After a week of trips to the hardware store, sweating in the once-a-year heat wave we’ve been having lately, sanding, gluing, staining, and oiling, I have discovered three things:
1. I love Minwax Red Mahogany Stain. It is the best and it was the perfect match to restore the six board antique chest.
2. I also love Gojo. It removes everything I manage to get on my hands minus the death factor associated with mineral spirits and paint thinner, and it’s exfoliating. So there you go, you should try it.
3. Happy mistakes. I learned this from my elementary school art teacher who was constantly facing budget cuts and used the term to keep us from running through a year’s worth of construction paper and paste in one week. And I am now applying this when I mess something up and can’t bear to go back and fix it. Most notably when I didn’t get every last speck of paint off the bureau and it created a sort of spotted (or pleasantly aged) effect when stained. But I did paint the knobs teal, so you can hardly tell…
And here are the finished products! I threw some intermediate pictures in there to show the process.
The Chest:
The Bureau:
The Sewing Machine Table:
Now that the furniture is all ready to go, I’ve moved on to the textile portion of my first apartment decoration 
Coming soon: how to make a duvet cover for $20.
Nice work.