DO IT YOURSELF It's not easy to refinish furniture

Refinishing is very often best left to professionals.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
So you want to try your hand at refinishing furniture.
The calendar promises mild weekends ahead for working in the garage. You're armed with miracle strippers and power sanders, and you've watched perky TV hosts transform an old table or chair in half an hour without mussing their hair.
You're ready. But before you begin, you should ask yourself several questions. The most important one is:
Do I really want to do this?
Refinishing is tedious. It requires tons of time, elbow grease and exposure to toxic fumes.
A common situation for amateurs, says professional refinisher Jeff Porter, is "getting halfway done stripping and finding out it's not a fun thing to do."
Porter and his brother Cregg run the refinishing side of their family's business, Cheep Antiques in Kansas City, Mo.
"Then they bring [their half-stripped piece] down here and say, 'My house stinks, my wife is screaming at me, and I've scratched it up by scrubbing the wrong way,'" Porter says.
A lot can go wrong
That brings up another pitfall: You can do a lot of damage to furniture if you use the wrong products, equipment or techniques.
You can literally "strip" an antique or vintage piece of its resale value. Or, with a curbside find, you can end up with a reverse makeover: from ordinary to unsightly.
The two most egregious errors committed against wood by lay refinishers, experts report, are power sanding and dip stripping.
When you use a power sander to strip down to bare wood, says Tim Anderson, owner of Twilight Zone Designs in Spring Hill in Johnson County, Kan., "you dip into the wood and create dips and gouge marks."
Besides, experts say, you don't want to strip down to bare wood. Anderson, who specializes in refinishing midcentury modern furniture, says finishes such as Heywood Wakefield's "wheat" and "champagne" are nearly impossible to re-create if you strip too far.
Another maker, Dunbar, used bleached mahogany a lot. Anderson says if you sand down too far on a piece like that, you'll run into dark wood.
Your goal in stripping should be to retain the original patina as much as possible and gently remove the top coat.
Drastic measure
Having a piece dipped in a chemical bath to strip it is never good but sometimes necessary, refinishers say.
"A dip tank will totally blow the veneer off," says Anderson. "It will destroy glued joints. And the chemicals are so harsh they can even burn the wood."
On the other hand, he concedes, if you're dealing with a piece that has three or four coats of old paint on it, dipping is the only reasonable option.
Professional restoration can cost anywhere from $125 for a chair to several hundred dollars for a dining room table or an armoire. Prices vary widely, depending on the condition of the piece, its size and intricacy. Some refinishers will give you a ballpark estimate over the phone (be prepared to answer a lot of questions). Nearly all will give a free estimate if you bring in the piece.
If your piece is not a priceless antique and you are sure you want to refinish it yourself, the next step is research. To choose the right products and techniques, you need to find out as much as you can about your piece:
What kind of wood is it?
Has it been stained?
What kind of finish is on it?
The right products
After you've done your homework, the next step is buying the right tools and products for the job. Go to a paint or hardware store with a knowledgeable staff and explain your project to them if you want more advice. Many stores now carry environmentally friendly strippers. But you should know you have to do a lot more scrubbing with green products.
"If it says 'flammable,' that's what you want," says Anderson.
Of course, using harsher chemicals means you have to be extra diligent about safety.
It's an art
Once a piece is stripped of old bad finishes and cleaned, the art of the refinisher really comes into play. Re-creating the original look of a piece, be it 35, 75 or 300 years old, requires a precise understanding of the stain used in that era. It also requires a painterly ability to blend stains. Professionals talk of applying background color, adding dye to toner coats and other refinements far beyond the grasp of the lay person. Plus, they often custom blend up to six different shades to get the perfect stain.
For your garage project, what that means is: Color is hard to control. If you want to do it yourself, you need to be flexible in your expectations.
Peter Kohl, owner of Peter Kohl Restoration in Kansas City, Mo., uses watercolor stains in his refinishing work.
"They're so much more beautiful. They're richer than oil," he says.
But whatever kind of stain you use, Kohl says, there is no substitute for trial-and-error experience to get it to look right.
"I've been doing this for 32 years, but I learn new stuff every day," he says.