Furniture Care After Refinishing: How to Keep Your Finish Looking Great You’ve done the hard part. The furniture has been cleaned, repaired, sanded, painted or stained, protected, reassembled, and moved back into the house. Now the goal is pretty simple: Keep it looking that way. A properly refinished piece of furniture can hold up beautifully for years, but even a durable finish benefits from a little care. At Brickhouse & Baron, we like to remind people that refinished furn

Finishing & Reassembly: The Final Steps of a Furniture Refinish At this point, most of the hard work is behind you. The furniture has been cleaned. Repaired. Sanded. Primed. Painted or stained. Protected. Now comes one of the most satisfying stages of the entire refinishing process: Putting everything back together. This sounds simple, but there’s still plenty that can go wrong if you rush it. Fresh paint can get scratched. Hardware can chip the finish. Drawers that worked pe

Professional Refinishing Techniques: How to Work Cleaner, Faster, and More Consistently Once you’ve refinished a few pieces of furniture, something starts to change. You stop thinking about just one dresser. You start thinking about the process. How long did prep take? How much paint did you waste? Why did one side spray perfectly while the other side came out rough? Could two pieces have been primed at the same time? Could the drawers have dried somewhere else instead of tak

Common Furniture Refinishing Problems and How to Fix Them Even when you do everything right, refinishing furniture can still throw a few surprises at you. Paint starts peeling. A brown stain suddenly appears through white paint. Your sprayed finish looks textured. A clear coat starts yellowing. Or somehow a piece of dust lands right in the middle of the tabletop after you thought the surface was perfect. It happens. At Brickhouse & Baron, we’ve learned that most refinishing p

Hardware & Details: The Finishing Touches That Complete a Furniture Refinish Once the paint, stain, and protective finish are done, the furniture may look finished. But this is usually where the smaller details start making the biggest difference. Hardware. Drawer interiors. Felt. Decorative accents. Little choices like these can completely change the personality of the piece. At Brickhouse & Baron, we look at this stage as the point where a piece stops looking refinished and

Protective Finishes: How to Protect Painted and Stained Furniture Once the paint or stain looks good, there’s still one question left: Does it need a protective finish? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. And just like everything else in refinishing, the answer depends on the piece, the product underneath it, and how the furniture is going to be used. At Brickhouse & Baron, we look at protective finishes as the final layer of defense. They help protect against: Scratches Moisture Cl

Staining & Natural Wood Finishes: How to Bring the Wood Back to Life Sometimes the best part of a piece of furniture is hiding underneath the old finish. You strip it down. You sand it. And suddenly you realize the wood underneath is actually beautiful. That’s when the plan can change. Maybe you were originally going to paint the entire dresser, but the top has great grain. Maybe the drawer fronts are too nice to cover. Maybe the piece just looks better with some natural wood

Painting Furniture: How to Get a Smooth, Durable Finish You’ve cleaned the furniture. You’ve made the repairs. You’ve sanded everything smooth. You’ve primed the surface and taken care of any stains or bleed-through. Now we finally get to the part everybody has been waiting for: Painting the furniture. This is where the transformation really starts to happen. But getting a good furniture finish is a little different from painting a wall. Furniture gets touched, bumped, cleane

Priming Furniture: When to Use It, Which Primer to Choose, and How to Get a Smooth Base Primer is one of those steps people love to skip. Sometimes they get away with it. Sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, the problems usually show up after the paint is already on. Stains bleed through. Tannins show up. Old odors come back. Paint doesn’t bond well. Repairs flash through the finish. At Brickhouse & Baron, we look at primer as insurance. It gives the paint a better surf

Surface Preparation: How to Get Furniture Smooth and Ready for Finish Once the repairs are done and the old finish is removed, you’re finally getting close to the point where the furniture starts looking like something again. But before primer, paint, stain, or clear coat goes on, there’s one more stage that can make or break the finished result: Surface preparation. This is where you smooth repairs, remove scratches, even out the wood, clean off sanding dust, and make sure t

Furniture Repair Before Refinishing: How to Fix the Problems That Matter Once the old finish is off and the piece is cleaned up, this is usually when the real condition of the furniture starts to show. And sometimes that’s a good thing. A loose joint that was hidden under paint becomes obvious. A drawer you thought was just sticking turns out to have a damaged slide. A chipped corner suddenly looks a lot bigger once the old finish is gone. This is where repair comes in. At Br

Removing the Existing Finish: Sanding, Stripping, Scraping & Solvents Once the furniture is clean, inspected, and ready to work on, the next question is usually: How do I get the old finish off? And the answer is not always “sand it.” Sometimes sanding is the best option. Sometimes chemical stripper saves hours. Sometimes scraping does most of the work. And sometimes the smartest thing you can do is leave the existing finish exactly where it is. At Brickhouse & Baron, we try

Cleaning & Preparation: How to Get Furniture Ready for Refinishing Once you’ve decided a piece is worth refinishing, the next step is getting it properly cleaned and prepared. This is one of those parts of furniture refinishing that doesn’t look very exciting, but it makes a huge difference in how the rest of the project goes. A lot of refinishing problems actually start here. Paint that doesn’t stick. Primer that separates. Sandpaper that gums up immediately. Grease that som

Before You Refinish Furniture: What You Need to Know Before You Start If you’re getting ready to refinish a piece of furniture, it’s tempting to jump straight into sanding, stripping, or picking out a paint color. We get it. That’s the fun part. But before you touch the sander, there are a few things worth figuring out first. What is the piece actually made from? What kind of finish is already on it? Is that damage on the top something you can sand out, or are you looking at