A Foray Into Furniture Refinishing

Hello, old blog. Sorry for the radio silence. I guess we've been too busy living in our "finished" house to bother posting about it. That, and the baby... Well, excuses excuses..

So here is the story of how we "upcycled" this old console stereo into an entertainment center. How did you say "super cool" back in the 60s??


We started with a Craigslist console record player / radio, circa 1966. The electronics still mostly work but it had been very thoroughly painted white - How chic!


Next we stripped off the paint. We used the no-scent safe stuff so we could do it in the garage and not stink up the house. Next time I think we'll wait for warmer weather and use the heavy duty paint stripper.


The paint stripper stuff did work, it just took a lot of elbow grease. And underneath, lovely walnut.


At some point we realized that it would be a lot easier to disassemble and then strip. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. I guess in that era furniture construction involved a lot of screws and very little glue. We lucked out in that respect.


Here's a shot after we've applied some tung oil and started re-assembling. You can see the shelf August added over the amp electronics.


TADA! We really liked the tung oil finish. Its easy to apply, very forgiving, and doesn't smell too bad.


Originally the only access was from the top. At first we planned to take out all the old electronics and decommission this door.


But the old school stuff was just too cool. Check out the turntable and radio. That grid thing on the right is the radio tuner. Why its a grid, I don't know, but it adds a cool 60s space-ship sort of vibe.


Now we just need a record!!

For access to the DVD player we split the old front panel and made it into doors. There's room for the Wii and some other random stuff too. We used Blum 170-degree hinges. I cannot recommend Blum hardware highly enough. It is awesome. Pure Scandinavian design genius. They are NOT paying me to say that!


In order to make the new doors as incognito as possible, we used magnetic touch latches.



The END! I love it. It turned out way better than my original vision which had involved the use of a recip saw to get that front panel off. And I might be a tiny bit addicted to this idea of taking old vintage stuff and making into something new. Example: Typewriter Ipad Dock.

No time to blog

Sorry for the prolonged absence - we've been so busy trying to work out staining issues. First of all, the originally chosen stain system turned out to be a dismal failure. Being a poly-stain it was already finicky, but combined with the low humidity we had a total disaster on our hands... Spent the better part of last weekend selecting a new stain. Here is the result of much testing:

+ + = GOOD! (good enough...)

That means the stain alone is 3 coats, plus another 3 coats of water based polyurethane, several rounds of light sanding.. Its a time intensive-process. At least these water based products dry on a scale of minutes rather than hours.

Here's some pics. PS We have a lot of cleaning to do before company arrives in a week!

Quick Update

Just wanted to make a quick update to the world. First of all, the winner of the stain contest turned out to be "Maple". I realize that, technically, "Pecan" won the poll by 2 votes, but I'm pretty certain you all would have voted for Maple had you had access to the real-life samples they have at Lowe's. The Maple looks great with both the floor and the mantel. Also, August did the staining this time and it looks much better than my work. I suppose I will remain in my roll as "assistant", all the way to the end.

The cabinets are coming along as well. We lack two face-frames from being done with the construction part of all the floor cabinets. We'll probably crank those out today and tomorrow. After that, we have to route a groove into some of the frames, which will require us to first setup and learn to use the router. And then the sanding/staining, and then assemble.

And that means we are roughly approaching the half-way point. That's no so bad, eh?

Stain?

Its time to select a stain, folks. Consider the challenge:

• Winter time - freezing garage
• Basement houses the furnace i.e. blow fumes all over the house
• A tight schedule - self-imposed but hey, its not that fun storing all your kitchen stuff in boxes on the floor
  
• Open floor plan - kitchen is effectively in the living room with its wood floor and lovely mantle
• Stainless appliances and hardware

What's our solution??? - {drumroll} water-borne polystain... Its a multi-tasking solution for sure. Water-based, so no fumes.. Dries super-fast in our zero-humidity climate. Beyond that, think of it as tinted polyurethane - stain and protection rolled into one. The downside is, its a little unforgiving, easy to leave brush strokes that end up VERY visible... The other downside is the cost.. sigh...

So, want to see the first test sheet?
The left side is one coat, the right side is two. Its hard to tell from picture, but two coats are a definite improvement over just one. I don't know, maybe too redish again? Its not a horrible clash with the mantle or floor, but I wonder if we could do better. Here are some of the options available in the polystain:

......Fruitwood............ Pecan......




........Maple.................Walnut.....




Help me out here, which would be the better? Vote in the poll to the right!! p.s. Walnut is the one we already tried.

Staining

Well, I keep putting off blogging about our latest project - the mantel - because we were supposed to be done.. um.. several days ago. However we are not.. so I'll update anyway, don't want anyone out there to think we're slackers.

Noticing that the fireplace looked kinda wimpy, we decided to build it a new mantel.. They do that kind of stuff on HGTV all the time. Plus, it gave us a chance to try out August's new [very old] radial arm saw. The construction really didn't take that long, better part of a saturday.. Since then we've done 4 coats of stain with several days off in between. Hopefully we'll be able to put the finished product up soon!