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There is a dresser on my husband’s side of the bed that is older than anything else we own.
It belonged to his grandmother. I thought it was from the thirties. It turned out I was close, and I only found out because I finally went looking.
It is not an heirloom in the sense of being handled carefully. The top drawer is where his keys go, and his wallet, and whatever was in his pockets. The drawers underneath hold linens and the travel things you only need twice a year. It has been in service for something like ninety years and it looks like it, and for a long time I have been meaning to do something about that.
Restoring an old dresser sounds like a weekend and a sander. It turns out it was neither.
What it actually does
Nothing in this house is behind glass.
The dresser is the clearest version of that. Ninety years old, and its job is holding keys.
I have written before about my mother’s table, which she bought the year I was born and which has been used every single day since. Keeping by using is the whole argument there. The dresser is the same idea a generation further back and with less ceremony about it, because nobody has ever once described it as a piece. It is where the keys go.
What it turned out to be
The story that a dresser keeps about itself is in its drawers, so I pulled them out and took a flashlight to them.
The dovetails are perfectly uniform, which means machine cut, which means after about 1890. There are no saw marks anywhere. The back panel is set into the case rather than nailed across the outside of it, and the drawer bottoms are solid wood sitting in grooves rather than plywood. Both of those are how better furniture was built and how cheap furniture was not. There are wooden plugs over the screws, because somebody did not want to look at screws.
It has no feet. It sits on a shaped skirt board with a scrolled cutout across the front, which is a form borrowed straight from eighteenth century American case furniture. The knobs are turned, with a bullseye face.
Put together, that is a good American factory piece, Colonial Revival, somewhere around 1915 to 1935.
Which means it was already pretending. It was made in the twenties or thirties to look like something from a hundred and fifty years earlier, at a moment when the country was feeling sentimental about its own past. A reproduction, and now old enough to be an antique in its own right.
Refinishing is stripping.
There is no maker’s mark on it anywhere. I checked the drawers, the back, underneath. That turns out to be the ordinary outcome rather than a mystery: good regional factories made thousands of these and almost none of them are recorded anywhere, because they were never worth recording.
Two kinds of marks
This is where I got stuck for a long time, and the thing that unstuck it was realizing there are two different things on that dresser and I had been treating them as one.
The marks of use are the value, not the flaw.
There is wear. Soft spots where hands have been, a finish gone thin at the drawer pulls, edges rounded off by ninety years of people opening the same drawer the same way. That is a record. It is the closest thing the piece has to a memory, and it is not damage.
And then there is paint.
Somebody, at some point, painted a room and did not cover the furniture. Probably me, when my children were small and every project turned into a circus. That is not a record of anything. It is an accident that happened to land on it.
The marks of use are the value, not the flaw. A paint splatter is just a paint splatter.
So the rule I landed on: keep what the family put there. Take off what that painter did.
Which sounds obvious written down, and was not obvious at all while I was standing there wondering whether to sand the whole top.
Restoring an old dresser without taking its history off
The mistake I nearly made was treating this as refinishing. Refinishing is stripping. Stripping takes the paint or finish off and everything underneath it, including the ninety years.
What I actually needed was much smaller.
Here is what it actually took.
Cobwebs first, with a dry cloth and a brush, before anything else.
Then sandpaper, but only on the paint splatters and on the places around the knobs where the old finish had gone gummy from years of hands. Nowhere else. The rest of the piece was not the problem.
Then Murphy’s Oil Soap and a hose, outside, and then I left it in the shade to dry all the way through. Wet wood reads two shades darker than dry wood, so there is no point standing there judging it until it is finished drying.
Then Restor-A-Finish on a rag. On, and straight off again. Use a cloth for light work, or steel wool for the deeper marks, per the label. Then Feed-N-Wax, orange oil or lemon oil after to maintain. This is the part that makes it look cared for rather than just cleaned.
Two things about the plugs, because they change how you work.
Do not sand the top hard. Just enough to get the paint off.
And expect any plugs over screws to come up darker than the wood around them. Their faces are end grain and end grain drinks finish. That is not a mistake, it is just what happens, and it is the moment people panic and start over.
The part I got wrong
Restor-A-Finish is tinted. That is the whole thing to understand about it, and I did not understand it until the rag was already on the wood.
Where the old finish is still there, it revives what it finds. Where the finish has worn away completely, bare wood drinks the tint. I used Walnut, and every spot that had worn through came up as a brown patch against the rest of it.
Neutral would not have saved me. It would have done the opposite and left those same spots pale.
So the honest advice is buy two or three shades and test them somewhere nobody will ever look. The side of the case near the wall, the underside of the top, the inside face of the skirt. Not the top, and not a drawer front. At ten dollars a can it is the cheapest insurance there is, and the color is the only part of this you cannot walk back.
And know what this is. It is a freshen up, not a refinish. If an even, perfect finish is what you are after, then stripping it is the honest answer, and you will take the ninety years off along with the patches.
Why I am not painting it yet
I have thought about painting it. A deep blue, or a green. It would look wonderful and I might still do it.
Do what you can undo first.
But paint is a one-way door.
I can paint over a restored finish any afternoon I decide to. I cannot unpaint back to ninety-year-old wood. So the order is not really a question of taste, it is a question of which decision I can take back — and that one is only reversible in one direction.
Do what you can undo first.
So: a good scrub, the splatters off, and Restor-A-Finish. And then we live with it for a while and see whether I still want it blue.
It is in the hallway for now, because the room it belongs in is about to be taken apart. The bedroom is next, and this dresser is the first thing finished in it. Wallpaper is next, and I have not picked it yet.
So, would you paint it? I have not decided, and I would like to know what you would do.
