Table upgrade
- brentmacneil
- Feb 23, 2023
- 3 min read
Hayley reached out to me about this table and having it refinished and I said, "let's do it!!!!"
A day or 2 later her husband dropped the table off. You could tell this table has been well loved over the years and most definitely a table that grew with a young family. I am sure there is a lot of history to this piece. To me, this a good thing and a table that every household should be fortunate to have. That said, it was in need of an overhaul.
Outside of a lot of scratches, chips and cup rings, there was a THICK glossy topcoat I knew I had to deal with. At close inspection, Hayley's husband and I agreed that the wood underneath the many layers of topcoat and stain was that of butcher block design.
Prepping the piece was....well...interesting. Initially I grabbed my scrapper to see how many layers were there. Unfortunately, there was A LOT!!! A lot of scraping was in the forcast. That said, I needed to be sure the top was solid and not veneer glued to a wood core. If I scraped or sanded too hard, I could burn through the veneer and this piece would only be good for the fire pit.🙃 I grabbed the belt sander and run it ever so gently on the top to get through some of the topcoat. I stopped doing this fairly quickly. I then grabbed some 80 grit sandpaper and went over the top by hand to wear the topcoat down a bit. Next was the orbital sander to wear down the corner section a little so I could see if there was a line where the veneer was glued to a wood core. To my delight, it was revealed this was a thick solid piece of rubberwood in butcher block construction.
Once I found out their was no veneer, I grabbed the scrapper and scraped away the layers. When I say scraped, I mean carved. I had to stop several times to vaccum up the shavings. After this, it was 100, 120, 220, 320 grit sanding to smooth it out.
I am not sure Hayley was expecting the butcher block construction on the piece and from here there was A LOT of flip flopping on finishing colours and styles. It was clear Hayley was as picky as I am. I added up the time spent on videos showing blocks I stained and painted with different colours and it ended up being close to an hour of video time.😀 when Hayley made her final decision, I ran with it.
The end result was keeping the top natural with 3 coats of polycrylic for protection while the base and legs got 3 coats of Ash FMP and a coat of the same polycrylic for protection.
When you consider the before and after it is a night and day transformation. Even if down the road Hayley wants to change this table again, it could be no problem since this piece is solid wood to the core.
I would like to thank Hayley for the work and the fun times we had trying to sort out what she wanted to do with this piece.
This is another example of not giving up on your current pieces and how diffrent things can look with a little bit of work. With solid constructed furniture, pieces can stay in a family for many generations. If you need help restoring pieces, give me a shout.😀
Please see before and after pics.
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