Restoring An Heirloom Cabinet

So last year I inherited a fifty-year-old cabinet. It had previously belonged to a doctor, who had swapped it with my artist Grandpa for one of his paintings:

It was in pretty poor condition - and smelled fragrantly of iodine:

Check out the ring marks. I do like the beaten-up tin boxes, however:

Decades of paint layers were crumbling off:

So the first step, natch, was to sand that sucker down. Very carefully, by hand, of course.

Yeah, who am I kidding, I totally broke out the power sander:

Many hours later (sanding is a lot harder than you think it's going to be), every nerve in my body was jangling, and I was coated in a delightful layer of fifty-year-old white dust to boot. Lovely.

Next steps - paint the base coat, paint the top coat, distress the top coat slightly to reveal the base coat at strategic points (yeah, the irony of taking a distressed cabinet and spending hours of work to distress it some more), and accessorise.

Watch this space...

Have you ever tried your hand at furniture restoration?