Painting Designs on Wood Furniture Using Oil Based Stain

And it Isn't Permanent Unless You Want it to Be!

Home improvement is often something as simple as giving old furniture a lift, but the idea of trying to reupholster or refinish a piece seems daunting to many. It shouldn’t …if you remember you’re supposed to have fun with it!

Too often, we sell a piece that we think would cost too much to restore. If you stop thinking about restoration, that’s a good start. Unless a piece is a high quality antique, which is valuable, there’s no reason not to start thinking about it in a completely different light. A Victorian piano-legged dining table might seem like a white elephant especially if it’s missing the leaves, but it isn’t at all. It is easily convertible into a great coffee table or breakfast sized table, and you can give it some new life in the process.

The one shown was exactly that when I found it at the town dump. It just seemed too good not to take home and work out some way to use it, and because I took with with me, it became a project that opened up new avenues for me.

In this case, I simply gave it a good scrubbing with a little Clorox and water. What was left of the varnish virtually came off with a little steel wool and I smoothed the surface with fine sand paper. With what became a blank canvas, I remembered a piece of furniture I’d seen in Scotland which was a tartan design done with intricate inlays of wood. It was far beyond my budget and I couldn’t buy it, but I always remembered it.  So, I started thinking about plaid.

My first step was to give the entire table a thin coat of oil based wood stain and then rubbed it down.  This gave the table an overall base color. During the time it was drying, I researched some tartan designs and decided on one that I felt was simple enough to recreate with different colors of stain. In assessing what steps it would take to get the design, I realized I would need to start with the lightest colors and work upwards to the dark ones, that I would need a lot of masking tape, different colors of stain, and a room where it wouldn’t matter that the table set during drying times.