How to Avoid Sander Swirl Marks When Refinishing Furniture

Hello everybody, welcome to another video. This one is a little bit of a doozy. This is a piece I picked up at the Habitat for Humanity restore. First glance, it looks like this may have been someone's first attempt at restoring a piece of furniture and I know we all start somewhere but unfortunately this was a pretty rough job and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to save any of it. The main reason I wanted to show you guys this specific flip, do you see all these little round squiggly marks? These are called squirrel lines and it's very typical in bad sanding jobs. I'm going to show you how I fix it and how to avoid it. This will be a paint wood combo, let's get into it. My name is Angie and I refinish furniture. Sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom. This original hardware has quite obviously been spray painted. That's not a huge deal but I am curious as to what's underneath, whether it's brass, whether it's plated, whether it's copper. I'm going to soak these in vinegar a little bit later on and see if I can get that paint off and see what we're working with. Now this finish is absolutely terrible. It is a veneer over top of solid wood. The veneer itself is quite thick so I'm not afraid to go in and start sanding right away. I'm using a pretty fine sand pad here, this is 180 grit. All I want to do is take off that top layer of very thin finish so I can see the damage underneath and as you can see here it is fairly extensive. All of these little squiggle marks and circles, this is called squirreling and there's a couple of reasons that happens. One reason is too much pressure, you're pushing down too hard on an orbital sander. Another reason that can happen is moving too fast, if your hand is moving too fast for the machine. Too coarse a grit can also cause it and if you use a coarse grit and then don't graduate up into finer grits as you go along that can cause it. And this is one that most people don't think about but using a sanding pad that is spent and by spent what I mean is it should be changed. Most of us don't change our sanding pads nearly enough. I've seen some people using it right down and to the paper basically and you don't want to do that. They actually have fairly short life spans so if you find you're not moving too fast, you're not using too much pressure, you're using the right grit but you're still getting these marks, try switching out your sanding pads a little bit more often and see if that helps. You can see I'm controlling this sander with three fingers only just to show you the amount of pressure you really should have. Obviously that's not as easy as holding it with your hand like this but this is also real-time speed here. You don't really want to be moving faster than that. I already know that I'm going to be painting the top, the sides, and this bottom section here. I'm going to try to save the drawers themselves but the rest there's just too much damage and it's going to take way too much time. I'm not a big fan of the wood grain here so I'm okay with painting part of this dresser. At this point it honestly doesn't matter what I do to it, it has to look better than it did. This dresser was likely made around the 40s maybe even into the early 50s. It's pretty well made actually. It's kind of a shame that it ended up so damaged but like I said we all start somewhere. No one's first few pieces were amazing, it's just not possible. So having sanded off a layer of the top here in preparation for paint you can see those swirl marks and just how bad they actually were and when they applied what I'm guessing is some sort of a dye stain or penetrating stain, it just soaked right into those marks and it just would have been a nightmare to try to remove from the whole piece so I just sprayed on a fairly light coat of black primer in preparation for paint and now moving on to staining the drawers. I'm using General Finishes gel stain in the color nutmeg which is actually my favorite color from them. Because this is a light wood it's not going to really darken the drawers all that much. It's going to give them a rich almost sort of like butternut almost kind of color or a butterscotch. It's not going to be dark as you can see here as I'm wiping it off. Gel stain does not penetrate like a dye stain or a penetrating stain does. It sits more on the surface but I just really like them. So I actually used three different sanding grits to get to this point where most of those swirl marks are gone. As you know I started off with a 180 grit, I moved up to a I think it was a 220 grit and then my final one was a 320 grit which is a little bit fine for staining but I wanted these drawers to be on the light side anyway so I was okay with that. Hi Jolene. Hi baby Marge. All right I'm just using a fine sand pad here to go over that light coat of primer just to make sure there's no little dust nibs on it and then on to paint. I'm using one of my custom mix colors. If you're interested in the recipe I will put a link to a video in the description box below where you can see how I make this actual color. It's actually three different colors from Fusion Mineral Paint and it comes out to be a nice rich dark navy with a little bit of a gray tone to it. So on to the hardware. I picked up this little pot from a thrift store. If you choose to do this do not use one of your cooking pots, have a separate pot dedicated. You can get one for a couple bucks at a thrift store. I'm using a mix of water and cleaning vinegar, popping the hardware in and I'm going to bring it to a boil. What this is going to do is going to loosen the paint as well as any grease or grime. I don't know yet at this point if I'm going to be able to save the hardware. It depends what's underneath this paint and why they painted it in the first place. Good soup. You also might want to pick up some separate tongs. I now owe our household a set of silicone tongs. This is the sludge I am pulling everything out of. This looks like a wire brush but it's actually a stiff nylon brush. I didn't want to use wire because I could risk scratching whatever finishes under here. Looking at it, it is quite tarnished. That's probably why they painted it in the first place but I'm going to keep scrubbing here. I'm going to use a little Bar Keepers Friend and you can see that that has helped a lot. They're just still not quite at the level I would want them to be to put them on as is so I'm just going to continue cleaning them up here and I will be spray painting them. These handles were a little bit worse than the knobs as far as the pitting goes. You can see all along the edges here there's still some of that gray paint inside the pitting and tarnish so yeah I'm definitely going to be spray painting these gold. It's unfortunate I like to save original hardware when I can in its original finish but it's not always possible so it is what it is. So three coats of paint now have dried. It's a beautiful color as is but I am going to be adding my favorite beeswax hemp oil combo from Fusion. This stuff is great on wood and on paint. It just adds a nice luster and deepens the color a bit so I'll show you here in a second once I get a little bit on the change in the color. So basically all I do is I put on a light amount, let it soak in for a little bit and then just wipe off any excess. I'm applying it here with an Art Minds wax brush from Michaels but you can also apply with a rag and you can see here the difference in the color and as well on the wood. It just deepens the color a little bit and adds a nice level of protection without being too heavy or plastic feeling. It's a nice light finish. We're in the homestretch. I was quite pleased with what I was able to do with the drawer fronts. There were a few things I couldn't get out but that's just character and I'm okay with that. For the hardware here I've already sprayed the underside so I'm just flipping everything over and I'm using this gold spray paint which is one of my favorite brands. I'm going to do three light coats from each direction and that should do it. Well it is no exaggeration to say that this piece has done a 180. I'm very happy that I was able to spare it. It's definitely not perfect and there are things that I would have changed had the situation initially been a little bit different but I did what I could for it and I'm just glad that it's going to be able to be used again. My guess is that the person who initially had this before me learned a lot. I know if it was mine I would have learned a lot as well and hopefully they've looked into ways to sort of avoid these issues in the future and hopefully they keep moving forward. If you're just starting out you're not going to jump into this and be amazing. It's going to take time and practice and you are going to screw up some pieces so don't be too hard on yourself or others. Have fun with it and yeah thanks for watching. Let's have a look at this piece now.