Bare Wood Furniture - The Significance Of Planning: Quite A Few Suggestions To Decide The Most Excellent For Your Furniture

So you've taken the plunge and bought a piece of bare wood furniture. Congrats! It is an excellent value for the money, and with appropriate care, can last for generations.

Hopefully, before you made the investment, you already had a clear idea what you wanted to do with the piece, but if not, then before you pick up the first tool and start to work, it's time to plan! A little investment in time now will save you a great number of problems down the road.

Where bare wood furniture is concerned, you essentially have 3 options for finishing the piece, and they are:

Leave the wood "naked"

Paint it

Stain it

Each of these alternatives requires a bit of work on your part in order to protect your investment and increase the beauty and functionality of the piece.

The easiest thing you can do is just "finish" your new piece of bare wood furniture is to let it stay in its usual condition. If you choose this option, you'll probably desire to protect the wood by coating it in some type of wood protecting oil (linseed oil is normally used on a wide variety of bare wood), but there are other products available also. Always, always, always test first by applying a small quantity of the oil you selected to an unseen corner of the wood to ensure that it won't cause any discoloration or other reaction in the wood. Once assured of this, you can safely apply your chosen protective oil to the entire piece.

If you decide to paint your bare wood furniture, you have quite many to think about, other than color selection. Type of paint, for example. If a piece is to be positioned in a bathing room, you'll possibly want to gravitate toward a glossy paint, as these stand up well to the high moisture environment. For high traffic/heavily used pieces, semi-gloss paints offer a good balance of good looks and durability, and if the piece is intended for a lower traffic/lower intensity environment, then flat or satin finishes will serve you fine.

Now's also the time to think about whether or not you will have any kind of border or scrollwork on your bare wood furniture. If you're not specifically artistically inclined, there are a variety of beautiful stencils you can use, readily available at home stores (Lowe's, Home Depot), arts and craft shops (Michael's), and often at chain retail outlets (Wal-Mart, Target), so you have got several options. Obviously, if you're artistically inclined or know someone who is, a hand painted border is a great way to really personalize the piece!

At last, you might choose to stain your new piece of furniture. This is my own favorite method of finishing pieces, although it takes the longest, and if this is the direction you intend to go, again, you have got a variety of decisions to make, beginning with the type of stain you'll use. Stains come in oil-based, water-based, or gel, and while my own preference runs to oil based, you will want to experiment to find out which works best for you. Obviously, you do not want to experiment directly on your new piece of furniture, so I recommend buying an unfinished wood shelf of the same form of wood from your local home store and experiment on that. Once you make a firm selection, you can proceed with confidence and start working on your bare wood furniture direct.

Make a plan, have some fun, and enjoy your new piece of bare wood furniture, regardless of how you choose to finish it!