Other posts on this topic: I Have a Card Catalog Cabinet, Refinishing a Card Catalog Pt. 1.

I FINALLY got all of the varnish off of this sucker! And now I am officially working on staining it black/super dark brown.

Here you can see how stripped down I got the wood (a far cry from what I started with, I’m so proud), and how the 1st coat of stain is coming along.

I’ve put 4 coats of stain on so far. And I’ll probably put on at least 4 more. Here’s the progress with the 1st two coats.

1st after it’s dry.

2nd after it’s dry.

I did the other 2 coats today and didn’t think to take pictures, so next post I’ll show from the 4th coat on.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to be finished stripping off varnish and old stain. I estimated that I put in a good 13-15 hours just on that part of this project (measured in how many hours of audiobooks I’ve made it through so far: I’m on my 3rd book of this project). Now the staining is going pretty quickly, it just needs to dry 4-6 hours between coats. And I’ll be out of town most of this week, so I won’t post again until next week. And we’ll see how it’s coming along!