To Stain Or Not To Stain

This past week I have been working on a few projects and was contemplating wether or not to stain a piece of furniture, and well I chose to do both on one. There have been an increased amount of new furniture that has some part of it stained and painted and I wanted to try it out. 

In my mind staining is by far the easiest thing to do to a completely cleaned up and sanded item. You just paint on the stain and wait two to three minutes and wipe it off and wait for an hour. Then you can see if it needs to be sanded with a fine grit like 220. If it's a little rough then you get to sand and then stain it another coat. Once it's smooth and stained you just need to paint on a top coat, which I prefer a semi gloss clear coat. Then you clean up all of your materials with mineral spirits. Even though it is a very easy process, you can see a lot of imperfections that might be in the wood that didn't come out during the sanding process. 

That is what happened to me, which made me decide to paint those areas. The project I was working on at the time was originally a painted white desk that was chipping beyond belief. So after removing the paint and sanding it, it showed that I wasn't able to completely remove all signs of having paint on it before. So this is where I thought of painting the bottom portion of the desk and stain the top of it. 

If you are wanting to do this, I advise to stain the top at least once before painting so that you can see where you need to cover it to avoid any accidents with the paint. Then you will need to tape the edges of the top and then you can start the process of painting. With the desk I was working on, I used the same paint primer I used in my other projects and I found a grey paint at Home Depot in the oops section, so it was at a discounted price. Once the paint was dry and after three coats of paint, I did the rest of the process that is involved with staining (sanding, staining again and the top coat).

In my opinion I don't think I will do the combination with the stain and the grey paint again, but I might with a much lighter color because it will allow the stained part to stand out a little bit more. I think staining or painting a piece is all up to a personal preference and if you want to try to do both in one project I hope you enjoy it.