I suppose a little introduction is in order. My name is Rick, and my wife(Em) and I recently purchased a two story 2400 sq. ft. home with an in-ground pool on a cul-de-sac in Grapevine Texas. Grapevine is a lovely town wedged between Dallas and Fort Worth just west of DFW airport, the schools are excellent, homes well kept, and there's plenty to do and see. Seriously I could go on and on about how much we love the town we now call home, but that's not what this blog is about, so I'll spare you the gushing. Back to the house... it's a little big for just two people, but we plan on filling it in the near future, we didn't want to bother with a "starter home" and figured we would save ourselves a move. The home is around 25 years old but has been very well kept by the previous owners, it needs a little updating as we feel the previous owners had very bland and dated taste, but they were much older than us and I can't blame them; I supposed scalloped sinks were all the rage 20 years ago. Unfortunately "a little updating" can still translate to a lot of hard work, but as real estate agents say: "the house has good bones".
I grew up doing all sorts of house and car repair projects with my dad, he taught me most of what I know about how to fix things, but more importantly taught me not to be afraid to dive head first into a daunting project. My love of craftsmanship led me to study Engineering in college, I have a couple degrees in Aerospace Engineering and work for a large defense contractor here in the DFW area. I'll do my best to document the critical steps in all these projects and identify "lessons learned" (like any good engineer). If anything this blog will chronicle all the hard work my wife and I have done and will do on our house, but I hope that my sharing this information will help others with their own projects.
Dining Set: Part I
I'll start off with a pre-house project. After our offer on the house was accepted and we were in escrow, my wife and I decided that since we were all grown-up we should get some "real" furniture, specifically a formal dining room set. After shopping around at local furniture stores and writing check after check towards all the expenses that come with being in escrow, we decided to find a nice used dining room set on craigslist. We found a very classy antique set with a 6-person table, chairs, and big buffet, we loved the wood color (I think it's mahogany) but the years had been very unkind to the furniture, basically the finish was ruined, but the price was right so we decided to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Here are some pics of the set before refinishing...
There are some very deep gouges in the table top and the chairs are extremely unsteady and scratched up, if you look closely in the lower left corner you can see how scuffed up the corner of the buffet is...Need further proof?
So what do we do? Start with a trip to our local "big-box" hardware store. We picked up some chemical stripper, a plastic scraping tool (which surprisingly did not melt), a couple small wire and thick plastic brushes, thick chemical resistant gloves, breathing masks, steel wool, cheap paint brushes (NOT foam brushes, these WILL melt) and a TON of rags, trust me you will need many many rags. These are only the supplies for stripping the furniture, I'll go over the refinishing supplies when I get to that step. We completed this project while we were in our apartment, two weeks before moving into our house, fortunately we had a 1-car garage that served as a well ventilated workspace.
We followed the directions for the chemical stripper very closely, which included brushing on a thick layer of stripper, waiting about 10 or 15 minutes, then vigorously scraping off the resulting nasty black goo. You will repeat this step many times. The brushes and rags are for getting the stripper gunk off of the crevices and tight spaces, the steel wool is nice for getting the last bit of finish out of the wood that the scraper can't get, it usually took about three iterations with the scraper. Once the majority of the gunk had been removed I preferred to wipe off the stripper almost immediately after its application using a rag or steel wool to get the gunk out of the wood pores before it begins to harden. Here's a nice side-by-side before and after shot of the drawers removed from the buffet.
Em enjoyed stripping the legs... hehe. But seriously she's a trooper to stick by my side through all these crazy projects of mine, we have fun though.
After a couple evenings and an early morning of work (gotta beat the Texas sun) we had a garage full of stripped furniture.
Good job Em!
Unfortunately I don't have a good shot of the stripped tabletop, but it looked nice and clean... I promise.
Some lessons learned about stripping furniture:
1) Buy the large bag of shop rags, you can't reuse old rags as the stripper-lacquer gunk hardens after it dries and makes the rag unusable. I also cannibalized many of my old T-shirts when we ran out of rags.
2) Wear protective clothing. I'm definitely happy we used a chemical stripper instead of trying to sand through the thick finish, the chemical wasn't that bad to work with, as you can see we worked in a garage with the door open, but after a few minutes working with the stripper we discarded our breathing masks, you really have to get within a foot of the can to detect much of an odor. The gloves are a must, and I recommend long sleeves, pants, and shoes that you don't care about. The stripper won't burn through your clothes but it will stain and will immediately burn your skin if it comes in contact, I only got a few small spatters on my arm and it stung very similar to a fire-ant bite.
3) Don't settle for 90%. Em teased me a bit for obsessing over a few stubborn areas where the old finish wasn't coming up as well, but an extra hour or two of work will save you a lifetime of looking at ugly furniture with an uneven finish.
4) Unlike with paint or varnish, you can leave the brushes in a can of the stripper overnight and it won't harden or damage the brush. The stripper only hardens when it reacts with the old varnish, it stays quite inert when left by itself. We used plastic paint cups to hold the stripper while we painted it on, the quart sized ones in any hardware store's painting section should be fine, we never had any problems with plastic containers or brushes melting, although I wouldn't try using a foam brush, that's just asking for trouble.
5) The brand of stripper we used came with a free plastic spray bottle to use as an applicator instead of a brush... this is a terrible idea, for one the stripper is fairly thick and does not pump easily out of the spray nozzle, but the main problem was that it's impossible to keep overspray from getting all over the place, which is a bad thing with such a harsh chemical. Don't waste any time trying to use these stupid spray bottles, use it to spray a misbehaving cat with water or to water your plants.
I'll cover the staining of the wood and application of poly-urethane varnish in Part II of this blog. This is my first time blogging and it's been fun, I still have many projects to be published and will be adding to this blog on a regular basis.
-R
