Removing Wood Plugs

Today I'm working on a lot of different projects:
- Revamping my office
- Painting file cabinets
- Painting the desktop
- Painting my new thrift store find

I still want to know when is the best day and time to go thrift store shopping, so I'm going to conduct an experiment. The salesman at Goodwill said Saturday is a great day because of all the drop offs, so I'm going to drop by there sometime this afternoon to check it out. There is a lot to paint before I take off.

This might be of interest to anyone who is refinishing an old piece with wood plugs.
This is one of my projects for today.

I thought I would be able to pop off the front pieces and the wooden plugs. I was wrong. After using the chisel to further distress my piece and make no progress in removing the wooden plugs, I decided to read up on it a little bit. Here is the site I found and here are some pictures to illustrate how to remove wooden plugs:

First drill a hole in the middle of the plug. As you drill through the little wooden piece, you'll feel it give when you've drilled through the whole thing.

Next, take a screw and manually screw into the hole that you drilled. Doing this manually gives you more control. See how I started mangling the piece trying to get the plugs out?

These wood plugs are DIFFICULT to remove from the screw. If you don't want a lot of screws with wooden plugs stuck on them like this:

Then screw them in a little bit, wiggle, and then remove.

*Edit* Use this technique if they are really glued in. If they're not, then eliminate step 1 of drilling a hole. Just take a screw and screw it into the wood plug just a couple of turns and then wiggle and pop it out.

Here is the piece neked- after all the yucky extra stuff was removed:

Here it is sanded and primed:

And here it is painted with Rustoleum's Fossil in satin, with the original hardware, and 2 coats of spray-on poly (if you want to know how much I lub this stuff click here).

Before:

After:

I just loved how it turned out. It makes me so happy looking at it! It was going to go in my office to hold my printer and paper, but now I kind of want it in my front room so I can look at it and enjoy it. Decisions, decisions.

Can I share a funny thing with you? I've shared a couple of times that I have been frustrated by the disorganization in my home and the lack of funds to purchase furniture and decorations to make it better. Well, two months ago in that frustration I started searching the internet and I found Censational Girl and then stumbled across many other talented DIYers. I was inspired to channel my creative juices into another area and I'm having so much fun. The funny part is that many of my neighbors stop by while I'm outside working on projects and they are telling ME that I'm inspiring THEM. Whaatt???? They are even dropping off things like baseboards to see if I could use them in my projects. How sweet is that?

Join in on the DIY fun on ASPTL site!!