you use the really flat one, or try the hot iron method if you dare

I chipped the furniture somewhat by trying to force the veneer off.

Here are more photos of the stripping process:

I really should mention to take care good care while dealing with strips of wood because I ended up with some of my skin peeled off as well because I did not wear any protection for my hands. Wear gloves!

After I’ve finished taking off all of the veneer, I cut off a piece of leftover plywood to place on top of the furniture and secured it with a few small nails.

I also noticed that a small piece of glued-on wood was about to fall off, so I wiped on some quick-drying contact cement to stick it on back to the furniture. I had earlier used some of our trusty Bulldog adhesive, only to realize that we had the one used for steel only.