How-To Blog

Furniture refinishing is my labor of love, and here, I make accessible my experience through how-to guides and professional furniture repair examples.

The Furniture Was Good, The People Were Better

I never planned to keep doing this. Furniture was a stop-gap, a bridge to my next career after quitting medicine. But slowly, with every new project, every new skill acquired, and every new relationship, something surprising revealed itself, like discovering walnut’s woodgrain under layers of decades-old paint: I love this work. And when I leave…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

What is the Best (and Safest) Furniture Polish?

Furniture refinishing complete and their piece delivered, I turn to leave the customer’s home. “Before you go, I have a question” the customer asks. I turn around, knowing the question before they ask it. “What’s the best furniture polish?” You might be thinking, Dude, if this is such a common question, why don’t you just…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Refinish Teak Danish Modern Furniture

When a piece of teak furniture walks into your shop, you pause, you appreciate, you stare. The light hits it differently, just better, a little warmer. And then it sits there in your shop and waits and waits and waits. Because teak’s beauty is intimidating! You don’t want to mess it up! So you wait,…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Refinish (and Modernize) a 1950s Mahogany Dresser

Mahogany finishes have faded from glory. Hard. Not once in my furniture refinishing career has a customer asked me for a “mahogany” finish. That deep, almost purplish, bing-cherry red has been cast aside for lighter, beachier tones. There’s nothing wrong with a mahogany finish. It was vogue, once. But no more, lost in the backwaters…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

The Top 10 Furniture Tools for Furniture Refinishing

There’s something to be said for getting the job done with whatever tools you have. It’s commendable, respectable, admirably resourceful. But there’s also something to be said for getting the job done in an hour—because you have the right tools—and freeing up your weekend for the completion of more honey-do’s. Both approaches have merit, and…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How I Brought a 1940s Lane Cedar Chest Back From the Dead

It’s not every day a piece of Lane Furniture walks into my shop. When that day dawns, I seize it! Because the aesthetics, particularly of these nearly 100 year old cedar “hope” chests, haven’t been duplicated since. Any good furniture restoration begins with a vision. Is the ultimate goal authentic, time-period-specific restoration? Is the goal…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Replace a Veneer Panel

At times, the best solution for damaged and chipped veneer is complete replacement. Veneer panels can lose their grip with time’s exposure to the elements, and as veneer begins to peel away, more and more veneer is chipped from the panel. If you think your veneer is salvageable, here’s a guide to repairing veneer with…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Replace Veneer with Paint

If at first glance, this seems impossible, or absurd, I felt the same way. But when this furniture repair strategy is applied to the right situation, there’s no better way to repair veneer. For larger sections of veneer damage—say, you need to replace an entire side panel on a dresser—paint would be labor intensive and…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Why I Refinish Furniture

Many days, I wonder if it’s worth it. To invest all this effort and energy, just to refinish a single piece of furniture, am I crazy? Many days I believe I’m off my Stickley rocker, but if what I do fails to possess a modicum of madness, then my work quickly descends into deadness. I’ve…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Clean Wood Furniture Like a Professional

“So, how do I clean my furniture?” After I deliver a piece of furniture back to their owner after restoration, this is the question I receive the most. Figured it was time to outline my simple approach in detail. To maintain the beauty and longevity of your furniture, whether it’s wood or upholstery, a professional…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Remove Paint from Furniture

In my early work on furniture, I’ll be honest: I didn’t know chemical stripper existed. If paint needed removal from my furniture, I sanded it off. While effective in removing the paint—eventually, with enough elbow grease and sheets of sandpaper—it’s deleterious to the overall quality of the work, and at times, it creates more work!…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Replace Old and Worn-Out Drawer Runners

Drawer runners are an essential part of your dresser’s functionality, helping the drawers glide in and out smoothly. Over time, these runners can wear out due to heavy use, causing your drawers to stick or become difficult to open. (Side note: the best solution is often prevention. Over loading of drawers with too many items…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Use a Paint Sprayer on Furniture

On Facebook Marketplace, I found this classic midcentury dresser: I loved its original brass drawer pulls and wavy contoured drawers. With six drawers of ample storage space, it teemed with potential… but also with immense damage (the video below goes into more detail here, including how I repaired the damage). To bring this piece into…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

A Guide to Professional Furniture Painting

The key to professional furniture painting is diligent preparation. This step is also the longest step of the process. Last week, I was hired to refinish and repaint a pair of nightstands. They will serve as our example as I walk you through the process! Preparation Always start with repairs first. For example, this piece…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

2 Refinishing Tips That Elevate Quality

You don’t know what you need to know until you know it… unless you learn from my mistakes! Last week, I professionally refinished a midcentury dining room table. It’s a stunningly cool piece of timeless furniture (and currently for sale in my showroom for $495). As I refinished the piece, I got to thinking about…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Whitewash Furniture (A Dresser Transformation)

I love refinishing furniture. That’s what I do. Mostly, my refinishing keeps me to stain, toner, and lacquer—the classics. But on occasion, I fancy a change-up. For the past week, I’d worked on and finished this dresser’s lowboy brother and nightstand sisters. In that process, I’d lived in the world of lacquer of toner (of…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

How to Sausalito Finish (Pottery Barn Inspired) of a Dresser

Adding the two-toned element of wood to a piece doesn’t always require wood. The Sausalito finish, patterned after Pottery Barn, is a clean finish that gave this dresser the faux wood contrast I wanted. Shout out to @blacksheep.house (Instagram) for the original recipe that I adapted for this video. She color matched the paint, Rugged Tan by…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Retro Red Dresser Refurbishment and Restoration

I was so enthused by this project that I forgot to take the before photos… but that’s okay! Just imagine these two dressers as black and riddled by pervasive scratches and dents from two decades of wear and tear. Alright, with that image in mind, let’s talk refurbishment and paint. In my mind, this set’s…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Colonial Chest of Drawers Makeover and Restoration

Sensibly, we strive to maintain a wooden element to any refurbishment. Paint pops best when complimented by wood grain. For this piece, it was fully painted out of the factory, but the beautiful wood grain veneer on the dresser’s top was too good to exclude from the restoration. The original brass drawer pulls were tarnished……

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Lane Furniture Paul Evans’ Style Brutalist Pueblo Dresser

When this piece stumbled into my life, my jaw dropped. I’d never seen anything like it. And to think a major furniture manufacturer commissioned an artist to help style its’ hand-place geometric, brutalist relief? To achieve the necessary restoration, which was really just a tune-up to its original form, I removed the finish from the…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Lane Acclaim Side Table Restoration

This project was a commissioned piece from a local artist in Asheville. She has an eye for midcentury gems! But this Lane Acclaim side table needed serious work. The most important detail in working with this collection is to be delicate. Thus, I avoided sanding for two reasons: 1) I did not want to sand…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Jack Cartwright for Founders Furniture Cabinet Restoration

This midcentury cabinet (circa 1960) is a timeless classic. And all credit belongs to its designer, the household name of midcentury modern houses: Jack Cartwright. Hailing from Michigan, he was lead designer at Founders Furniture in the late 1950s through early 1960s, where he crafted enduring midcentury classics. Though his work with Founders was brief,…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Danish Modern Chair Restoration and Refinish

Made in Denmark by Tarm Stole Mobelfabrik. Designed by Erik Ole Jorgenson. Circa 1960s. 100% Burmese teakwood. In approaching this piece’s restoration, color was the priority. I wanted to highlight the underlying orange tones of the teakwood which blend well with the mid-century modern aesthetic. I sanded off the previous finish, which was a combination…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD

Zen and the Art of Career Change

Whatever’s happened didn’t happen like I thought it would. Nor did it happen fast. Nor have I seen any of it coming. I graduated from medical school at The University of Oklahoma, then completed a psychiatry residency at The University of California, Irvine, and earned my board-certification. It was September of 2022. I’d been living…

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by Ryan Fightmaster, MD