How to Lighten Dark Stains on Furniture

Hello everybody! I'm doing something a little bit different again today. I don't normally do dining tables. This one is an exception. I'm doing it for a very good cause, but I thought I'd bring you guys along on the transformation. This is a nice antique solid wood table, but you can see there are a ton of finish issues and water stains, so I'm going to do what I can to get rid of these. But first, I want to tell you why I'm doing this. 10,000 Carats Rabbit Rescue is a rescue near and dear to my heart. I do a lot of fundraising for them, including this table. Every few months, I do what is called a furniture flip for the bunnies, where I take a piece of donated furniture and through a series of online polls on my Facebook page, people can vote on color, style, and just basically guide me into a finished product, which I then sell tickets for to raise money for the rescue. So I do this every few months. If you want to check these out, you can find me on Facebook under Transcend Furniture Gallery. When I do one of these flips, I make a separate event for it so you can follow along that way if you want to. No pressure. One thing I will mention though, if you do want to follow along, make sure you're clicking the discussion tab under the event or you won't be able to see all of the posts that I make and the polls that you can vote on. If you want to find out more about the rescue, you can find them on Facebook Okay, now let's get on with the flip. My name is Angie and I'm the one behind Transcend Furniture Gallery, a business created from the love of vintage furniture and the desire to take broken, dated, and unloved things and turn them into modern treasures. 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 solid wood tabletop is an absolute disaster. It's clearly had many, many, many years of love and wear and tear. Most of the finish is completely gone. The finish that remains is not intact, so obviously it all has to go. Luckily this is scraping off quite easily and I'm able to get a better look at the damage to the table itself, most likely from heat and water. Those are the usual culprits on a dining room table. Just using a stripping pad here around the edges to get this curved detail clear of the residual stripper and a slightly finer stripping pad on the top with some mineral spirits just to make sure I have all of that stuff off. It'll also give me a better look at the damage I'm dealing with here in terms of discoloration, which you can see a fair bit of in the middle here as well as on the drop leaf areas. I'm going to be using a product called oxalic acid, which is a wood bleach, but before I do that I need to sand down the first layer of the table. You don't want to take it all the way down to your finest grit before you do the wood bleach because you will need to do a light sanding after the wood bleach, but you just want to get that top surface off before you apply the oxalic acid. I'm noticing also a few areas where there are some deeper gouges and scratches which is not at all uncommon on a tabletop. I'm going to be using a damp rag and a hot iron without steam to try to press those out and just a few other areas here that are going to need some wood filler. So basically how this works, the water and the heat will cause the collapsed wood fibers to swell and sometimes they'll swell up enough to become flat with the rest of the tabletop and sometimes they don't, but I've had pretty good luck with this technique in the past so I'm going to give it a go here on this table. It's really hard to see on the footage here but it is actually helping. The fibers are starting to swell and the depth of these gouges are getting less. So now I'm going to mix up my oxalic acid. You want to use hot to warm water and there's no real exact guideline here. Everyone sort of does this a little bit different in terms of measurements but basically what I do is I add it until it stops dissolving in the water. And just a quick peek at these gouges again. I'm hoping you can see here that they have raised a little bit. Applying the oxalic acid, there's no special way to do it. You just brush it on basically. I should totally be wearing gloves here. I have no idea why I'm not in this shot but yes, always wear gloves when you're dealing with this stuff. It's also helpful to take a stiff bristled brush to help work the acid into the worst areas of the stain. It will help loosen and lift it. You never want to use it only on the stained area. You have to use it on the entire top of whatever you're doing or the entire area. If you don't you'll have an area that bleaches out and the rest won't and it'll just look strange and you can't really fix that. I'm letting the acid completely dry on the surface while I go ahead and do some cleaning on the legs in preparation for painting. So the oxalic acid has dried now. You can see after one treatment that the stains are quite a bit less. It's very important that you wipe off the oxalic acid. A good rule of thumb is to give it two or three wipings with water afterwards just to make sure you've gotten all of that off and then you just let it dry. Basically you want it completely dried out before you start your next sanding coat which I'm about to do here. This 220 grit sanding should help smooth out any of the remaining scratches and gouges and this is about as good as I'm going to get this tabletop in terms of staining. You can do up to two coats of oxalic acid but after two if it's not working it's just not working. I'm using a little pick here to get rid of the previous filler that they had in these holes because I'm going to be adding some new fresh filler and I want to make sure that any old crusty filler or oils etc are out of the holes so the new filler adheres properly. Now that these patched areas have had a chance to completely dry I'm doing my final sanding coat which is 320 grit. Just a bit of a note here the finer you sand your project the harder it will be for stain to penetrate the wood. In this situation I don't want the stain to get very dark so 320 is perfect. It's a nice smooth finish and I want to keep this tabletop as light as possible. I'm using Minwax Classic Grey here and I'm basically just wiping it on completely and then wiping it off. Normally there's about a 10 to 15 minute penetration time and you can play with that a bit if you want it darker or lighter but in this case I want it fairly light so I didn't leave it sitting for very long. I just want to point out because it looks like this table is rocking all over the place I only have the legs hand tightened right now they're not fully tightened so that's why there's a little bit more movement than there probably should be. I'm happy with how this top has turned out it's an old piece so I don't want it to look like it just came off a showroom floor. I want it to still retain some of its character some of its dings some of the discoloration didn't fully come out and that's totally fine this piece has a history it's got decades and decades of family dinners and report card readings and you know that kind of thing so I don't I just want to preserve that while at the same time giving it a fresh new look and finish that will protect the wood for the next however many decades. I just gave these sides and legs a scuff sanding in preparation for paint and now I'm just cleaning off any residual dirt from the rest of the piece and sanding dust and on to my first The folks from the Facebook page had voted for a dark colored base so I opted to go with coal black from Fusion which is one of my favorite colors it does go on a little bit streaky with the first coat but the second coat always does the trick. I've mentioned in a few of my other videos but I'll mention it again here in case people haven't seen those you never want to go too heavy on your first coat a little bit of a streaky coat is actually a good thing if you put it on too thick you're not going to get the proper adhesion so you've also seen me use odi's oil in a couple of my other videos I wanted to show you what it looks like fresh out of a new jar it's very thick almost like honey before you use it you need to make sure you stir it completely until it's more like liquid honey this just ensures that all the ingredients are mixed well and this is basically what you're looking for here perfect a little bit of this stuff goes a long way and after I'm done applying the first coat I'll show you how much I actually used you'll be surprised it's a small jar but it really does go a long way so all you do is apply it with a very fine grit sanding pad you want to make sure that the sanding pad it's not like sandpaper it's um it's an abrasive pad you want to make sure that the grit on that pad is higher than your last sand coat so on this one I'm using an 800 grit abrasive pad over a 320 grit sanding which is perfect in this situation I'm going to be applying a second coat of odies oil in about 12 to 24 hours just for some extra protection and here on the legs I'm using fusion beeswax hemp oil mix which I love using over paint and here you can see I've barely used any of this this is one coat and as I said I'm going to be doing a second coat but yeah a little goes a long way this sweet little table is pretty much done I'm just removing the excess odies oil from the top and we're gonna call this piece finished time to sell some tickets and make some bunny money this sweet little girl you see here is Millie she's one of our four rescues from 10,000 carats and thank you guys for watching this video no it's a little bit different where it's a fundraiser but tickets are underway now it's been about I think five or six days of sales the draw is tomorrow night May 23rd at 8 pm obviously tickets are only on sale for locals but if you do feel like you'd like to donate to the rescue you can find them on Facebook under 10,000 carats rabbit rescue thanks again for watching another video and I'll see you again soon