How To Refresh Wooden Furniture

[Ad – This post is in collaboration with Ryobi.]

If you follow us on Facebook you will possibly already have seen, that we recently managed to purchase a fantastic new sideboard from one of our local antique centres.

Unsure what to do with it, we thought we’d ask you guys what you think so we ran a quick survey to see if you think it should be painted or left natural and the results are in!

You all definitely thought that it should be left in it’s natural state, so that’s exactly what we’ve done!

I know that some of you thought we were completely bonkers to even consider painting the sideboard, but the quick picture I took with my phone didn’t quite show the reality of the situation.

In reality, it a bit too orange, some of the drawers were coming apart, it was dirty, sticky, had scuffs, marks and one rather nasty looking watermark right on the top.

Overall though, it was in good shape and we wouldn’t have bought it if we didn’t think it could be repaired. Luckily it was nothing too major and nothing that a bit of cleaning, sanding and gluing couldn’t solve.

The main issue for me (and one of the reasons that we’d even considered painting the sideboard) was the large watermark on the top. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting an old piece of furniture to look new and signs of use are definitely part of the charm, but a big watermark is not one of the prettiest things.

We’ve already tried to remove it, but none of the methods we’ve tried have worked, so for now it’s going to have to stay.

Other than the watermark, it was really easy to give this sideboard a new lease of life. After giving it a thorough clean with some sugar soap to remove all of the dirt and stickiness, it was just a matter of giving the whole sideboard a sand with our new random orbit sander.

It’s the perfect tool to sand surfaces and made it so easy to remove most of the dints, marks and scuffs leaving a perfectly smooth surface ready to wax.

Unlike the solid wooden front of the drawers and the edge of the sideboard, we assume that the top surface isn’t solid, so we were careful not to sand it too much. We also only used quite fine sandpaper (180 grit), which just lightly removed the top layer of the wood.

Although we’d already cleaned the drawers before sanding, they were still marked and scuffed quite a bit. After just a few minutes of sanding and a quick wax, the front of drawers look completely different – they even look a shade lighter as you can see on the middle drawer with we’ve already sanded.

After sanding everything, it’s time to get out the wax. Make sure to remove all of the dust from sanding and then, using a soft cloth (we usually use and old T-shirt) work the wax into the wood and let it dry.

It really changes the colour of the wood and you can almost feel how it’s feeding it. After the wax has dried, use another clean cloth to give it a polish. Just rub the surface (in direction of the grain) until it’s smooth and shiny. At first you’ll almost feel the cloth sticking to the wax, but the more you rub it, the smoother it gets.

We’re so happy with how it turned out, the finish is much more even and it feels fantastic, too. It’s so smooth and looks so much better than before.

If we’d had to sand it by hand it would have taken such a long time, but thanks to Ryobi and our random orbit sander, it probably only took about half an hour to get the whole sideboard sanded.

Have you ever been lucky and found a second-hand piece of furniture you love? Do you love to use power tools as much as we do? Do you have any ideas on how we can remove that ugly watermark from the top of the sideboard?

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