Clearly the best way to furnish your apartment is to build custom furniture for yourself, or purchase custom furniture from a mastercraftsman friend of yours. But with the rising price of hardwoods, the huge time commitment and the cost of maintaining a good workshop, this is not always an option. So here is the second best way to furnish your apartment: get furniture for free.

Here we have an old bar booth from the basement of the bar on the corner. While it wasn't exactly rescued this from the curb, it was destined for the dump. The owner of the bar asked Shawn ahead of time if he would be interested. Let me stress how important this is. You should always be on the lookout for new furniture for your apartment. If it's cool -- like a booth from a bar -- you will make space for it. And if not, it doesn't cost you anything to throw it out.

I should just point out the paint job on this booth. Mostly pink, but accented with splashes of yellow, green and orange.

Clearly, the first question was how to get rid of that godawful color. The first option is to paint over it. A light sanding to smooth out the old paint and it would have been ready for a fresh coat of pretty much any color you want. But Trevor scraped off some of the paint and got a glimpse of the wood underneath, and it looked like oak. So with the promise of a hardwood, they decided to take the difficult route and strip the bench.

There are a bunch of ways to strip paint and all of them suck. Shawn's first instinct was to use metheline chloride, an unbelievably caustic chemical which softens paint and varnish to a sludge which can then be scraped off. But metheline chloride will burn your skin if you get it on you and when it comes right down to it, he is afraid of chemical burns. A semi-recent alternative to metheline chloride is the water-based stripper. A water-based stripper is supposedly just as good, but far less toxic.

Shawn purchased a water-based stripping solution which contained a stripping agent mixed with a wax to make it more viscous, and easier to apply. This turned out to be a mistake, but I'll get to that later. The key to using a chemical stripper is to work on small areas at a time, and to be patient enough to let it sit and do its stuff.


Brush the stripper on with a chip brush, a cheap, low quality, synthetic bristle brush. Your brush strokes should go in a uniform direction, preferably in the same direction as the grain. You do this because the stripping agent starts working immediately and gets gummy fast. Crossing over brush strokes you have already made risks wiping off the stripper and leaving you with a patch that doesn't strip. Shawn started with the big, flat surface on the back of the bench and then went and got a burrito. When he returned and began to scrape the old paint off with his scraper, most of the finish came off easily. Like brushing, scraping should be done with the grain, and be careful not to hurt the wood. Don't push too hard, you're just removing the old paint, not the surface of the wood.


Shawn noticed that there were still spots of paint that hadn't come off, and more importantly, that the bench had been subjected to a coat of polyurethane or varnish before it had been painted. The original owners had a natural wood finish on the bench, and at sometime between then and now, the varnish had been painted over. The cushions that came with the bench are Ford Explorer Green, so Shawn envisioned a dark stain on the wood. In order to put a stain on the wood, he would need to take all of the finish off, not just the paint. Shawn opted to put a second application of stripper on to remove the varnish. This decision doubled the amount of time the stripping would take, with five different surfaces to strip and allowing thirty minutes for the stripper to work in each application, he spent a full day stripping. Man does that sound funny.

On a side note, once he had taken the paint of the first surface, he saw the wood was definately not oak. Both Shawn and Trevor should have realized this earlier because oak would have been much heavier. The bench turns out to be beech.

Chemical stripper is great because it does most of the work for you. But it's not a miracle cure, and even with two applications and two scrapings, Shawn still had spots that were not taken down to bare wood. This is where the problem with the wax added to the stripper comes in. He made the mistake of trying to sand off the remainging paint and varnish right after he scraped, which was a total disaster. The wax leaves a residue which destroys sandpaper and really just spreads the remaining paint around instead of removing it. The best thing to remove wax from wood is a fast evaporating alcohol, like naptha. But they didn't have any around the house so they called it quits. There is a lesson here: don't start a project unless you have what you need, it's wicked frustrating. Not anticipating what you need is no excuse. Shawn should have shown a little foresight and realized he would need to clean the stripped surface before he sanded.

Instead of an alcohol, he ended up buying a product by the manufacter of the stripper which was marketed as a pre-sanding wash. Shawn claims he usually doesn't fall for gimmicks like that, but this particular wash had some of the same chemical stripper in it he had originally used, but without the wax. It seems redundant: this was like stripping the stripper which had been used to strip the paint. In the future, I think Shawn and Trevor will stick to paint and varnish removers that do not have the wax added. Whatever advantage was afforded by the viscosity was quickly undermined by the extra step involved in removing the wax; he was left scraping the wax off with his handy 6-in-1 painter's tool (AKA the Painters Favorite Tool, PFT) which has a scraping surface and a sharp, crevice scraper for corners.

The next step is to sand. Sanding, anyone familiar with the process will tell you, is the most obnoxious step in any project. The bench still had a little paint left where the stripper hadn't been able to cut through the layers of paint, and in scraping the waxy buildup off the bench, Shawn nicked the wood in several places. It all comes down to sanding the leftover blemishes off. Now, not many people own a random orbit sander, but I'll tell you this -- it's invaluable. You can clean up any surface with a scraper, a bit of sandpaper, and a block to wrap the sandpaper around, but a random orbit sander will devour the project. Shawn and Trevor used one to clean up leftover varnish and paint on the large areas, and used the PFT again to clean out all of the profiles. It could have been done with a sanding block, but it's the difference between doing dishes by hand, and just scrubbing all of the really vile shit off before popping the pans in the dishwasher. Really, it's that much better, and you can get a decent sander for about 30 bucks at ACE, and a good sander for $60 someplace more reputable. Hey, you got the furniture for free, and you'll use the sander again (or did you really want that 3 year old pasta caked on the countertop to stay there for your stay in the apartment). A quick sweep of the bench with 120 grit, and then 220 grit took care of all but the most egregious scratches on the piece.


Before anything else can be done, you need to get all the sawdust off. Sanding makes a huge amount of dust and it will destroy your attempt to finish the wood if you leave it there. For about a dollar you can buy a tack cloth, a sticky piece of cheese cloth that will attract sawdust. Give a thorough wiping with a tack cloth before staining.

After all of this, you're left with a bare wood piece of furniture. So, for a solid day's work, you've saved the money you would have spent on one of those unfinished furniture places for some ugly pine box you would have had to sand anyway. Trevor then started thinking about finish. You can stain bare wood and then put a top coat on, or just put a one step top coat/sealer on. This bench needed a little bit of that old, corner bar atmosphere, especially with the Ford Explorer green seat, so they decided a walnut stain would do it. The best stains are oil and stain pigment. Minwax has more extra ingredients than Funyuns, and their pigments are low quality, and really, just don't buy Minwax products: they suck. Trevor went with General Finishes' tung oil-based Dark Walnut stain, which has some urethane blended in for durability. One coat, wiped on with a rag, stains and seals the wood so that the wood won't dry out, and will stay the color you want.


Trevor wiped the stain on with the grain, because that's exactly how it'll soak in, so you don't get blotches from extra stain sitting too long on the wood.

The first step in finishing wood is to get it the color you want. Most Minwax users will stop with an application of stain, but you always need a top coat. Unless you have a really good and educated reason not to have one, you need a top coat and I really can't stress this enough. If you're thinking about skipping this step, then you're not listening. You will spill water, soda, beer, wine, ramen broth, candle wax, all the change from you pockets, and your peanut butter and jelly sandwich onto your furniture. Without a top coat those substances will be absorbed by the wood, which is pourous. A stain alone will not protect your furniture and do you really want to put your furniture out on the curb again, after your hard work, because that pizza slice you left on the chair soaked into the grain of the wood and turned your cherry into moss? It may seem like I'm overstating things here, but you have no idea how many people have such deep-rooted misconceptions about this.

Classic top coats are laquer, shellac, varnish, or urethane, although there are many others. They range in cost and difficulty and protection afforded. They decided to go with a gel varnish by The Bartley Collection. First, the Bartley gives a nice satin finish and is almost as strong as old school polyurethane. But more importantly, gel varnishes dry fast and have almost no room for error. The directions for a gel varnish are as follows: wipe on with a rag in no particular direction in extreme excess, wipe off with the grain, wait, repeat. You'll want to wear gloves through this entire process, because stain and polyurethane is bullocks to get off of your hands. Just as long as you remember to open your beer before you put on your gloves (most important with twist off caps, but also with cans), you'll have no problem getting the smallest pack of disposable gloves you can find.


So, they allowed about 12 hours for their stain to dry and then put on the first coat of varnish and then hit the bars. In the morning (OK, early afternoon) they put on a second coat of varnish and by the time they were ready to go back out to the bar, the third coat. And no, you cannot only put one coat of varnish on. You can't have cake for breakfast, you can't tell your girlfriend she looks fat in those pants, you can't leave your furniture with only one coat of finish. These are the rules and I didn't invent them.

I know this sounds like a lot of work, so here's a time schedule:

On the way home from work on Friday, buy everything you'll need. Wake up at a reasonable hour on Saturday and start stripping. That still sounds funny. Allow Sunday for your final scrapings and sanding and you can stain it on Sunday night. When you get home from work on Monday, put on the first coat of varnish. Same with Tuesday and Wednesday and by the time Petite Friday (Thursday) rolls around you'll be sitting pretty in the second best furniture in town.

Here's something to think about when doing this project for yourself: when is trash night in your neighborhood? In Cambridge, it's Sunday night and Monday night. In Somerville, it's Monday night through Wednesday night. In Back Bay, it's Monday and Tuesday nights. In Arlington, Medford, Belmont and surrounding areas, there's trash somewhere every night. In Jamaica Plain, Brookline, and Allston there's trash everywhere every night. Find it. Work with it. Get your roommates involved. Wear a black watch cap and carry a flashlight because then it seems like you're doing something illegal which makes it more fun.

Oh, and don't smoke while you're working with oil finish. Believe me.

Expense Budget:
Two solid beech benches: $0
Gallon of paint and varnish remover: $20
Sandpaper, steel wool, chip brush, rags, gloves, dust mask: They had these things kicking around their apartment, but expect to spend another ten bucks on expendibles: $10
Pint of stain: $8
Quart of varnish: $17
Total expenses: $54

Time Budget:
Stripping: 10 hours with lots of waiting time
Sanding: 5 hours
Staining: 1 hour
Varnish: 3 hours spread out over three sessions
Total hours: 19


I saw plywood (not solid hardwood) booths for sale for about $400 a piece, as in $800 for a pair. Think about that.

Written by The Logos Staff on Feb 01, 2004 | Profile | Print This Page | Tell a Friend

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