The top of the bar has needed to be refinished ever since I nabbed it in 2008. Especially after a vase of flowers tipped over on it a few months ago while I wasn’t home to clean things up, giving a small puddle enough time to eat through the old finish.
As was the case with the Binary Floor project, I was faced with a decision about how to approach things. I wasn’t going to refinish the entire piece, so I had to either choose to match the new bar top as close as possible, or simply try something else. It was a similar challenge I had with the floor, since trying to match new fishes to old finishes is just asking for headaches. (The closer the refinish is to the old finish, the more it clashes.) To make matching a non-issue, I chose to stain the Binary Floor a completely different color than the original floor, opting for natural and ebony. It worked.
I chose to approach the bar top the same way. Pulling out some leftover ebony stain from the shed, I hit Home Depot for sandpaper and brushes Friday night and got busy. I did the first sanding (to remove the original finish) until about 1AM, then got up early on Saturday to mask things off and apply the stain. While the stain was drying, I took a field trip to Motherland Music for a couple hours, then came home and spent the rest of the weekend finishing things off with a Varathane water-based crystal clear gloss polyurethane. That’s the time-consuming part; you apply the finish, let dry for a few hours, sand down, wipe off, and repeat four times.
Pics I snapped along the way:
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