Refurbishing a Table

 In my first post I talked about my first project and how I got started with wood working. Now I’m actually going to discuss the steps I took to refurbish the table I mentioned in my “Learn by Doing” post.

The biggest challenge with the table was removing the goopy, thick paint. You can see in the below picture that someone started this process before we ever got the table…then quickly gave up on it.

Why would anyone do that to this poor table?

Being relatively new to things like this, I followed the advice that was given to my wife at Home Depot and started using a paint thinner. I very quickly realized that using paint thinner on this table wasn’t going to work well, largely because I couldn’t get the paint out of all of the detailed grooves. I switched gears and started sanding. Initially I used mostly hand held sand paper but I found I still couldn’t get into the grooves and clean out the final small sections of paint.

Pesky paint…

You can see in the picture the “trouble areas”. Now, learning by doing, I tried using a dremel tool and VERY quickly realized that I couldn’t control the speed and ended up gouging out small pieces of the wood. I switched gears again and started using my drill, with sand paper drill bits. This seemed to work better for me as I could control the speed and still get into the grooves. The biggest challenged I faced with sanding the legs was trying not to take to much wood off in my effort to sand out the last remnants of ugly red paint. Admittedly, I did some damage to the legs, but this being my first project, and the damage being relatively minor, I was pretty happy with the work I had done.

After hours of detailed (and frustrating) sanding, I was finally ready to put my stain on. My wife and I really like dark colored woods, and in particular a dark walnut color.

Staining

You can really see the difference in the wood after the stain. It’s not to dark and it really helped to cover up some of the smaller cosmetic issues present in the wood (that sanding couldn’t get rid of). Staining the wood was a fairly simple endeavor, although I did learn well after the fact that I could control just how dark I wanted the wood to look by wiping away the excess stain as I applied it…again, learning by doing! I didn’t have much trouble putting a semi gloss polyurethane coat on the table (though I did learn well later that sanding the polyurethane coat with ultra fine sand paper was a good idea).

Finally it was time to reassemble the table, and it was here I learned that having a good set of clamps comes in really handy.

Reassembly phase

The reassembly phase was a lot more challenging than I expected it to be. Largely due to the fact that I didn’t really have the tools needed to apply pressure to the joints I had used wood glue on. Ultimately I decided to reinforce the joints with discrete screws, which I found also helped with the overall stability of the table (before I started this, it felt like it could fall apart if you blew on it the wrong way).

With a little bit of ingenuity, I managed to get everything back together, sturdy, and ready for the home. My wife was happy with it, and I was HOOKED! I learned a lot from doing this table, and I carried those lessons into the next project…refurbishing an ottoman style chest… More to come!

Happy wife, happy life!