Bombay Furniture Makeover - Bringing New Life to an Old TV Stand

This is my first project and potential furniture flip. This started out as a TV stand we purchased years ago from Bombay furniture. It had been in our attic for years and it seemed perfect for a learning project. In this blog I am going to share my makeover idea and the many issues I faced.

Materials Used for This Project

1/2” birch plywood for new table back and drawer
Shuhang 12” drawer slides
Sherwin-Williams Extreme Bond Primer
Sherwin-Williams Pewter Green and Shitake Interior Acrylic Latex
MINWAX Polycrylic Clear Satin
DAP Plastic Wood Filler
Graco D360 VSP Sprayer
Kreg 720 Pocket Hole Jig
Kreg Multi-Mark Tool
Dewalt Orbital Sander
Hula Home Mist Bottle
Krud Kutter

So What Shall it Become?

I decided to make this into a nightstand/side table. That meant I needed to replace the back so there was no hole and to add a drawer. So first things first - cleaning. I used Krud Kutter to remove all of the grime and dirt that had accumulated on it all of those years in the attic. After that, since it was Bombay furniture, it came apart, making it easier to scuff sand all of the pieces. Since I was going to paint it, I didn’t need to remove the old finish, so I will prime all of the pieces with Sherwin-Williams Extreme Bond Primer.

Making the Back and the Drawer

I put the sides of the table back on and measured for the new back panel. I cut it out of 1/2” birch plywood on my table saw. (Mistake: After the first cut I realized that the fence on the table saw was (1) not square to the blade and (2) slipping. Always make sure your saws are calibrated before cutting or you will waste both time and money.) After all pieces were cut, I primed and painted everything. When dry, I attached the back to the two sides of the table using four pocket holes.

Building the drawer was a different matter as I had never built one before. I wanted the drawer facing to be flush with the two sides of the table, so I measured from there to about a 1/2” from the back. The drawer slides were 1/2” thick so I took off 1” from the width of the drawer back and front, and this is where I made my first mistake. They were measured to the full width of the drawer, not taking in account the thickness of the drawer sides. So because of that mismeasurement, the front and back were going to sit on top of the sides not inside the sides of the drawer (I didn’t yet fully comprehend the impact of that mistake). I staged the fit, it all looked good, and I drilled my pocket holes in the front and back panel. When I went to screw them on, I then realized my mistake; since the panels sat on top of the sides instead of inside the sides, the screws in the pocket holes had nothing to bite on. What a rookie mistake. So, I decided to drill pocket holes in the sides to attach the front and back. Well, now I had pocket holes all over the place, so I decided to fill them in with wood filler and paint the drawers. Since I used plywood for the drawer, I needed to hide the plywood layers on the exposed edges. I could have used edge binding but I didn’t have any, so I filled in with wood filler and then sanded the edges smooth. Live and learn. One tip for drilling the pocket hole screws; set the drill setting to the lowest setting possible so that you don’t set the screws in the holes too far and risk punching through the other side.

For the drawer bottom, I also used 1/2” birch plywood and I installed it in dado’s a 1/4” deep and 1/2’ wide on all sides of the drawers. I don’t have a dado set, so I cut it out with multiple passes on my table saw. This is where the Kreg Multi-Tool really came in handy. I used it to set the blade to a 1/4” high and then to set the fence for the first pass and the second pass to establish the full width of the cut. I then needed to move the fence to make one more pass to cut out the remaining wood. Using the Multi-Tool was so much easier than using a tape measure.

Even though I made several mistakes I had to correct, the following YouTube video from Shara Woodshop Diaries taught me quite a bit and if you want to build and measure drawers, I highly recommend it. It is actually one of a series that puts it all together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o6c_lQm9FE

The Fun Part, Painting

This was not a big piece and I could have used a brush, but I wanted to try out the Graco D360 sprayer I had purchased. As I said, I could have brushed the paint on, but in my opinion, if you really want a smooth surface, spraying is the way to go. I sprayed two coats on both the drawer and the table and top (the top was still detached from the table). Using the Graco was really nice. Since it is variable speed, I used the lowest setting, which in hindsight was too low and needed to be bumped up a little bit. Afterwards I did find some light spots and needed to touch up with a brush.

I let the paint dry overnight and then sprayed two layers of top coat using MINWAX Clear Sating Polycrylic on the sides and legs and three coats on the top; sanding lightly with 220 grit sandpaper between coats.

Putting it all together

So everything was painted and now time to install the drawer. I used two small pieces of scrap 1/2” plywood on the inside left and right to set the drawer slides on to give a guide to where to screw them in to the sides and to the drawer. Since I wanted the door face to be flush with the sides, I had to make sure the front of the slides were set back a distance equal to the thickness of the face, or 1/2”. Slides and drawer installation was fairly uneventful. Now it was time to attach the drawer face.

Again the multi-tool came in handy when measuring the placement for the drawer face to make sure the gap on each side was even. I measured the bottom gap and the two side gaps. The top basically took care of itself. For the side gap measurement, I measured the gap close to the bottom of the face (that was a mistake not measuring both top and bottom). I clamped it onto the drawer and drilled the holes to attach it. So exciting that I was about to finish my first drawer!

You are Kidding, Right?

I put the drawer on the slides and slid it in. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of what I saw but the gap between the face of the drawer and the sides was not the same from top to bottom. It looked horrible. I thought, how could I have made such a mistake? Was the face not cut squarely? So I took my rafter square and the drawer face was square on all sides. I then checked the sides of the table and they were not square. I guess they never were because they were attached to the top with dowels. You could never tell before because there was just an opening, but now you put a rectangular drawer in that space and you find out the flaw in the table assembly. The left and right side were out of square by about two degrees. So, I recut the face. making the sides of the face two degrees out of square to basically match the “out of square” opening. Since the difference was so small, you can’t tell anything is out of square and now it looks perfectly centered. But I had to prime and paint the new face, again.

The Finished Product

For my first product, I am pretty satisfied. One of the things I learned, or relearned, is that in any project there will be unknowns or mistakes made that you will have to figure out how to deal with. But you think through the issue and decide the best way to address it. I certainly learned a few lessons about building and measuring drawers and about how to deal with potential defects in the piece of furniture you are working with. All in all, The Next Season for this table looks bright.