When I moved here and started planning out what furniture I needed to get to make it feel like home, the first thing I honed in on was a desk. This desk:
I love the industrial looking sawhorse legs, and the dark wook color. It would match the rest of my wooden pieces perfectly! Price tag? $780... EEEP!
So I sulked and pouted and looked for alternatives. There are other sawhorse designs, made by other stores, but they seemed to be just as expensive, and not close to large enough for a gadget-geek like myself. I went to IKEA as a last ditch effort, and saw beech saw horse legs for 13 dollars each, and a solid pine table top for 40. As each of these pieces were solid wood, not veneer, I decided to try my hand at staining.
First time stainers:
1. If you have a garage, stain your pieces in a garage to avoid strong fumes in small quarters and ruining nice floors.
2. If you have no garage, I still recommend staining outside on a deck or a balcony.
3. If you stain outside, try to do this when it's warm. I stained my desk in February had to take breaks every 20 minutes to defrost my hands!
So the basics! First you need a selection of materials before you can start anything!
- Floor protection (thick newspapers, tarp, etc.)
- Wood stain
- Appropriate paint brushes (ie: a natural bristle brush for oil stains, 1 large one and 1 small one)
- Rubber gloves
- Steel wool
- Sand paper
- Tack cloth (it looks like orange waxy cheesecloth)
- Sealant (You can get either water based or oil based)
- Soap or paint thinner to clean the brushes
Prep your workspace by laying out the tarp and sanding down all your pieces. This roughens up the wood to help the stain 'stick'. Then, one piece at a time, begin to paint on your wood stain, avoiding drips and keeping the stain layer relatively even over the piece. Continue for all pieces, you will get messy! There's directions on the stain can, but I stuck to doing about three layers. In between stain layers, rub down the wood pieces with steel wool, then tack cloth. This roughens the surface slightly without taking off stain, and then removes the dust before the next layer is applied.
Once your piece is stained and completely dry, I highly recommend a sealant, preferably not a water-based one so you can avoid water marks later on. The more layers you're willing to apply and let dry, the more polished your piece will look. If there's surface damage to your piece later, it will also be easier to sand down and reapply a sealant rather than re-stain and seal the whole piece over again.
The finished result is below! This desk has the look I was going for with an even larger table top, and cost almost $700 less than the 'original' version!
It was easy to pick up a few hardware items (bungee cords and eye hooks) and an Ikea Galant desk cable organizer to rig up my own quick n' easy cable management system. I love not having to look at the inevitable tangle of wires below my desk.
It's not perfect, and sometime in the future I know I'll be reapplying a smoother seal, maybe even touching up the edges. But for now, it's a solid, industrial-feeling desk with a more elegant finish. Taking the time to apply three layers of wood stain and three layers of polyurethane finish was a pain, but I think it was worth it!
