The Table is Done!

If you read my previous blog, you would know that Stephen built a dining room farmhouse table for our friends! The next step was staining and painting the table. Our friend wanted the base to be white, and the top to be stained kind of an orange/brown color. This was a table she had seen in person and liked, and we were trying to get it close to this color.

As I’ve probably said about 50 times on this blog, staining is much harder than painting, because you truly never know what the color is going to look like until you try it on the wood itself. In our case, the color on the can; the “example” color in Home Depot; and what actually came out on the wood were three different colors!

One great tip a guy gave to Rose, since we were using pine, was to dip a paint stick into a stain color and let it dry. I didn’t know paint sticks were made out of pine! It gave us a better idea of what the colors would look like.

What we did next was get a few sample-sized stains, and I tried them out on excess pine pieces of wood that were cut from the actual wood we used on the table. I labeled them with a sharpie so we would remember what was what. Rose gave me a sample piece of her new flooring… she didn’t want it to match perfectly to it, but it was a great reference to have to make sure the stain color we chose blended with the flooring.

I bombarded Rose with a lot of text messages and pictures, and we decided on one… the one above on the right that was a mixture of ZAR Modern Walnut and ZAR Early American. The staining process is super easy to do; it just requires several hours of drying time between each coat. I ended up doing 5 layers of the ZAR combination, with one coat of Minwax Red Chestnut on the top! The Red Chestnut added a more brown tone to tone down the orange shade of the other combination. Check out the progress…

When pine settles under pressure, it forms cracks on the exterior. Luckily, these cracks don’t affect the sturdiness of the wood- they are just cosmetic. You can see the difference in the left leg from the last picture to this one. We used wood filler to fill in the crack, and then painted over it!

Different lighting brings out different colors of stain, too. The above picture and the below picture are with the same amount of stain on the table. One is under a workshop LED light, while the other is in the natural sunlight. Crazy, huh?

Below, you’ll find the finished product- Stephen attached the table top to the base using pocket hole screws. I added the Red Chestnut stain coat and two coats of polyurethane over the top and the legs, and… voila!