Furniture Renovation Part II: Sanding to Remove the "Goo"

**Updated to add: the legs were in the unfinished wood/crown molding section of Home Depot. They are actual legs that are meant for a table, not something we had to manipulate to make work. They just screwed right in to the existing table, and were even the right height. Yippee!

OK girls, are we ready for Part II in this series? I've been busy over the weekend, working on a few furniture rehab projects so that I could show you step by step what to do!

Below is a work table that we inherited from my husband's parents. It's served many different purposes, but I've been wanting to renovate it so that it can become my sewing table and live in our upstairs loft. Right now it's a pretty basic (read: boring) table. I think it looks like it came from a public library in the 1970s! I want it to look more "cottage-y." So, away we go!

If you are planning on staining a piece of furniture like I did with my recently rehabbed dresser, you first have to get all the "goo" off (by "goo" I mean the existing paint, stain or polyurethane). There are two ways to do this. The much easier way, if you can do it, is to just sand it. The other alternative involves using a liquid stripper, which I will talk about in my next post.

Sanding furniture requires nothing more than sandpaper and some elbow grease. Just jump in and start doing it! I found that this Norton brand sandpaper, pictured below and bought at Home Depot, is really great for starting the process. It's a 60 grit, which basically means that it is really rough, so it will really get in there and lift off the coats of goo, which is what you want.

I highly recommend using an electric sander for this. Of course, you can do it manually, but it will take much longer. Electric sanders are super-easy to use, and can cost about $50 at home improvement stores. I used an electric sander on this table, and even so it took me about 1 1/2-2 hours to get it done. Below, you can see where I stopped at the halfway point. I think it's pretty clear which side has been sanded!

There is no exact science to this! Just start with a really heavy grit sandpaper, and graduate to a finer grit as you go along. I usually try to sand along with the grain of the wood, as opposed to across it. As I said, I started with a 60 grit, then went over the whole thing with a 100 grit, and finally a 150 grit. (The grit gets finer as the numbers go up.) By the time I finished, the existing stain and polyurethane coats were gone, and the table top was almost as smooth as my baby boy's bum! :)

The goal here is just to reveal the raw wood, so that it will readily accept a new stain, polyurethane or paint. (Of course, if you are planning on painting it, rather than staining or polyurethaning it, you don't need to worry about removing every little bit of goo since you'll be covering it up anyway. Just "rough up" the wood enough so that it will take the paint. More on painting in a future post!)

You may notice that while I was at it, I (ah, my husband, actually!) changed up the legs for the table. The new legs cost about $12 each and I found them at Home Depot. I am planning on staining the top a dark color, and painting the legs and apron a robin's egg blue. I can't wait to see this project finished!

In my next post I will get into the (slightly more complicated) alternative, using a liquid stripper to remove the goo. Stay tuned!