Restaining Furniture

My husband recently went to The Biggest Loser Fitness Ridge in Malibu, CA and was gone for an entire month so I thought it would be a good idea to finish my kitchen table while he was gone. THOUGHT being the key word. :) It was actually great timing to do it, but way too hard being a single mommy for the month AND trying to accomplish all these crazy tasks I set up for myself. I make life way harder than it needs to be... but it's fun, let's be honest. So here's the table project...

Before:

 After:

Not the best picture in the world (especially with my sweet salmon colored walls I always complain about), but you get the idea.

THE PROCESS:

We bought our table at an outlet store and it already needed lots of help. THEN somewhere in there I may or may not have spilled wood glue on it and forgot to clean it. Ooopsies. This is how bad my table was before...

I, with help of my awesome friends, carried the sucker out to my garage, took it apart and slapped a coat of stripper on it. You don't HAVE to use stripper, but it's awesome and saves a lot of time sanding. It lifts the stain without you having to do really any work, and it's great for all the crevices, sigh... I hate that word, it's almost as bad as "moist" :). Read the directions on the can... you want to be careful applying it, just brush it over one time, let it sit for 15ish minutes, then...

scrape it with a putty knife. A few layers of nastiness should come right off. (If it doesn't you've probably let the stripper dry on there too long.) ...

Tip: Use an empty box to scrape all the goop into, it makes the process a lot less messy. And p.s. WEAR GLOVES!

The left side of this table has been stripped once, the right side has been stripped twice (just to give you an idea of what the stripper does). ...

I stripped it one more time, then sanded the table almost all the way down to the bare wood. Most spots were bare, I left a few just to give it a little character. And, well, I was sick of sanding. :) As you get closer to being finished with sanding you'll want to use a finer grit of sand paper. I started out using coarse because I'm impatient, but if you're smart, start out with medium grit, then fine, then super fine...

After that I cleaned the table really well, then SHOULD HAVE applied a wood conditioner, but didn't. If you're doing this yourself I'd for sure recommend using a conditioner. Why? What happened? Well, I'll tell you what happened :) ... I started brushing my stain on and the table pretty much turned black! I wanted it dark, but not THAT dark! I used Minwax Dark Walnut and have used it plenty of times before and it's never been that dark so the table must have been super dry. So... I just decided to brush it on everywhere and hope for the best, and after a few hours it still looked sooo dark. I looked online to find any kind of answers and the few answers I did find weren't available to me at 11pm, so I came up with a little something myself. Maybe don't tell anyone. And keep this off the record, because I'm sure any professional would tell me I'm crazy and I totally messed up...  but ...

I totally Goof Off'ed my entire table. Yes, I said it. Goof Off. And did it work? Yes, it sure did! HA! Who'da thought!? The stain lifted just enough to make me happy. After that I ended up brushing stain on a few more times to get it just the color I wanted, waited for it to dry, then followed with a few coats of MinWax Polyurethane. Polyurethane (oil based) because I've read horror stories about anything water-based on kitchen tables - including this story HERE.

Then, and probably most important, don't use the table for 2-3 weeks. It may feel dry, but trust me, don't use it!

 

It's not a perfectly even job, but I like how it turned out with a little bit of the lighter color popping through! 6 years later and we finally have a nice looking table, phewsh!