Refinishing A Dining Room Table

I swear this is going to be the last post (for a while, at least) about refinishing anything. But, this is a little different from the other things I've posted about, which is why I decided to go ahead and share.

Earlier, we told you we moved everything out of the dining room so we could refinish the floor. When then time came to move everything back into the dining room, we took a hard look at the dining room table. The finish had lots of nicks and scratches and worn spots. This wasn't a surprise because we (mostly me) have put this table through a lot in the last 35 years. I've used it as my cutting table for dozens of sewing projects and as my work bench for stripping off old car seat upholstery and then cutting, sewing, and installing the new upholstery. It's where I start my seedling garden plants in the spring. We've used it to inventory boxes of old car parts. It's no wonder the finish on the table looked so bad.

E used his small orbital sander to take off the old finish, starting with the leaf in the middle. If you look closely at the upper edge of the section on the right, you can see how badly the finish was worn in places. Also, when you look at these "before" photos, notice how the finish hides the grain of the wood.

E had the entire table sanded in a couple of hours. It would have gone faster, except we did this inside so he had a bag on the sander to catch the dust and he had to stop sanding and empty the bag every ten minutes. Here's what the entire table top looked like when E finished sanding.

The next step was to stain the table to match the rest of the furniture. Even though we used the lightest mahogany stain we could find, we wiped it off almost as soon as we brushed it on. The directions on the can said to leave it on for five to fifteen minutes before wiping off whatever hadn't soaked into the wood. If we'd done this, the table would have been way too dark.  Here's the table with the stain on it.

Next came six coats of satin finish polyurethane coating.

It hardly looks like the same table, does it? There was a nice wood grain hiding under the old finish and the polyurethane will protect the finish for many years to come.