PA Refinishing & Restoration: Volume 6, Issue 25 (Repost)

In the fields of furniture restoration and touch-up, it's nice to have more: more colors, more ways to accomplish the job, more coffee breaks just checking to see if you are paying attention!, and more stuff--what ever the stuff may be--to make the job go better. One of commedian George Carlin's most famous routines involves "stuff". The more we have, the more storage containers we need to buy to put it in, and the bigger the house we need to store those in, etc.

Applying more finish may indeed protect the furniture against wear and tear but too much finish--can take away from the clarity of the wood grain. And, every coat of finish applied runs the additional risk of reacting with contaminents ranging from chemical to organic (human hair or house flies). Some finishers like to use additives such as Fish-Eye Eliminator or Lacquer Retarder as insurance against bad finishing reactions. Using too much of any of these too often does more harm than good. A really good insurance policy is to read the label more often to see if you are really following the recommendations. In many cases, less is more.

Doing a touch-up often means working on an area where color has been scraped or worn off. Finding the right color to fill in is extremely helpful. However, here again, less is more. Application of too much of the "right" color can actually make it appear too dark. One rule of thumb is to add color gradually. Once it's dry, you can always darken it more if you need to, but once you get it too dark, you may have to start the touch-up over--or worse yet, refinish the whole piece! A little restraint may take more time initially but will save you time in the long run.