Do It Yourself Furniture

If you have a new house and you want to fill it with furniture it can get expensive rather quickly, but having no place to sit is not an option either. You may have considered making your own furniture before. You may have believed that it would be ever so satisfying to make something that would be large beautiful and practical. You may have even gotten far enough to end up at home depot, in the hardware section, and then at the checkout counter tallying up a large ticket. You may have even ended up with a garage full of power tools and a stack of books that show you how to make that beautiful set of chairs and the bed frame that you know would be perfect for your room.  Six months pass and you realize that this carpentry stuff is no joke! Well fortunately there is a compromise, one that will hopefully save you some money rather that making you loose some.

Fortunately there are some things you can do to have nice furniture without having to pay too much money for it. You may have not thought about buying unfinished furniture before, but it can be a really great way to have a lot of variety to pick from and it is very economical. One huge benefit about it is that all of your furniture can match and you can get whatever style you want. Really this opens up a new world of options.

The only thing you will need to do in order to do it yourself when it comes to unfinished furniture is to pick it out and do the staining and sealing. Sometimes you can even buy unfinished furniture kits. These are the things you will need:

Unfinished Furniture Staining Materials

• The Unfinished Furniture
• 220 grit sandpaper (make sure to use the right size!)
• Foam Paintbrushes
  
• Rags
• A Small Hand Vacuum (optional)
• Tack Cloth (This is very useful)
• Sanding Sealer
• Stain
• Floor Varnish or Polyurethane

1. Make sure to put your piece of furniture in a well ventilated area, or do this outside. Your garage might be a good place, especially if this is your new home and it doesn't have much in it (Lucky You!).
2. Lightly sand the piece so that you can flatted any marks that were made during the transportation to your house. Make sure to run your hand along all of the edges of the wood to check for any low spots, burrs or rough spots. Then make sure to wipe down the piece so that you can remove any wood dust or dirt.
3. If the wood is a soft wood, make sure to apply a sanding sealer so that the wood can be stained more easily. You don't want the wood to just soak all of your stain up. Let this dry thoroughly. Then lightly sand this again to remove any bumps from the sealer and prepare the surface for the stain.
4. After opening the stain make sure to give it a good stir with you stirrer to mix it up real good. Use the foam brushes to apply the stain with the grain of the wood. Try to do this evenly to keep the color from looking mottled. You might want to try a part of the furniture that won't be easily seen first. Let as much of the stain as possible soak into the wood, then wipe off the extra stain with the rags. Keep doing this until you have the color that you would like.
5. After about 12 hours when the stain dry, do another sanding to remove burrs that have cropped up after the wood has swollen from the stain. You can check for these by running you hand along the piece. Don't forget to wipe this down again before putting on the next coat. Put two coats of the polyurethane or floor varnish on the surface to give the piece some durability. Make sure to sand, remove dust and let the coat dry before putting on the second coat.

Walah! Now you have a beautiful piece of furniture at a fraction of the cost of retail and at a fraction of the effort of doing it from scratch. Are you not glad that you decided to take a but of a short cut?