Please see How to Refinish A Dresser – Part 2 – Stripping Old Paint.

Many hours of sanding reveals the beauty of natural wood furniture.

The most important lesson I learned when sanding hardwood furniture is to take your time and be patient.

After stripping as much of the paint off the 80-year-old maple dresser that I could the wood was still fairly dark and blotchy, but I figured there was nothing I could do about that, so I began sanding. Sanding off the top layer of wood from an old piece of furniture not only takes off years of discoloration but it also opens up the grain of the wood so that your new coat of stain will apply well.

Sandpaper Grits
There is nothing magical about sandpaper, but it’s important to know what you’re really doing with it. To put it simply, sandpaper is ripping up the surface of the wood. This sounds scary, and it can be if you’re not careful.

Sandpaper is just that: paper with sand (little rocks) glued onto it. If you take a rock and run it across a piece of wood you’re going to mark up or scrape the wood. Rock is harder than wood. Sandpaper takes a bunch of tiny rocks and scrapes away the wood you run it against. Sandpaper is actually categorized by how “big” the sand grains are on it and, really, how many grains fit into a 1 inch square. This measurement is called “grit.” The lower the grit number, the larger the sand on the paper, the rougher or more course your sanding will be.

You can see this by taking a low grit piece of sandpaper and high grit piece of sandpaper and just looking at them closely. Try them on a scrap piece of wood (softer wood like pine will show this better) and rub each grit paper against the scrap with the same amount of pressure and same length of time. The lower grit paper should leave a “rougher” surface on the wood.

With all this in mind, I set out sanding my dresser with a low grit sandpaper of about 80 grit. After I sanded one of the draws with the 80 grit I moved up to 120 grit and repeated sanding the same drawer all over again. After that I move up to the 150 grit and sanded it again. Finally I went to 220 grit and sanded one more time. Every professional wood worker offers different rules and tips for sanding different types of wood. I asked five people how I should sand maple and got a different answer each time. Some people suggested ONLY using the 220 grit once and some people suggested sanding over the same drawer eight times with sandpaper ranging from 60 grit right on up to 400 and over.

I learned this: hand sanding is for the young and insane.

The difference between using a power sander (left) and sanding by hand (right).

I sanded the front of one drawer with various grit paper for about two hours and ended up with a drawer that still didn’t look very good and a heck of an arm cramp. In fact, you can see my results on the right. The right side of this drawer was sanded by hand for about 40 minutes. The left side of this drawer was sanded with a power sander for about 4 minutes. You can see how beautiful the wood was beneath 80 years of paint and stain.

Power Sanders
Using a power sander to take off the dark layers of color from the wood dresser still takes a lot of time and patience, but your arms will thank you for it. There are actually a number of different types of power sanders you can use for a project like this. Consumer Reports has a good quick run down of what to look for in a power sander. I ended up using two different types, though I probably could have gotten away with one.

First I used a belt sander. This was, in retrospect, a mistake. Belt sanders are high powered machines with a “belt” of sandpaper on them that runs around in a loop and pretty much sands and scrapes away at anything they touch…very quickly. They are really meant for “tougher” jobs than furniture, like sanding decks and other outdoor projects. Because they run so fast and are so powerful, they really aren’t very good for fine sanding work like that usually found on furniture. I used a belt sander for most of the drawer fronts of my dresser. It worked, but because it chewed away the wood so fast (yes, even a hard wood like maple) I inadvertently put a few “gouge” marks in the draws. With a belt sand you have to move it back and forth fairly quickly, never letting it stop in any one place because the moment it does you accidentally chew out a spot of wood.

I learned this the hard way. At first I didn’t notice the problem until I started holding the drawer up to the light and saw that at certain angles you could see all my scratches and gouges.

Finally done sanding the dresser…

So I moved on to a random orbital sander. These are really meant for interior wood projects and projects where stain will be used because the sanding head spins and rotates in very short random orbit patterns, which alleviates the chances of leaving long and deep scratches and gouges like the belt sander. The random orbit sander is not nearly as powerful, though, and took much longer to remove a lot of the dark coloring on the maple of my dresser.

It took me a long time to complete the sanding. For one longer drawer (about 36 inches long) it took me nearly an hour of slow, methodical back and forth paths with the random orbital sander. And, just like with hand sanding, I did step up the grit each time. For this project I decided to use three different grits. I moved from 60 grit to 120 grit to 220 grit. Again, each expert recommends something different, but once you find what works for you I strongly suggest you follow the same pattern on all the parts of the same piece of furniture so everything looks consistent.

Finally, after I had just about completed my sanding I noticed a few wood splits and cracks around the bottom legs of the dresser. They weren’t structurally weak, they were just unsightly and would hold pools of stain if left alone. I filled the cracks with a wood filler that was designed for sanding and staining, let the filler dry, and sanded the filled area very lightly with high grit paper.