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

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