Make Your Own Furniture
Walking past an antique shop and peering in at all the incredible, highly-polished things on display can make you think that in order to furnish your house lovingly you have no choice but to spend thousands of pounds on the best in French-polishing or hand-carved mahogany; in truth, anyone can, with a bit of time and patience, create something just as good as you can buy in the shops. All you need is a car boot sale, some wood stain, a tin of clear wax and a lot of elbow grease.
1) Find something you like the look of: remember, the cabinet / chair / table doesn’t have to be a work of art, or anything close—it only needs to have potential and be fairly stable. With a few nails and wood filler in the cracks, almost anything will do.
2) Sand the object down—don’t take all day on this; it need only be enough to wear away any old varnish or polish and allow the stain to take hold on the wood.
3) Apply the wood stain: mahogany, walnut, dark oak etc—spirit based stuff is best. Use as much as you like, there can never be enough. If you see patches where the stain hasn’t taken hold, be sure to go over it again with sand-paper until it does.
4) Now is time to wax! Waxing a piece of furniture starts of hard, and gets easier with each layer; first, apply the wax fairly liberally and leave it for half an hour or so. When it goes dim it’s ready to polish. Now go over the wax fluidly, fast enough not to stall and drag the wax off the wood, but not so fast that you skim the surface. The first couple of layers will appear very dim, but after that the polish will harden and become more and glassier. Soon, with some patience, the object will be transformed. Your friends will be asking how much you paid for it! And now you just need the designer bedding to match!
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