Making good on those new year's intentions.

Well, I've accomplished one big thing already this year that has nothing to do with the house.
I took "advantage" of perhaps the worst possible market in memory to trade in a car, and traded in the '14, 60k miles Forester "Touring" Turbo.
Meet the new CRV. It's a '16, has 140k miles, 4 cylinder, takes normal gas and doesn't need fancy maintenance. I didn't realize how much I'd gotten used to sheer power of the flat 6 Boxer engine. It's like going back to driving a lawnmower. But it's a cheaper ride in the long run, I hope.

I just hope this car treats me as well as my first CRV did.

I also started a project for me. I've needed a full sized bed frame for a while, but nothing I found was sized proportionally for my house or priced right for my budget. Then I stumbled over a listing for a free bed - someone had started to refinish it but then ran out of time and ambition. I contacted the woman, and picked it up last Saturday. It looked fine from the onset, but...

The foot board. Decent original condition. Some scratches commensurate with age.
Appears to be mahogany veneer.

Ah. The head board is where the former owner started her refinish.
With an orbital sander with a very aggressive grit.
So many swirls.

Well, let's take this down. Time to get the hardware off, like those casters.

This bed has seen some stuff. Only one rail had one original setup - the one on the left. The bed hooks are inserted into a slot in the end, then two little metal slugs are put into two holes that pin the hooks in (you can sort of see circles near the ends behind that staple), and then the wide staple is hammered over to hold the slugs in.
On the right, you can see that the staple is gone. It's been replaced with a piece of steel bar with three machine bolts that pass all the way through the rail, creating a wood, slug, and hook sandwich.
This is not an elegant solution, but it's certainly a functional one.

No two ends of either rail are the same.
There's literally 3 different size bolts, one for each end of the bed.
The smallest bolts (on the left hook here) were so bent out of shape they will need to be replaced.

Taking off the finish - it was just barely kissed with shellac, I think. I started lightly with a 120 grit, and it was more than enough. I took it down to 320.

The headboard, (where she had started with 60 or 80 grit I think), took the longest to work on. Not because the finish wouldn't blast right off, but because I had the delicate chore of trying to smooth out the deep sand swirls without blowing through the veneer. I'm pretty sure she was going to paint it a color. I'm taking it back to a traditional mahogany stain.
I'm also resigned to never getting all the swirls out.

The little reed details on the foot board gave me trouble. It's about 3/8" wide, tacked on with teeny tiny little pins - maybe literally sewing pins that were cut flush. The grain runs diagonal, and it was happy to break if you looked at it too hard or bumped it with the sander. There was a lot of creative gluing and clamping at this point.

The bed's composition is mahogany veneer on a poplar frame. This isn't a great picture, but the green staining in the grain sort of gives it away.

I hit all the pieces with a wood conditioner to make it take the stain more evenly. I was half-temped to just leave it natural/conditioned, but then it would look very patch-work-y.

Here's where knowing your species is important. I don't so much care because these are just the rails that will be covered most of the time anyway, and this is not a piece of High-Falutin' Furniture. On the left is the (probably original) poplar rail, and on the right is the (probably replacement) pine rail. Both were hit with the same conditioner and same stain for the same amount of time before being wiped, but look at how differently they absorbed the color.
If you're doing High Falutin' Furniture, it's recommended that you keep spare pieces of wood you're using in your project, and you run through different finish scenarios so you know what you're getting in the end.
This project is not that.
I'll give the poplar a second coat of stain today to try to bring it darker, but that'll be that.

*NOTE: Don't do staining projects inside in the winter unless you have some sort of exhaust system if you don't have to. It Stinks. A lot. While the respirator made me blissfully unaware of this while I was in the basement, when I went upstairs I was fully aware of my mistake.*

I have a number of different top-coat options. I have 2 quarts of Shellac I could use (glossy end result). Since this is not a high-abuse piece, I could probably do a few coats of that and it would be fine. Down site is that it scratches pretty easily. I also have a quart of a water-borne "Old Masters" clear finish that's intended for outside projects that would probably be fine (satin end result). I'm guessing highly scrtch resistant. I also have some random poly finishes downstairs, but not a lot of any of them.
I think I'm learning toward a satin finish so that it looks more natural-wood-like, but I'm not so invested in the natural-wood-look that I want to fuss with an oil finish.
I'd like to get this done and under my bed sometime in the near future.
We'll see where I wind up after my trip to Koopman's for new bolts this afternoon.

And if I hate it, I can always paint it again.

 

According to my files, these are only 12 weeks away!