Refinishing Wood Furniture Is Not As Hard As You Think
More and more do-it-yourselfers are buying neglected pieces of wooden furniture and refinishing them back to their previous beauty. Refinishing old furniture is a good way to get “new” furniture at a fraction of the cost. Solid wood furniture often holds a special place in our lives because it is so beautiful and can easily be given from one generation to the next. Solid built wood furniture is difficult to come by these days and often costs an arm and a leg when bought new.
Refinishing plain pieces of furniture is always less challenging when you’re first starting out, so you might want to start with a piece like a small dresser or even an old wooden toy. The procedure of changing a forgotten piece of wood furniture that has been neglected and restoring it to a noteworthy piece of art can be frustrating but the end results are worth it. If you have time and a little bit of talent then it isn’t hard to restore most wooden furniture pieces. Here are the general steps you’ll take to restore just about any wooden pieces of furniture:
Removing the original finish of a piece of wooden furniture is the first challenging step you’ll have to undertake. You’ll first want to remove any old stain or finish carefully without damaging the wood beneath it. You can uncover the plain wood surface of a piece of furniture with chemicals, specially designed tools and lots of elbow grease. Taking off an old stain finish can take a long time, so be patient and try not to get discouraged by how much work is involved.
After removing the old stain you’ll want to sand every side of the furniture piece you’re refurbishing. Sanding a piece of wooden furniture removes any remaining stain and it prepares the bare wood to accept a new stain of some sort. There are lots of different tricks you can follow when you have to sand old wooden pieces of furniture with different grit sandpaper.
You can fix cracked wood pieces with an adhesive and use wood paste to hide any obvious dents. At this point you may need to repair anything that’s not working on your wooden piece of furniture. If your wood furniture piece has any metal moving parts or handles that are broken you’ll want to replace them now.
When it’s time to pick a finish you’ll have a lot of choices available to you. You can move on to applying a new finish to your old wooden furniture piece. There are several different types of wood stains you can use to change the look of your furniture and then you have to consider what type of polyurethane you’re going to use to protect that new finish.
Turning a neglected furniture piece into a surprising treasure can be a lot of fun. When it’s all done it’s good to know that you can transform a piece of garbage into gold. Restoring an old piece of furniture can be an amazingly rewarding project to complete!
Before stripping the finish off the wood or staining your antique furniture you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve completed any furniture repair tasks ahead of time because that repair process can sometimes require you to replace entire sections of wood.