Do You Upcycle Furniture?
Upcycling antique furniture is a great way to get nice furniture for your home and grow your woodworking skills. While don’t do it much anymore, I’ve upcycled many found pieces over the years and they were great learning experiences.
One of my first and one of my favorite upcycles. Sadly I cant find a before picture. But it was thrown to the curb by the previous owner.
What to look for in furniture to Upcycle
Find an antique - Solid wood construction, with some plywood. If it’s built from particle board or from Ikea it’s probably not worth the trouble.
The body (carcass) of the piece is in reasonably sound condition. Drawers can be rebuilt, tops replaced, but if the body is falling apart or damaged, it’s probably too far gone.
It’s not nasty - Dirty is one thing and can be cleaned but if it’s covered in an oily sludge, or reeks of cigarette smoke you probably want to pass
You have a vision for what it can be. if you just grab every curb alert you find you’ll have a garage full of potential projects that you’ll have to throw away when you move. At least that’s what happened to me.
Refinishing the end-table my Papa Built
Why did people paint things harvest gold in the 1970s? Anyway… My mom thinks my grandfather built this in high school shop class back in the 1940’s. Then it was savagely attacked by the 1970’s and painted this awful color. I spent a few days getting off all this lead based paint.
This is one of my earlier videos so the quality isn’t great.
Dresser Turned Window Seat
Again this is an old video but I did a lot of work on this found dresser to turn it into a window seat.
Turning an old headboard into bench
Sometimes you find something and have a vision for how you can use it. I don’t even remember where I found this old headboard. But it made a nice bench for outside.
I hope this inspires you on your woodworking journey
Today, my shop is full of professional grade tools. Is pretty big, and it’s dedicated. When I made these projects I could work outside or in my 13x13 little shop. I didn’t have 1/3 of the tools I have now and they were all “entry-level.” I hope you see from this that you don’t need a shop full of tools or tons of experience to love woodworking and make something awesome.
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