Thread: Refreshing baby's cot

Hi Cray

Congrats on your first baby. Life won't ever be the same again!

Looks like a good project to get into. My first baby used to chew her cot rails too, and we had the same problem. If it was up to me, I'd simply sand back the bit with teeth marks, then restain it to match the rest. Sanding a whole cot like that would take ages. But each to their own.

Yes, buy a random orbital sander and a range of different grits of sandpaper discs for it. You'll also need some plain sanding sheets for hand use on the slats etc.

Firstly, pull everything apart as much as you can. Start at about 120 grit or so and move up to about 240 or 360 grit to finish. If the 120 doesn't cut fast enough, try 100 grit. You know when to change grit when you can't see any of the sanding marks from the previous grit. For example, in the second photo, the little swirls are from a random orbital sander and changing between grits too soon.

Make sure you use a dust mask and even try a fan behind you to blow the dust away from you (out the door of the garage or similar) as it will make a big mess.

As for staining it to match another cabinet, that will be hard. Ideally you'd have some offcuts from the same timber and you could experiment with different stains and varnishes. I guess you don't have that, so I'd be practicing on the bottom or somewhere you won't see. Remember that most finishes are a few coats, not just one, so don't be fooled if it looks perfect to start. Take a drawer into a specialist paint shop (not the big shed) as they will generally know more about colour matching.

Finally, consider what kind of finish you want on the cot. The last baby evidently ingested a bit of varnish, so perhaps a food safe finish would be sensible.

Good luck.

Trav

Hi Cray, I concur totally with Trav. It's not a mission impossible to scrape and sand back an article like a cot to bare wood and then re-polish but its not far off that level. I'd limit myself to scraping back to bare wood the top and faces of the chewed rails only and re-polishing those. It's a good idea to apply a wash coat of clear Shellac first to the bare wood then when you put on the stain it doesn't go all blotchy the way it likes to do with radiata pine. It's hard to match stain accurately but by all means take the drawer along to get the closest you can find. It'll be called light baltic or maybe medium baltic. If you haven't got the gear it may be easiest to purchase a spray can of satin finish lacquer to do the finishing as its a bugger to brush paint a cot { come to think of it it's a bugger to spray finish one as well! }. Don't put on more than two, max three, thin spray coats or the result it looks a bit like cheap plastic. My advice is not to try to make it look like new more try to make it look like new/old so to speak. I wouldn't fill the chew marks---there's no knowing what's in those fillers and sure as apples they will be palatable to little ones!.

Quite a nice design that article. I've never seen one like that over east!.

And finally:congratulations

Old Pete

Originally Posted by cray-

We were given this cot by a colleague of my wife, it's survived 3 kids and still nice and sturdy. However we'd like to freshen it up in preparaton for our first born.


I'm not quite sure what kind of timber it is, still learning this stuff. I'm assuming it's just pine? Here is a closeup of the grain.


This photo shows the bite marks along the inside top rails and reveals the natural color. The varnish flakes off rather easily if I pick at it.


So basically I'd like to sand it all back and refinish it. Originally I was going to take the lazy route and get it acid dipped or sand blasted, but I've had no luck finding anywhere in Perth to do the job. So I'm thinking I should just buy a cheap orbital and a few sheets of sandpaper and go at it by hand. Any tips for a beginner?

This is a change table we were also given, we'd like to stain the cot to match.


I know photos aren't a very accurate way to judge color, but the change table is quite a bit darker than the cot (the camera seemed to adapt better when I left Spot in the frame with the primary colors). Is my best bet to take one of the drawers with me when buying stain and try to match it up with their samples?


Any other tips, tricks, suggestions? This will be my first project of this kind, so be gentle, you can safely assume that knowledge is almost zero so even the simplest most basic instruction will be taken on board.