The !@#$ Furniture Project

We needed a new tv stand for our obnoxiously big tv (which we received last Sunday) and vowed not to buy any more cheap furniture from Target or Ikea... so it was off to the REAL furniture store for us. We're still pretty cheap though so ended up buying something unfinished. We also wanted to get it faster and have a fun little project to work on. Well, it turns out that finishing furniture is only fun when you know what you're doing or you don't care what it ends up looking like. But we are definitely learning from our mistakes:

1. Never stain in bad lighting
2. Pick a location separate from the house, that is not underneath your neighbors' bedroom
3. If you start running out of stain, go buy new and DON'T scrape the bottom of the container (the pigment is a different color down there, which looks really bad when you're trying to touch up)
4. When sanding off your mistakes, check first that there's enough wood to sand
5. Wear gloves

We found that the more we did, the worse it looked. Finally on Sunday we called up some friends with some experience finishing furniture. They brought over a box full of power tools and plenty of moral support and got it all fixed up in exchange for a pizza.

The Studly Hubby on the first staining step, workin' hard..

Don't worry, we pretty sure it's still going to be usable!!