Safety Tips for Refinishing Wood Furniture

Series Summary

Furniture serves many important, essential functions for people the world over. In the last few thousand years, chairs, beds, desks, and tables have provided places to sit, eat, talk, work, gather, or sleep. Many people will spend more than a third of their lives in, at, or on furniture. It comes as no surprise, then, that humans have a unique relationship with this group of items they spend so much time around.

In some ways, furniture has become a reflection of personality. When choosing furniture for their homes or offices, people are known to concentrate on design, giving it equal or greater weight than function and stability. Many people pass furniture items down from one generation to the next, keeping the item as a family heirloom.

In this free, do it yourself video guide to refinishing and restoring wood furniture, learn tips and techniques for how to refinish your old, well-loved wood furniture, including everything from wood stain removal to applying a fresh, new furniture stain. Our expert will walk you through a refinishing project step by step, with safety tips before you begin, what types of sanders you’ll want to use, and how to choose and apply the right stain for your piece of wood furniture.

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Jennifer and I have over 10 years of woodworking and furniture restoration experience. Today's project is a pretty simple one. What we're going to be doing is restoring some old benches. Now as you can see, these benches are in pretty good shape so far with just a couple of minor scratches and scrapes here and there, but the stain is the problem. What we're going to be doing is sanding down this stain and refinishing it with a new stain so that your benches look like brand new. First, before we start though, we need to go over a couple of safety tips. You always want to make sure that you have safety goggles whenever you're sanding. It's always important to protect your eyes when working. Using a sander will produce a lot of fine dust and you really don't want that to get into your eyes. A safety mask. In this case, just a regular disposable dust mask will work just fine. You can buy these at your local hardware store. If you have long hair, now is the time to put it in a pony tail, and don't forget to take off any jewelry that you're wearing as rings or necklaces can get caught in your equipment. "