In my previous posts I showed you the little antique dresser I was working on. When I took the replacement hardware off I came across an odd screw and nut. As I unscrewed it I was surprised that the nut was just soldered wire. How ingenious if you didn’t have a nut to fit. It was very strong, too, and it screwed on and off just like a nut. It looks a bit crude but works great. If you wrapped the wire around the threads a bit more carefully, it would be a great way to make a nut to fit any size screw (in this case it didn’t matter, it worked great even messy.) I suppose you’d wrap the copper around the threads tightly and then unscrew it carefully and wipe with flux and solder it while it was off of the screw threads. I’m not sure if the solder would bond to the screw if you soldered it in place while it was on the screw or not (depends on the metal I think.)

I can think of many times I could have saved myself a trip to the hardware store looking for an odd-sized nut I didn’t have on hand because I do have copper wire and soldering tools. I wouldn’t use it for anything that would carry weight or could be dangerous in case of failure, but for furniture hardware and the like it is a great idea I think.

Kelly Kuppersmith of Athens, GA sent me pictures of the linoleum he found in his house. Click on the thumbnail below for a slideshow of his photos.   Via email……

(I thought they were pretty cool. The “rug” that was in my dining room was covered by a newspaper dated Sept 19, 1965.)

If anyone can further date these it would be appreciated. Since his was covered by 1965 newspapers is probably much older than that.

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Please read the history of linoleum here. Vinyl became popular in the 60s and nearly took the place of linoleum as new flooring. But linoleum is making a comeback because it is made from natural materials. Here is a link to my Linoleum Page.

If you have pictures of your antique or vintage linoleum, please send me your photos and I’ll include them in my blog with credits to you. Many of our linoleum patterns aren’t shown in the Linoleum book by Jane Powell (great book!!.) It would be nice to get a really good additional collection with clues (like under dated newspapers etc.) to try and date our linoleum.

Please make a notation if you are from the Erie area as I’ll include them in the Erie links, too. Email photos to: thisolderiehouse@verizon.net

I finished the antique dresser I was working on. I have the original hardware back on. Some of the hardware holes had been filled with dowels and I had to knock those out. Otherwise they went back to their original places easily.

The picture makes the dresser look too shiny but in reality it isn’t near the shiny look the picture shows. I painted some dark green over the black but left some black showing through. Then I used a crackle medium before using the colonial red paint. Then I took some water-based fumed-oak color of dye and rubbed it in to dull the red and give it a little aged look. I finished the dresser with 2 water-based satin urethane coats because my Waterlox had gelled up and could not be used. I’m excited about the extra storage I’ll have plus the additional space to display my collectibles.

My next post will show you the “mickey-moused” hardware that I found when I took off the mismatched hardware. Those old timers really had a knack for invention. (I used the “cutout” function for the pictures below because my floors aren’t refinished yet. That’s my next big project.)

Before

After

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.