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staceyneil

Hans Wegner dining set needs refinishing... what would you do?

Stacey Collins
12 years ago

Hello,

We have a beautiful 1950's teak Hans Wegner dining set. It is our main dining table. Despite being careful about using placemants and not setting glasses on it, the tabletop has a lot of discoloration, water spots and rings. It is starting to look a little shabby :(

We have a few concerns:

1) We do not want to ruin the value of this heirloom set, which we plan to pass down to our daughter one day.

2) We want it to look beautiful again.

3) We want to be able to use it as our everyday table WITHOUT having to fret and worry about it, and WITHOUT having to insist on coaster and placemat use. I would dearly love to be able to set my plates and glasses right on the wood.

4) The dining room has many windows, so the table gets direct sunlight.

There are no local refinishers familiar with mid-century oil-finish pieces like this. We are accomplished DIY-ers, I was a fine art (painting) major in college, and DH is a does boatbuilding and woodworking for a job, so we have a pretty good set of skills to consider tackling this ourselves.

One option we considered is simply restoring the oil finish (after removing the water spots somehow) and topping the table with glass for protection. However, that won't look very pretty.

We are also considering refinishing with a good quality waterbourne poly, which would mean we could use the table like normal.

What would you do as far as a finish?

How would you go about evening out the discolorations and water marks?

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