Steps for painting furniture

So you have your piece, you know which look or color you want to paint it, let's go!

1. If your piece has drawers, remove them. If you have doors on your piece, get a srewdriver and take them off. Be sure to put all the screws and hinges in a bowl or cup for safe keeping, now is not the time to loose a part! Yes, you will need some workspace to accomplish this. Just spread out old sheets, shower curtains, tarps, or newspaper, and place your piece on top of it .

2. Sand, sand, sand your piece. You can use a hand held power sander, or a medium grit sanding sponge from 3M available at your paint store. The goal of sanding is to take the shiny finish and rough it up a bit so the paint has something to stick to. You do not have to sand all the old finish off, just knock back the gloss, be thorough.

3. Carefully dust off everything with an old paintbrush and make sure there is no shine left, you might have to sand some more, but the hard part is almost over. Clean up the dust that fell to the floor, you do not want that stuff getting in your paint. At this point you can wipe down the peice with a DAMP cloth to remove the rest of the dust.

4. Denatured alcohol. It comes in quarts at Home Depot http://www.homedepot.com/ or Lowes and is fairly cheap. If you want to be sure your paint will stick, get some of this stuff and put it on a rag, wipe down the piece. Denatured alcohol will remove any possible wax or who knows what from from the surface. You must wear gloves when you do this step or your hands will be very dry afterwards. Denatured Alcohol smells but dissipates fast if you open a window. You can skip this step if you hate the idea, but I always do it to ensure a long lasting finish.

5. Primer. The best primer I have used is Pro Block from http://www.sherwin-williams.com/ It IS an oil based primer, but has almost no smell, drys quick, and works great. Zinsser has a great one too called "Cover Stain". If you are covering up knot holes, or sap use "Bin" from Zinsser. http://www.lowes.com/

The way I apply primer is with a sponge brush. They are black with a wooden handle, you can get them almost anywhere and when you are done priming you throw them away. Put some primer in a smaller container and dip the sponge brush in about 1/4 inch. Stroke the surface of your piece in the direction of the wood grain back and forth, trying to smooth it out as much as possible. You may need to use a chip brush to get in molding details or little crevices, but make sure to cover everything with primer. When you get it all on and it is smooth, let it dry. The longer the primer drys up to 8 hours the more stain coverage you have. If you aren't worried about stains bleeding through your primer, you can start to paint in two hours.

More on all of this tomorrow!