Busy, busy. I got my house-number sign restored, repainted and back up.

Since I’m limited in what I can do because of a (hopefully temporary) knee injury, I’m tackling a project I meant to do long ago. When my husband’s grandfather died we rescued a dresser that was used in the garage as a work bench. It was going to the dump because no one wanted it at the garage sale. It was made out of solid quarter-sawn white oak but was banged up and painted black and who knows what other colors underneath (I saw some blue and some green) and had backboards nailed to it probably to clamp on vices. It had clear glass knobs that didn’t look right with it and some pieces of linoleum glued to the top. I stripped one drawer on the right to see the pretty quarter-sawn oak but decided to paint the stripped drawer back to black, got the linoleum off and sanded and painted the top. Still trash (picture below) but just wait, someday it will be my treasure!

At some point, I’d like to strip it back and restore it to it’s original condition but I need something to bring red into one side of my living room. I’m leaving the black color and adding dark green in places and then crackling colonial red on top. It will give me a place for an antique table lamp and some pictures as well as magazine storage. I like the curved bow on the front of the top and the little detail cuts in the apron on the bottom front.

I like the unique “dovetail-like” joinery on the sides. I did a little research (I love research!) and I found this website. The joinery is called Knapp’s pin and crescent drawer joints and dates between 1870 and 1900. I have seen in woodworking catalogues the past couple of years, a tool that reproduces that kind of joinery. See what it looks like below or follow the link to the website listed for history of the joint. The joints are very tight on all the drawers over 100 years later!

As we were loading up the dresser to bring it home, we were given a plastic sack and was told this was the original hardware for the dresser. They were taken off and the paint stripped off of them and polished back up and stored away. I’m excited to have the original hardware and the work was already done on them.

I know this type of dresser is not valuable monetarily but it is so valuable to me knowing someone from the Victorian era had this dresser and used it. The wood is so superior to the stuff you get today and antiques just never go out of style. Now starts the fun stuff.