In shocking news, I've been working on things other than programming or digital artistry in my spare time! Laura and I received a dinning room table set, hutch and coffee table from her Grandmother, Mary Orr, after she moved into an apartment and had to get rid of some furniture. The pieces are likely from the early fifties and are showing their age so we decided to refinish them all - that should be easy? Time to fire up the Soule Designs woodworking engine once more - and this time... it's personal.
To kick off our refinishing party Laura employed a four step process: apply super caustic chemical stripper, scrape off said super caustic chemical, sand till fingers hurt/can't sands no more, repeat. The result of two such rounds can be see on the two chairs to the left below:
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| Why won't you go away ye olde super dark finish! |
Not impressed? We weren't either - and this took nearly eight hours! Since the two chairs consumed so much time and they were still looking a bit blotchy we amended our initial refinishing plans on these chairs, opting to punt on a stain refinish and go with a paint finish. While that may sound bizarre there are actually many furniture manufacturers who create dinning room sets with stained tables and painted chairs, here for example, so we'll pretend that was our plan all along and never speak of it again.While Laura was toiling on the chairs I tried out her four step process on a small coffee table. This yielded much better results, likely because it wasn't stained quite so dark, and we plan to stain and polyurethane this piece - after finding a replacement top!
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| Topless coffee table? Oh myyyy... |
Last but not least came refinishing the actual dinning table. The top wound up the easiest of all because we already owned an orbital sander from all our floor refinishing at Hemlock House. Laura worked on the table legs and they came out very nice - they look even nicer with a coat of Zar Golden Oak - which the whole table has applied below:
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| Golden Oak drying - next up is the polyurethane! |
We still have one piece left, after the other 3 chairs are prepped, but to prevent more furniture stripping nightmares we are likely going to tap out and just paint this hutch!
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| I see a paint finish in your future, Mr. Hutch |
I fail to see how ZBrush or Maya fit into this project, but I'll keep plugging away for the greater good... the greater good... the greater good...