How to Refinish a Rocking Chair with Stain and Stencils

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In this post I’ll be sharing How to Refinish a Rocking Chair with Stain and Stencils.

My husband, my little ones and I went to Junkapalooza this year.

While there we scored these 2 chairs. Aren’t they awesome?!

They’re both completely different from each other, but equally fantastic.

How to Refinish a Rocking Chair with Stain and Stencils

I started out sanding the seat with an orbital sander and realized the sander wasn’t even necessary, the finish was just flaking off easily.

I went to work hand sanding this rocking chair.

I discovered the small back spindles had been refinished recently.

The stain was a different color, but also the polyurethane coating was new, making it not as easy to remove the finish.

After I finished sanding nearly the entire thing, my husband graciously offered to sand the back spindles for me, too sweet.

How to Refinish a Rocking Chair with Stain and Stencils

I also put wood filler around the bottom of the spindles because there were unsightly gaps at their base, I’m guessing due to wear and age.

After the wood filler was sanded, and all the dust was cleaned off, the chair was ready for stain.

If you notice from the picture above I already started the staining process before I remembered to take these in process pictures.

I stained the entire chair then, I applied 4-5 coats of polyurethane, sanding between coats of polyurethane.

I flipped the chair over after the top portion dried, so I could polyurethane the runners.

I wanted to try something different with the stencils this time, so I stenciled my hand drawn flowers on after I applied 3 coats of polyurethane, then I sealed the flowers with one more coat of polyurethane.