Unfinished furniture is one of the best bargains you can get. Besides saving the amount of the cost of finishing your unfinished furniture, you quite often can get better, unblemished furniture when it sits in all of its raw glory for you to see its surface.
Many very expensive pieces of finished furniture have repairs to their surfaces, big gouges that have been repaired and bad fitting joints that have been filled to name just a couple. The reason for the swirled brush strokes and fly specks in a modern day finish are to allow for and hide boo boos.
I would suggest that you not look for any repaired blemishes. If you haven't noticed them before, you won't notice them now, but if you go looking and find them, then every time you look at the piece of furniture they will stand out like a sore thumb.
A very handy tool for surface preparation of unfinished furniture is a pair of cotton gloves, the kind you can get for 79 cents or so that you use for gardening. They'll save you some slivers and show you where you need more preparation.
There are a couple of electric sanders that are good for unfinished furniture, but whatever you do, don't use a belt sander. The good ones are, finishing sander and random orbit sander. The finishing sander is almost as safe as hand sanding, but if you get off of flat surfaces with the random orbit, the sandpaper can go into random orbit. See my experience with sanding edges with a random orbit on the Sanding page.
Some unfinished furniture is finish sanded with very little final sanding, but those pieces are not too common. Most will have quite a bit of finish sanding. Here is where the gloves come in. Put the gloves on and run your hand very gently over all surfaces. Where ever the surface will need sanding, the gloves will drag. Remember though that all areas of a surface will need equal sanding, not just the rough areas. Sand the rough areas first then resand the whole surface.
If there are a lot of areas that need sanding, put a little corn starch on your glove and it will stay heavier on the areas to sand so you can keep track of them. The corn starch will come off when you give the surface a final cleaning with a tack cloth
Be sure to always sand with the grain. If you sand across the grain it will show when you stain, no matter how fine the sandpaper is.
Clean the sanding dust from the unfinished surface very carefully. Any sanding dust left on the surface seems to grow in size after a clear finish is applied. The best thing to clean dust off is a tack cloth. The tack cloth is treated with a very sticky substance that cleans the dust out of nooks, crannies and wood grain.
The success of your staining job is directly related to your sanding job. If the sanding is uneven, then the stain will be uneven too. Stain is absorbed more in less smooth areas.
If you plan a clear finish, only, you can get away with a little less stringent sanding. More about clear finish only in a minute.
Continued on UnfinishedFurniture page 2
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