Refinishing the Kitchen Table

We have had the same kitchen table since shortly after Stefani and I were married (coming up on 10 years this summer). We bought it out of some garage-based wholesaler in north Seattle as a scratch-and-dent, and the finish was all but gone. We also weren't fans of the honey-oak color. It matched our first house, but moving into our current one meant that it had to go.

So, I took on this weekend project to refinish it, right?... Three weeks later we are satisfied with the results, and here's what I did:

1. I took the thing apart and headed out to the garage.  I spent some hours stripping it, first with the furniture refinisher I got at Home Depot and some steel wool.  It came off pretty well, but I went through a lot of wool because it kept getting gummed up with old sealant.

2. I tried putting a test coat of the stain we chose (from Kwal Howell, which I recommend for the most part), but it wasn't taking the stain very well.  So, I decided the best way to take out the rest of the finish was to just sand it down...


3. When it comes to sanding, I'm really liking the power tools.  It would have taken me forever to get all of the sanding done by hand.  I used this really old Makita vibrating sander for all the flat and convex surfaces I could.  I moved the project down to the basement, where I could put a tv show on while I sanded, and I spent an especially long time on the table top because I was trying to get out some scratches that had been there since we originally purchased the table.  It almost worked.

4. For the concave surfaces, all of the little nooks and crannies, this Dremmel tool came in handy.  The bit I used was a little carving ball of some sort, and it allowed me to pull all of the residual sealant out of the detailed table legs and etc.

You can see the difference between the wood after it was stripped using the refinisher (right) versus after sanding down to the bare wood (left).  Before sanding, the wood was just not equipped to take on new stain.

5. With everything sanded, I began putting coats of stain on.  The guys at Kwal Howell said to only apply one coat.  I did, and it just wasn't as dark as I wanted it.  So, I disobeyed them and put on three coats.  I smothered it and let it just sit there for a while, so that the pores would soak in the darker color.

6. Once the table was the color we thought we wanted, we took the next step of sealing it.  At Kwal Howell (and this is where their advice didn't turn out so well), they recommended their water-based sealant.  I was to put on 5 coats of this stuff onto the table top and 3 coats everywhere else.  I was also instructed to make the coats just as thin as I possibly could, and to do each coat in one sitting so my layers would be consistent.  Well, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this, so I really did exactly what they said.  No good.  After I put the coats on (several days worth of work and wait), it looked as though a sandblaster had hit the table.  The more I put on, the worse it got.  I was livid.  I eyed the axe in the garage as the solution to this table...

7. So then I resanded
the...
whole...
freakin...
thing.

8. After marching back to Kwal Howell and demanding a refund for that stuff, I headed over to Walmart to get some oil-based sealant.  The instructions on the can were similar to those on the can of the water-based stuff, and my methods of application were identical; but the result was oh-so-different!  4 coats of that stuff on the table top and 3 everywhere else has yielded an impenetrable barrier that is a nice wipe-able surface that will hopefully ward off Ali's fork-attacks for years to come.