My First Experience with Stain

When we bought our house we were fortunate enough to inherit 6 cans of Minwax stain in all different colors. That got me pretty excited because I've never stained anything before but I've been wanting to try it out for sometime now. My mother and father got a beautiful solid wood dining room table from my grandparents as a wedding gift. My mother decided she wanted to refinish it sometime around my early teen years but her version of stripping it was scrapping the finish off with a butter knife while she drank coffee and talked with friends or me and my sister. It has been my intent to strip it and refinish it ever since I inherited it almost four years ago. Now that I have a garage that gives me space to do projects like this I instantly got cold feet. I'm scared I'm going to ruin this table that is older than I am and holds so many memories of all those years.

 I remember making "biscuits" with my sister when I was my sons age. At 8 and 6 years old we had no idea that bicuits had more ingredients than just flour and water. Thats right, we coated that entire table top in paste while my mother was on the phone with my grandmother. She made us clean up the mess we had made and I'm amazed that there isn't still paste in the groves of the table. Over the years we have spent a lot of time around that table and I'm amazed it's still in such good shape after all that plus the 6 moves in 3 1/2 years I put it through after it became mine. So that rambling explains the cold feet I have about messing with that table.

In an effort to get some staining under my belt I felt i should go with something less sentimental like the unfinished shelves in the laundry closet. So that was my test run and I survived it and now I'm ready to tackle a bigger project. Maybe not the table just yet but something bigger than a closet shelf. But here is a picture of my newly stained dark oak shelf in the laundry closet.

 

Uh oh! Please ignore the wet white touch up paint and the dark iPhone pic.

 I love it and it makes me happy every time I open the doors to wash clothes :)