How to spot a solid-wood piece under a bad paint job

A tired coat of paint hides more good furniture than it ruins. The trick is reading the bones before the finish.

Paint is the great leveller of secondhand furniture. It makes a solid oak chest and a chipboard imitation look roughly equivalent across a crowded market stall, which is excellent news if you know what to check and expensive news if you don't. Five minutes of looking separates the two reliably.

Weight and joinery tell the truth

Solid timber has heft and grain that runs through an edge, not just across a surface. Look at the corners: dovetails and mortise-and-tenon joints mean someone built it to last, whatever colour it wears now. Staples and glue blocks mean the opposite, and no amount of stripping will change that.

What paint can't fake

Turn a drawer over. Machine-cut, uniform boards suggest later mass production; hand-cut irregularity suggests age and care. The underside is where a piece stops pretending. The same goes for the back panel — the one surface nobody bothered to disguise.

• Check for veneer lifting at the edges — repairable, but factor it in.
• Smell for damp: the one problem paint won't cure and the one worth walking away from.
• Wobble it. A rack in the frame is a repair, not a dealbreaker.
• Open and close every drawer. Runners tell you how hard the piece has lived.
• Look for woodworm exit holes, and check whether they're old and empty or fresh.

What's worth paying for

Pay for construction and timber. Don't pay for finish, because you'll likely be redoing it anyway, and don't pay a premium for "original paint" unless it genuinely is. Once you've found the piece, the next question is how far to take the restoration.