Apr 23rd, 2025

Author: donich_admin

Restoring some furniture

Moving as we are to a huge Victorian house, we have a slight furniture problem.  We do have some lovely Victorian and Edwardian furniture of J’s which is currently in storage, but this is not by any manner of means enough to furnish a 7 bedroom house.  So what we are left with is:-

Furniture from Donich Lodge which is on the whole modern and in light oak.

Furniture from J’s flat – this falls into the categories of absolutely knackered and “was good forty years ago”.

So in my “spare time” I am trying to turn the Donich Lodge furniture from light oak to mahogany, and renovate those items of J’s furniture which are worth renovating.

So I started with a piece of furniture we had been going to throw out – it came from my grandmother’s house.  I think it is 1930s.  It was very dirty, one of the legs was missing its pad, the handles had gone grey and part of one of the handles was cracked off.

 

I scrubbed it down and then sanded it.  I removed the handles and sprayed them gold (on reflection this looks garish and I should have used a bronze shade).

I then applied two coats of mahogany stain, leaving it to dry between each coat. I repaired the leg and the handle.  Finally, I waxed it with dark oak beeswax polish (the sort in the tin) – this gives a much softer appearance than varnish and reattached the handles.

This is it now.

Not bad for a first attempt if I do say so myself.