Dining Table Restoration

Yesterday, I shared my completed dining room in all of its glory. What was missing from the post was the hours that I spent restoring the dining set. Actually, our future new dining set was all set to be our first big dollar furniture purchase for the new house, but when we came upon the whole shebang at local antique shop Country Mouse City Mouse for just over two hundred bucks, we ran with it! This seemed like as good a time as any to figure out to restore wooden furniture! Read on for more before, process, and after pics and how I did it.

There she is at the store, and truth be told, we didn't actually run with it. It was literally the first place we'd looked for furniture (and my first antiquing experience), so we actually mulled it over for a few hours. Then, we jumped on it. With the date May 23, 1957 stamped on the bottom, this is an actual mid-century score.

The top was covered in scratches and stains. Actually, we bought it thinking it was solid wood, and while it is, the top is a veneer. After a little internet searching, it appeared that I was still good to go with a traditional refinish job so long as the veneer was thick enough.

With bated breath, I sanded that sucker down. And surprise! It did incredibly well.

I didn't do anything groundbreaking. I filled in a few chips in the veneer with some stainable wood filler. Then, it got a coat of pre-stain, a coat of dark walnut stain, a coat of polyurethane, a light sanding, and another coat of poly. Text book stuff, really. The only big departure was that the supposedly stainable wood filler didn't take the stain at all, so instead of hiding the veneer's imperfections, it made them look even worse. In desperation, I took some brown craft paint to it just before the polyurethane. Not exactly pro and not exactly seamless, but from a modest distance, it looks much better than the alternative.

See. There's a close up for you of the craft paint patch job.

The chairs were in pretty bad shape too, but I wasn't prepared to do a full-on refinish of those.

I removed all the seat coverings, which included 2 coverings on 5 of the seats and 3 on one. That's equivalent to like 13 chairs, no? Then, I gave them a serious wipedown and jazzed them up a little with some walnut-tone Restore-A-Finish, which did an okay job of buffing out some of the scratches and bringing a shine back. Then, I recovered the seats in a couple of layers of batting and a super convincing white vinyl leather (Or are we calling it leather-ette? Or vegan leather? Let's be honest. It's pleather.) that I picked up from my local Joann.

The final step of the whole ordeal was polishing up the brass chair and table feet. They were in pretty terrible shape. I took to them with some Brasso metal polish. Not only did it take away the tarnish, though, it also took away the brass. So they're now sort of brushed steel with a hint of brass, but much like my craft paint patch job, it's still an improvement over their former condition.

It wasn't completely without its challenges, but honestly, the whole thing was a little easier and less timing consuming than I had expected it to be and the result was worlds better than either I or my husband could have imagined. It certainly gives me a whole new appreciation for wood, and I certainly count this as a win for my DIY skillz, my new home, and my pocketbook.

Have any of you ever taken on a wood refinishing job? How did it go for you?