Refinish dining room set, color and mood, Quick fix a scratch or gouge

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Refinish dining room set

If you've been planning to refinish your dining room set, or something else big, but have been putting it off because it's such a large task, just think of it as one dining room chair to refinish, then one more chair and so on down the line. Dining room tables are a snap after doing a set of dining room chairs.

You can break it down even more. Don't think of a whole chair, just one leg, then move on to the next part. The next thing you know, the whole set is all done and you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

For more information about refinishing your dining room set or other furniture that needs refinishing see our page Furniture Refinishing Basic and the links to other parts of our site on the left side of each page.

Furniture Refinishing, Staining, Finishing Books and Videos

Lots of information for reading and watching if you're interested in furniture refinishing. This is a very comprehensive collection of books and videos to help you refinish furniture, strip furniture, prepare and stain furniture, and the final finish to complete your furniture refinishing job.

More books and videos to learn about wood, dust control, spraying a furniture finish and if you're bogged down with a project and need some uplifting the WoodChuckles Book of Jokes and Cartoons will get your spririts lifted and get you back on your wood refinishing project in a hurry.

Color and mood affected by the color you paint your furniture

Studies of color and mood have been very thorough and show that we have some common traits as a group, but groups are made up of individuals and not all individuals are the same. Maybe your drummer has a different colored drum. The color and mood studies are a good guideline and very beneficial in making decisions as to how you would like to make people react, but in your home you need to make colors you paint your walls and cabinets and paint your furniture compatible to your family and not to the desires and whims of interior designers and decorators.

People change too and during the day different colors will have a different appeal to you and different effect on your mood. As your lifestyle changes your color choices will change too and age makes a difference.

Our daughter has recently made a change, which is a good example of how we change our color desires. She has always been successful at what she does right from her first stint as MC for her first kindergarten musical program to her present day new job.

She has always been an industrious worker and in her late teens she fulfilled one of her greatest desires, a bright red Camaro. She then traded the red Camaro for a red Thunderbird. It was very striking, a beautiful blonde in a red classy car, but as teenagers will do, she tipped into the twenties and proceeded to her present condition of a quarter of a century old. A few months ago she left a successful job to take another job with more opportunity for the future and she decided she needed a new car, but she said she had always had red cars and she was ready for a change. She has become very successful in her new job and has become more conservative. A couple of weeks ago she got her new car, a black Honda Civic.

That's a pretty good example of how we change our color desires and how color can describe a person in general, from the exciting abandonment of the teenage years to an age of getting a taste of life under your belt and realizing there's comfort in settling into a good life.

Just a quick note to the parents of teenagers. You too will some day get to relax with a big sigh of relief. Watch their color choices.

I almost forgot, she kept the red Thunderbird too. She's a very versatile young lady.

Favorite colors are perceived more in the heart than in the mind. Think of your favorite color. Can you say why you like that color? Probably the best answer would be just because you do, it puts you in a good mood. That's the color that's best for you personally.

When choosing colors to use on your furniture it's best to use colors that are compatible to all members of your family. If you paint a kitchen table a color that you think is real neat, but another member of the family walks into the room and says, "Bleck!!", it's time to change the color if you want to keep unity among those who will gather around it.

Next time we'll start with the effect each color on our moods. Each color has effects from very subtle to very rattling, depending on the situation, so we'll take each color at a time and give a good description.

Quick Fix a Scratch or Gouge

If you need a quick fix for a scratch or gouge in a piece of furniture and you have a child with lots of crayons you're in luck. Scrape a few colors of crayon into a jar lid and using pliers to hold the jar lid heat the crayon colors on a low heat burner on the stove or over a candle. Keep adding different colors until you get an exact match for color, then use a toothpick to fill the void with wax color, scrape it even with a credit card or similar item, then buff with a soft cloth.

Word of caution, crayons are wax and wax is extremely flammable, so use great caution. I normally don't recommend heating things this way, but you will have a very small amount of crayon scrapings and if it does catch fire don't panic, just stand in one spot holding the lid with the pliers until you get over the yipes situation.

Other pages from our newsletter March 15 2003: Cabinet Hardware, Unfinished Chair, Repaint Kitchen Cabinets, Make A Picture Frame Square

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