We will not consider the restoration of antique items, as in our opinion, such furniture requires professional work. Now we'll talk about how to repair simple wooden chairs, stools, Ikeev tables, chipboard furniture and the like.
Establish the nature of the damage
Most often, the main damage to wooden furniture is: loosening of the walls and legs, chips, scratches.
- Loose furniture is easy to pull up, all that is needed is "straight" arms and a minimum amount of tools. But it is not always enough just to tighten the furniture, so if the ability to disassemble a table, chair, etc. is not very important for you, then you can use glue. Epoxies work best. So, for example, in my dacha all the wooden benches are not only twisted, but also tightly glued with epoxy.
- It is a little more difficult with chips, if it is on a solid piece of wood, then you can glue the broken off piece using wood of the same species. But this is quite difficult, so it is often easier to round off all the "dangerous" corners with a file. Another way is to form the broken-off part from clay or "liquid" nails, and then paint the entire surface.
- Scratches can be fought with sanding or full painting, more on this below.
Work
So, the first thing to do is to determine the material from which the item is made. So, ikea furniture is often made of chipboard and covered with veneer at best. Please pay close attention to this. Once I tried to grind an old Ikeevsky table, which, as I thought, was made from a single piece of wood, and was refinished to a chipboard board. Here is such an incident! As a result, I was forced to temporarily paint the table, and then buy veneer and glue it over again.
We will write about grinding below, and now we will talk about the simplest method - painting furniture. Of course, we are not talking about professional work using spray guns, paint rooms and the like. We are talking about everyday painting of scratches and decoration. Anyone can handle such "painting" work. Such furniture will look quite good, moreover, the work itself will bring a lot of pleasure. If you don't know how to draw, you can use stencils or just paint the furniture. If you own the art of a painter, then the limit for creativity is only your imagination.
Many authors and editors of our portal have fun by painting and painting country furniture. So, Anastasia wrote an article about how to decorate the porch of your house and there she mentioned painting the front door.
A Few Tips:
- After painting, be sure to dry and sand the surface (you can use sandpaper). Then cover the furniture with varnish.
- I recommend choosing a varnish for cars, in an aerosol can. Since all other types will require the ability to work with them.
So, grinding. The goal is to remove the top coat of varnish and damaged parts of the wood. I strongly recommend using vibrating grinders for this, the price of which starts from 1,500 rubles. But you can also use the old grandfather's manual method, which consists in the use of sandpaper and muscle strength. After you have sanded the surface, you need to cover it with wood stain or varnish, in the event that you want to preserve the texture of the wood. If you don't like the look of the wood after sanding, glue the furniture with decorative veneer, and apply a stain on top, or cover the surface with a thick layer of paint.
A Few Tips:
- Before staining sanded furniture, be sure to test it. For example, when repairing an old table, you should turn it over and try it on the “wrong” side.
- After using the stain, be sure to re-sand the surface with fine sandpaper and then varnish.
