2/22/2009 Save The Rotten Step Back Cupboard - Pocono Primitives

2/22/2009 - Save The Rotten Step Back Challenge - (Part 1)

This piece was perhaps destined for the woodpile or the landfill as it had some serious rot on the bottom and the top 1 to 2 feet of the cupboard had been cut off. It is quite an early piece with hand forged nails, wide plank back and hand planed boards but it is almost beyond saving. It apparently was used in a home for many years as the gaps in the back boards were sealed with some sort of old oil cloth and it had at least 3 layers of wallpaper in the upper section probably to seal out bugs and varmits. (see following "before" pics):

The wallpaper, the cut off top, and the bottom rot

The notable gap in the sides of the bottom section

Wide plank back

View of bottom rot

View of bottom rot

The objective with this piece is not to restore it but to bring it to a state of being a usable and displayable piece of furniture and at the same time save as much of the original piece and its original paint as possible. Because so much of the top had been cut off, I decided that it would never look right as an open step back because the top section was too short and adding to it's height just wasn't practical. Instead, I decided to put drawers in the top section, along the lines of our small apothecary cupboard (see pic below) but much larger and with 9 large drawers instead of 12 small ones.

Our small apothecary cupboard - Item # 61

Step 1 would be to deal with the rot at the bottom. I removed the door then cut several inches off the entire bottom to square up the bottom and to get back to solid wood.

Most of rot was cut off bottom and bottom was squared up

It was now time to deal with the large gaps in the sides of the base of the cupboard. This required a major disaasembly to realign the side boards.

Base disassembled

Then the base was reaasembled and was boxed in to stabilize everything. Then a new bottom shelf was added.

Boxed in base and new bottom shelf

Then a simple base trim was added to the bottom of the cupboard. Also, the door was trimmed to size and reinstalled. I was able to utilize the original hinge positions on the cupboard but had to remortise the hinges on the door. The old mortises were filled with a thin slice of old wood and will be touched up so they do not show when the final paint matching is done.

Base trim - note the gaps in the sides of the base are gone now

The original two shelves in the base were pretty nasty with pieces of early 1900's newspapers from Williamsport, PA stuck to them and who knows what else - I cleaned them as well as I could without doing any sanding but then decided to flip them over as the undersides had a nice patina and were cleaner.

Original shelves after being flipped over

The bottom half is now about done except for the final painting and paint matching. The next step is to start on the nine drawers on the top. I built an insert to frame the nine, 6" by 10" drawers. This insert will be dropped into the cupboard from the top and then attached. The insert is designed to have the drawer frame be flush with the front trim boards of the cupboard.

Drawer frame insert

The insert was painted with a brown wash and then installed. The wash was a walnut color brown latex paint cut to about 50% with water to make a wash that gives an older look than would stain or full strength paint.

Insert

(To Be Continued . . . I will try to work a few evenings this coming week to finish this project up and will publish the results sometime after that).

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2/28/2009 - Save The Rotten Step Back Challenge - (Part 2)

I was able to spend three evenings on this project this week. The first step was to close in the top and add a top molding. The molding is just a 1-1/2" by 1" strip of pine with a bevel to the mid point of the strip.

Then came the biggest job of the project - making 9 dovetailed drawers. This took two evenings - the dovetails drawers were made using a basic dovetail jig with a template for half blind dovetails.

All that remains is to do the final paint matching. I will try to get that done next week so I can move on to the next project which will be widening and lengthening an antique rope bed to accomodate a queen size mattress.

(To Be Continued . . . )

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3/6/2009 - Save The Rotten Step Back Challenge - (Part 3)

Here are the images of the final product. The paint was matched as close as possible by trial and error. Most of the front of the cupboard is the original paint - the sides, the drawers, trim pieces, etc were painted with a thin wash of the matching color. All the newly painted areas were then rubbed with steel wool to give an aged, dry paint effect. The newly painted areas then were strategically touched up with a dry brush of a brown wash and some very subtle touches of black. These areas were then steel wooled again to blend in the newly added paint. This process is continued until you get a decent match of both color and aging.

I have started on the rope bed modification mentioned above - will post that one in a week or so if I get some time to work on it in the evenings.

dh