Refinishing a Child’s Rocking Chair

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About a month ago my wife picked up a little toddler-sized oak rocking chair at a yard sale for $3.00 and brought it home for our son who is about to turn one year old.

The chair looked as though it had been left out in a rain once or twice or at the very least kept on a sun porch and exposed to the elements for a while. It was a little dirty and scratched up and had some water stains on it, but it was in generally good shape and really only needed to be sanded and refinished to look like a really nice piece. Structurally it was very sound, though someone had reinforced the arms with screws. I don’t have any idea when it was made, but I have a feeling it’s probably no more than ten years old and by no means an heirloom piece of any sort. That being said, it is still make out of a solid wood and it’s still looks pretty nice, so I decided to refinish this little rocking chair.

Though small, this little chair provided some of its own challenges to refinish.

Total Guy Side Note: I told my wife this and she immediately felt guilty for unintentionally giving me another project to do. I just nodded and said, “Yes, well, I’m doing this because I love you, Dear!” This, of course, won major points. In fact, every time I went out to the garage to work on this little chair my wife would express how guilty she felt about giving me more work to do. I would always just nod and say how I was doing this for her and my son. The truth, of course, is that I love this sort of stuff and it gives me a chance to crank up my iPod and zone out on a cool project while she does the dishes instead of me for a couple nights. Just don’t tell my wife!

I’ve had other refinishing projects before like when I completely refinished a maple bedroom dresser. That took me about three months with all the drawer fronts and minor repairs that had to be done. This chair was going to be quick sand and refinish job in my mind, but I ended up hitting a few obstacles.

I first had to guess what kind of wood it was made out of, but that wasn’t too difficult. The grain and hardness of the wood pretty much indicated some sort of oak, but I still checked some of the wood identification guides I had written about earlier.

Here are the general steps I took with a few of the pitfalls and challenges I came up against:

1. Sanding the Chair - The chair was too small and had too many crevices and twists to sand it with anymore than a few sheets of sandpaper and a mouse sander in a few spots. As I began sanding I quickly realized this wasn’t going to be easy. I took a couple hours over several nights to hand sand off as much of the previous finish as I could. I got rid of all the water spots and stains that were in the first finish, the wood was in pretty good shape by the time I was done. But I have to admit, my arms were really sore for the next week or so.

2. Staining the Chair – Pretty straight-forward, but once again the complex design of the chair threw me for a loop at first. I used gel stain, so I had to apply the stain with a brush, wait about 2 minutes, and then remove the stain with a rag. I had a difficult time staining each and every section of the chair without forgetting about a piece here or there. I finally devised a little bit of a system where I would stain one piece the chair at a time and simply made sure I wiped down every side of that piece of wood before moving onto the next piece.

3. Applying the Water Based Polyurethane - Similar to the stain, I had to pace myself and just apply one or two sides of each piece of wood at a time, allowing the finish to dry before moving onward. This actually took me about two weeks of on again off again finishing because of the wait times involved. After I had one coat on the full chair I would lightly sand it (just to rough up the smooth surface) and then repeat the process. I ended up putting on three layers which should protect that wood from just about anything my son can throw at it.

And that was it! It was a small piece of furniture, so it really wasn’t much work, but it was a strangely shaped piece of furniture, so it presented it’s own challenges.

Best of all, my toddler son loves to rock in the chair, though he hasn’t quite figured out how to sit on it all by himself yet!

Tags: furniture

This entry was posted on October 4, 2007 at 3:24 am and is filed under Woodworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.