Day Two

For Christmas, I decided to refinish/restore our dining room table for my mother. It was something she had really wanted for a long time. So the day after Christmas, she and I took the table and four chairs over to my friends house. Ever since, it has been there in his shop, taunting me. I don't know who did the previous job of staining this table, but it was pretty bad. After a week, it feels like I haven't made much progress at all.

We finally got into groove with the chairs though. It helps a bunch to completely disassemble the chairs. First we use a snot like stripper to remove the outermost layer of stain and scrape that off with a plastic scraper. Then, I use steel wool to remove the leftover stain. Finally, James uses the belt sander and smaller electric sander to finish them off. This definitely beats the previous attempt at sanding each chair with sand paper and my bare fingers. I thought I would never regain proper feeling in them after the first day of sanding.