Edwardian Console

Console Before Refinishing

Console After

This console was an extraordinarily large piece of furniture. It's hard to judge the scale of this piece standing alone, but it comes up to the center of my five foot frame and is approximately six feet wide and twenty-one inches deep in the middle.

It had many surface scratches and had seen some wear, mostly on the top where the veneer had worn off and on the sides where the veneer had peeled off on one side and was half gone on the other. Before anything else could be done, I needed to repair that veneer on the one side and add a section to the missing left side. Luckily I was able to match the existing veneer pretty close. With veneer it's a gamble, because most of these pieces were done many years ago and the veneer they used was quite different from today's selection, but I was satisfied the veneer was appropriate for this piece and blended quite nicely.

Unfortunately, this very large piece of furniture would not accept a complete strip because the veneer on the back edge was made with paper veneer on top of particleboard. This piece is a reproduction, therefore the manufacture used particleboard instead of solid wood and used paper veneer instead of wood veneer for the edging detail.

This type of veneer cannot be stripped. It would be like applying sandpaper to a piece of paper. It would completely wear it away, destroying the surface. Since it wasn't in the budge for a complete new veneer, the next best thing is to camouflage the flawed areas with stain, touching them up so they are not as noticeable, then applying multiple coats of polyurethane to preserve the new finish. Once the furniture had received a new topcoat of stain, it refreshed the entire surface and hid the smaller scratches quite well. All in all it was a good, sturdy piece with a new look.