Recommended Stains for your Refinishing Project

We always get asked what type of products do you use and which ones should we stay away from.  Here are some recommendations on the stains that we use at Wood Menders:

The stains that we use almost exclusively when we are refinishing furniture comes from General Finishes (http://www.generalfinishes.com).  We purchase them typically at our local Wood Craft store or online – www.woodcraft.com.  The advantage to going to a retail outlet is that they have lots of color samples on different species of wood – so you can help determine which color is going to best for the project that you are working on.  They carry both water based and oil based stains.  We typically are using their water based stains.  The main reason it cuts down on the odor when working on a piece of furniture.

I would recommend staying away from the stains and finished that alot of the big box home improvement stores carry like Home Depot and Menards.  In particular I would not purchase anything from Minwax.

I hope this helps – if you want us to go more in detail with applying stains and more how-to – just tell us below in the comment section.  You can also come to one of our Furniture Repair & Refinishing Classes to learn how to restore a piece of furniture from start to finish.  Go to: www.woodmenders.com/classes for our schedule.

Until next time – Dan @ Wood Menders