With Furniture Refinishing, You Have to Go With the Grain

It was a measure of my burgeoning love for wood that caused my wife, Lorraine, and me to spend the first night in our new Hudson Valley home without a front door.

We had fallen in love with the metal grating and honey finish on the original side door of our 1860 Victorian, and I decided that the front entrance, buried beneath geological layers of flaking paint, needed the royal treatment right away.

After barely extricating the oak behemoth from its hinges -- they don't make 'em like that anymore -- we dropped the door off at TNT Furniture Strippers, just down the road in Hyde Park, N.Y.

At the time, I could only have guessed what stripping wood entails. (In TNT's method, it's a spray bath and scrub in a gentle methylene chloride, followed by a pressure-water washdown to remove any chemical residue.)

Ditto for refinishing wood. I could, and still will, go on endlessly about the revelation I had upon retrieving the door. Copper hardware? Beautiful grain? Who knew? The thing was a piece of art as well as history, and the $600 outlay was among the best investments I've ever made.

Several, related postscripts hatched from this experience. Lorraine and I were so excited by the transformation that we decided to stockpile worn-down midcentury modern chairs for rehab and eventual sale on eBay (EBAY Quote). The stockpiling part was easy, a job for garage sales and Craigslist. (Friends have dubbed our home "Craigslist Manor.")

But refinishing -- oof, there's the rub. You rub (first, with 120 grit sandpaper), vacuum, stain, dry, repeat (buffing this time with 220 grit sandpaper, and maybe steel wool, too), varnish -- and, again, this is only after you or your stripper has stripped the piece. TNT has generously provided more detailed refinishing instructions for would-be do-it-yourself customers, as they did for me and my newly stripped door.

Refinishing School

Still, absorbing the instructions is hard enough work, never mind actually enacting them.

Months passed without me refinishing our gorgeous door, despite buying all the necessary products from TNT. This was partly out of fear that my novice technique would ruin it, and partly because the thought of painstaking manual labor somehow always makes me sleepy. This handiwork also explains why it's usually twice as expensive to refinish as to strip.