My father bought a dresser at a garage sale. I think he paid about ten to fifteen bucks for it, not very much. Over the next few weekends, he labored in the garage to remove the many layers of paint covering the wood. When done, he had a beautiful oak dresser. I was fifteen years old at the time, and it became my dresser to use. Fast forward to today.
I still use the same dresser and it still is beautiful oak. However, it is also showing its age. I don’t know how old it was when my father bought it, but the many layers of paint suggest at least a couple of decades. I’ve been using it for forty-one years now. That’s a lot of wear and tear on a piece of furniture. Additionally, it has moved from Iowa to Arkansas and back, and been exposed to a variety of weather conditions. It was time for some work.
The three drawers across the top row are small. Two are only a hand’s breadth wide. The middle drawer takes up the rest of the space and has a warded lock that doesn’t work. Below that, stacked vertically, are two drawers that span the width of the whole dresser, one of which also has a warded lock. Those are the ones that needed work.
Over time, the drawer bottoms sagged. As they sagged, they rubbed against the drawer stops (the parts that keep the drawers from going too far in). This gradually scraped a couple of tracks through the bottoms until going all the way through. Since these gouges ran about half an inch wide, patching would not work. The entire bottom panel needed to be replaced.
A typical drawer of this type has a rigid box for the four sides: front, back, left, right. The front and sides have a groove cut near the bottom so the boards that make the bottom of the drawer can slide in. The back panel is shorter, just touching the bottom board. Once all the pieces are in place, a few small nails are driven through the bottom and into the back panel to keep things from moving.
The plan was to get some quarter-inch plywood with a finished side, cut it to fit the drawers, and then replace the old bottoms with the new. Cutting was easy enough with the table saw. Just needed to pull the small nails from the drawer, slide the old bottom out, and slide the new one in. Piece of cake, or it should have been.
As mentioned, the dresser is old. The wood is old and subject to things like cracking, splintering, or just bits falling off. On one of the drawers, that is exactly what happened. Not on the bottom, of course, because that would have been easy to handle. No, the damage was on the back and one of the sides. Not to be left out, the glue in the dovetail joints on the other drawer had disintegrated and the whole thing was ready to fall apart.
The loose joints were easy to fix. I popped all the boards apart and cleaned out the joints. After applying new glue, I clamped them and left them to cure. The new bottom slid in easily. A few tacks later and the drawer was ready for a good oiling to help with the dry wood.
The rough drawer took way more work. Its joints were also loose, so I disassembled the whole thing. This made it easier to work on the broken pieces. The back board had splintered along the bottom and was missing quite a bit of wood. Most of it would not reach the bottom when assembled.
The damaged side-board was broken along the groove for the bottom piece. Much of the lower section of the side showed rounding from years of friction. That made it harder to fix since it did not provide for a straight clamping surface.
For both of these items, I measured their lengths and thicknesses and bought some wood to match. The new pieces would be too big, but that’s what I wanted. After taking many measurements and double checking everything, I used the table saw to remove the damaged sections from both original boards. Then I glued the new boards onto the freshly sawn straight surfaces.
Glue takes a while to set if you do it right. That meant that my simple bottom replacement had now taken two days and still wasn’t done. Still, better to do it right.
The next day (making day three), I cut the replaced parts down to size. In the side board, I cut the groove for the bottom board. These are times when it really pays to have a table saw, even a cheap one. With all the parts repaired, I reassembled the drawer and clamped everything up.
Day four came around, and I could remove the clamps, oil the drawer, and put it back into service. Well, not into service yet. I really want to make sure the wood oil is not going to soak into any clothes, so I will wait about a week. Then, it would be nice to add a useful and decorative drawer liner. Also, I need to have a moment without laziness so I will go through the effort of putting the clothes away. That’s a lot of waiting.
Now, my forty, fifty, sixty, or more years-old dresser is ready to take on a few more decades. With proper care, it could last centuries, though I don’t know if I can still get proper oils then. It would be nice to fix the two locks and get some keys, but that’s a lower priority.
My next furniture project would be to repair a chest I made in junior high school. It has been to more states than the dresser, as far as I know. Its oak and walnut are cracked, despite my best attempts at care. The thing was dropped at one point when fully loaded with weight, and that damaged some of the joints. My current dovetail jig is not wide enough to redo the sides, so I may go with simple finger joints. Anyway, that will have to wait until I have more time and a lot less laziness.