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A few weeks ago our friend Joe asked me if I could help him pick out some furniture for his new apartment, he knows I woodwork for fun and figured I could help him not get ripped off. I told him that IMO the best deals on quality furniture were antiques from the '30s and '40s mainly, because they are typically very well made, have had 70 years for any problems to show up and aren't usually collectible and so are affordable. So last weekend Becca and I took Joe antiquing (or mantiquing as we decided to call it) to help him find some bedroom furniture.
While we were out there Becca and I continued our long running search for a nice dresser.

Joe made out very well and found a terrific matching set of mahogany bedroom furniture - a good sized dresser with mirror and a pair of matching nightstands - made in the '40s probably post war.

Here's our chest. The dealer didn't have much information just that it was purchased in Pennsylvania and (incorrectly) stated that it was built in the 1870s. It's most likely a pre-Civil War piece from around 1840-50 according to several people on the woodnet.net woodworking forums I post at. Looking closely at the drawer and carcass construction it's clearly handmade. It's quite a site to see the knife lines from laying out the dovetails on the drawers and the beveled undersides of the drawer bottoms that were clearly done with a hand plane. It appears to be a mix of solid mahogany, pine, poplar and mahogany crotch veneer.

Here's how it looked when we got it in the garage. There's a backsplash that I took off before snapping the pictures, it had been reattached badly by a former owner and had taken the brunt of a white paint splatter attack at some point and needed more work than the rest.

After a few hours of gentle cleaning to get the worst of the grime off:

It's finished in shellac so will be easy to repair. I already started a bit on the top drawers with some gentle rubbing with a denatured alcohol soaked rag. The shellac melted right away just like it were new and began repairing itself. That's pretty much how I'll repair the finish on the whole thing, just remelt all the shellac and polish like I would if I were putting it on fresh. Fortunately I use shellac for just about all of my finishing work on new projects so I'm very well prepared to work with it now.

One of the drawers - these are just about the most perfect half-blind dovetails I've ever seen, they look better than mine do new!

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