DIY - Done!

I'm torn - I love to decorate and to have a home which truly reflect our style, but I can be incredibly frugal. So, what's a gal like me supposed to do when we have a perfectly good coffee table that just isn't working for me? Besides a few minor scratches my only real complaint was that the color was too light for my taste and it didn't seem to go with the rest of our darker, more contemporary furniture. I decided I would try to give it some new life with a little sanding and staining.

Before I get into all the details, here are the before and after photos:

{Before}

{After)

See our beige carpet in the second photo? Before, the light coffee table blended right in. Now, it pops!

I expected this to be a quick weekend project, but it ended up taking me a month or more, off and on. First I had to sand the table, removing all the old polyurethane. I bought an electric sander which I used for the top and some of the sides and sanded the edges by hand. I'm still not sure if it was the sander I bought or my technique (the more likely of the two), but I spent at least 2 hours sanding and except for a few spots I didn't get all the way down to the bare wood. I knew I needed to get it all off, but at a certain point I stopped caring and moved on to the staining process. 

For the stain I used Minwax wood finish in red mahogany. My first mistake here was going with the stain brush recommended to me by the guy at Home Depot. The brush was fine for the top, but too wide for the rest of the table so as I tried to paint one side of the leg the bristles would bend around the corner and some stain would get on the other side of the table leg. This resulted in the stain building up near the edges. My second mistake was not wiping the stain off soon enough so the whole thing became sticky and took forever to dry. And my third mistake (yes, I made a lot of mistakes) was not using a wood conditioner before I applied the stain. When I saw the wood conditioner at the store I figured it was a waste of money, but apparently it really does help, especially for a soft wood like pine. Live and learn!

The initial color was a beautiful lighter reddish color, but due to the splotches (from lack of conditioning) I knew I needed to apply a second coat. After letting it sit for a week I figured it was dry and with some cheap foam brushes of various sizes I set out for coat #2. The foam brushes worked much better than the fancy and more expensive stain brush. 

After letting the stain dry for another few days it was time for the polyurethane. I went with Minwax fast-drying semi-gloss polyurethane. After the first coat there seemed to be a whitish haze, possibly from not stirring the can enough. After sanding the top I realized that some of the stain at the edges came off so I applied the second coat of poly to the top, but left the rest with just one coat.

The final step was replacing the wooden knobs for some more modern looking brushed nickel ones. When all is said and done I think it turned out pretty good. It's not perfect, but it was a good start and I learned a lot along the way. In fact, Andy is so impressed with my work that he wants me to tackle the bedroom dresser next! However, I've got a totally different project in mind. 

So, have you ever tried your hand at refinishing a piece of furniture? If so, how did it turn out?