Building Furniture for Ultimate Relaxation Part 3

Posted under DIY, Tools

Well, I forgot to post pictures of the bookshelf I built for my son!

Having all the wood in place, I finally had to sand it all and stain it. This was no easy task. Sanding took a very long time because I wanted to do it by hand. I snagged the kids for part of this. They like sanding for about 10 minutes then it’s bike riding time.

I chose a deep dark oak stain and what I got looked like some bad tanning lotion. Ugh.. See the picture below.

stain

What I ended up doing was resanding it with some fine paper to remove where the stain soaked in and started looking like orange paint. Took quite a long time, but was worth it.

I don’t know exactly why I did it this way, but I chose furniture wax instead of polyurathene. When I was a kid I used wax and it worked really well on a desk I refinished so I was sentimental I guess.

Buffing in the wax woked pretty good on this too, it just required about 5 coats to get it looking right. It’s not the best picture in the world, but the bookshelf has an antique look to it and really looks good with the green paint on his walls.

bookshelf2

If I was going to do it again, I’d use Minwax stain instead of Olympus. I’ve never had a problem with Minwax before and the orange in the Olympus ‘taints’ my opinion about the brand..pun intended.