Chefette&Little Taking This Hand-Me-Down Dining Table and Chairs Set from Orange Oak to Bleached Oak with a Modern Flair
About four months after we purchased our home my in-laws decided to sell theirs and relocate to their vacation house as part of their retirment plan. Since they had owned their vacation home for over a decade prior to this they didn’t need to take much furniture with them, essentially they were downsizing. This worked out majorly in our favor as we ended up with a lot of the furniture that they no longer had a need for. One of the pieces that we ended up with was this solid oak dining table and chairs set.
This set is a really nice solid piece, it has a center leaf to expand to fit up to 6 and came with 6 chairs as well! Plus it has the added sentimental value that it came from family, my husband remembers doing homework at this table growing up which is such a fun added touch! The only “problem” was that I didn’t love the original orange-oak finish nor did it go with our overall design aesthetic.
Design Plan
Although I knew that I wanted to refinish this table as soon as we got it, it took me a bit of time to land on the design plan. Our house is a mid-century era home so as I’ve made plans to redesign rooms and furniture in the home I’ve tried to keep this in mind both to pay homage to the home and honestly because I like the style! I knew that I wanted a two-tone look where the table finish was different from the chairs, and that I wanted to lighten up the finish but wanted to avoid going too beachy, instead I was going for more of a French-country design with a modern accent. I ended up settling on a bleached oak refinishing plan for the table and planned to refinish the chairs in a black semi-gloss. As I was doing research on refinishing oak I discovered that an effective technique to lighten up a finish on oak is to apply chlorine bleach to literally bleach this wood. I’ve included a picture below of what I was thinking.
Waiting for the Right Time
My husband took my son out of town to visit my in-laws for the weekend and I decided it was the perfect time to tackle this DIY renovation project. This was my first project back in the DIY furniture flip game in a while, at this point I had taken about a 5 year break from flipping furniture regularly and thought this would be a good project to get my feet wet with furniture flipping again!
The break in furniture flipping wasn’t a particularly intentional one, I started flipping furniture in undergrad as a way to bring in some extra income. I started a little side business where I would clean out people’s attics, garages, or basements-basically any room that had been used for storage and accumulated way more than the home owner could manage. I would clean the rooms, and organize the stuff that had accumulated for the client. The client would then go through what I had organized, I would then take anything that they no longer wanted and either haul it to the dump to dispose of or if I felt that it was a piece that I could salvage and bring back to life I would flip it and resell it. It was a fun little side business for sure. When I started nursing school I stopped taking on clients because nursing school, if you know you know.
After graduating from nursing school we lived in a town home without a garage for about 10 years, since we didn’t have a garage I didn’t have a great area to complete my DIY work, I could get around this however by taking projects over to my in-laws’ house and working in their garage. However I didn’t pick back up with flipping furniture to resell during this time as it was pretty inconvenient to transport it all to my in-laws’ place, instead I would mainly complete pieces for our own home, and I got to a point where I had all of the furniture that we needed/wanted and I really like the aesthetic of our home so I fell off with furniture flipping!
When we moved into our current home I knew that I was going to jump back into furniture flipping, at first just to refinish pieces for our home but always planned to get back into reselling of items too! I felt that this was a good first project back in the flipping world!!
Re-Finish Plan
As I stated earlier I really wanted to lighten the finish on the entire table, I decided after some Google searches to accomplish this by literally bleaching the wood. I planned to do the bleaching process on the entire table-top and pedestal, and I wanted a contrasting look for the chairs so my plan was to spray paint them in a glossy black. I opted for a black finish for the chairs as I honestly didn’t want to do the work of stripping all 6 chairs of the original finish and wanted to have a more modern look to the piece when all was said and done!
After some reasearch I found a great tutorial but in short the steps are as follows:
- Strip/sand your piece to bare wood
- Apply liquid chlorine bleach to your wood-you want to avoid pooling so apply with a rag or brush in an even layer and let sit for 30 minutes, repeat process until you acheive your desired look
- Wash away any extra bleach to stop the bleaching process
- Apply a wood wax or poly to seal your piece
For more detailed instructions be sure to check out the tutorial that I linked above it is very detailed!
Stripping and Sanding
To get started it was time to strip this original orange oak finish. I tried out a new-to-me technique of applying Easy Off to the table to strip off the finish, the finish was pretty beaten up on the top of the table as you can likely tell in this photo so I thought that the Easy Off might be enough but it didn’t do the job. Note: I was using original Easy Off and I think for this technique to be effective a more heavy-duty version should be used. Nonethless after removing the Easy Off I switched to CitriStrip and it took the finish right off!
After stripping off the top layer of finish it was time to sand. I ended up sanding with my orbital sander on the top and as much as I could on the pedestal base with 60 grit, 120 grit, and 220 grit sandpaper. Whatever I wasn’t able to sand with my orbital sander on the pedestal I did by hand, which in August North Carolina heat was not fun, let me tell you!!
Next it was time to start the bleaching process. I followed the steps that I outlined above on both the table top and the pedestal. I repeated the process 4 times until I got to the finish you see below, I love that you can still see so much wood variation, but absolutely love the lighter color of the wood versus where we started!
Unfortunately I was not as successful with this process on the pedestal base. I think that I didn’t get the original finish as stripped off as I should have. As I mentioned above I was doing a lot of the sanding by hand and I didn’t remove the top from the base for this process I was simply crouched underneath the table, which was definitely an oversight on my part looking back. If I could do this refinish process over again I would have removed the top and placed the pedestal on an elevated service to make the sanding process easier. I underestimated that the wood truly needed to be stripped bare for the bleaching process to work, this was definitely a learning piece!! I’ve included a picture below of what I was left with on the pedestal base after 4 rounds of the bleaching process.
Moving to Plan B
I just didn’t love the unevenness of the bleached finish on the pedestal base and thought that it looked way too different from the table top so I decided to move to Plan B for this project and paint the pedestal base in the same black spray paint followed by a spray paint semi-gloss poly that I would be using on the chairs. After all what’s a DIY furniture refinish project without having to move to Plan B at some point!!
Painting the Chairs and Pedestal Base
After I was done with the bleaching process it was time to get started on painting the chairs and the pedestal base. This was the easiest part of this whole process but it is time consuming. I highly recommend using the spray top adapter tool (I’ve linked it at the end of the post), and you want to use an even spraying technique in one direction and avoid going back and forth. You also want to avoid over spraying at one time as this will lead to drips and an uneven finish, just plan on repeating the process with several coats allowing for some dry time in between coats.
Also make sure you’re spraying in a well ventilated space and wearing a respirator for your own protection!
Sealing the Dining Set
After the bleaching and painting was complete it was time to seal the piece. I decided to use polyurethane on this project rather than a wood wax. I liked the semi-gloss of the polyurethane and also since this set is our main dining set I knew that it would be a high-traffic area and was worried that the wood wax wouldn’t hold up to the wear and tear of a toddler’s eating habits!
The spray poly went on really well onto the chairs and the pedestal base, it is oil based so definitely has an odor so the mask is a must and I ended up applying 3 coats of the sprayable and regular poly in a semi-gloss finish. However I made my second mistake on this project when it came time to apply the poly to the top of the table, I forgot to sand between layers. Like I mentioned at the very beginning of this post I had taken a good hiatus from furniture flipping and failed to read the instructions on the poly can to refresh my memory prior to starting so missed this step and it made a big difference. It unfortunately left the finish on the top a bit uneven, and the poly actually didn’t hold up very long to the usual wear and tear of being used 3-5 times per day for eating and daily cleaning. I ended up re-doing the top of this table along with some touch ups about a year after completing this flip originally and sanding between coats of poly made a HUGE difference and the finish came out much more even and has held up really well. I’ll include photos of both in the after photos below. When I was re-doing the table top I also took the opportunity to complete the bleaching process on the table center leaf that allows you to expand the table to accomodate 6 people if desired.
Before & After
Let’s take a quick look at the table before the refinishing process:
Here is our after for the original refinish process:
And finally after re-doing the poly on the top about a year after the initial project:
Final Thoughts
- Repurposing hand-me-downs can be a really cost effecient way to getting the furniture look that you want. I’ll be honest I almost didn’t take this set from my in-laws as I really didn’t like the original finish and wasn’t sure how I would best re-finish it. Now that this piece is done I am so glad that we took this and love how it came out.
- Mistakes will likely happen when furniture flipping, don’t be afraid to move onto Plan B, and try not to get discouraged when things don’t go according to the original plan.
- Furniture flipping tools can pop up anywhere, before doing my research for this project I would never have thought that household bleach could lighten up an oak wood finish but I will definitely be using this technique again. Be sure to do your research through good ol Google as someone has likely gotten a finish that you’re desiring before and will go over the technique!
Be sure to check out my YouTube video all about this dining set and chairs as well! Let me know in the comments below what you think of this before and after, do you prefer the more modern finish or the original orange oak look?
