Refinishing Wood Chairs

One of the ways that we are trying to be more sustainable is to refinish used furniture that will fill our home. It’s been a big learning process so far, figuring out types of stain, protective gear, and how to apply each layer. We’ve left gobs of stain remover everywhere, I’ve gotten orange blotches all over my hands, we’ve stained and sanded and re-stained, and the latest mistake – we realized the polyurethane (top coat) was missing in our last hardware store order. 

Because we don’t have that top coat, we haven’t been able to finish anything and it will take at least a week for us to get another delivery and have time to do the work, but I wanted to share the progress we’ve made so far on our two wood chairs:

My aunt gave me and my partner the chairs when we first moved in to help fill our new place. She got them for free from Craigslist – they are simple solid wooden chairs that she stripped, and lightly sanded and stained, so we could finish them however we wanted to. 

We sanded the chairs a little more and then stained. We already had an orange stain, so we used that first, but it looked a little too orange-y, so we got another darker stain to go over it. We are happy with the results so far and everything that we’ve learned from the process, plus the progress of each step has been so exciting to see!

UPDATE: We finally finished! The finish came, we applied a few coats, and the chairs are now in use!