Friday, July 19, 2019

The Search for Stain

So my Ikea patio set was starting to look a bit worse for wear, so I decided to give it a little refurbishment. Since I had some wiping varnish kicking around I decided to give a hidden spot a little quick sanding and splash some on to see how it would look.


Answer: not too hot. This is unfortunate as I wanted to limit my sanding and refinishing to the spots that were actually showing wear, and not have to get into all the little nooks and crannies to make sure everything looked the same.

The good news is that Ikea sells the stain for this furniture set. So I go online to Ikea's website and check to see if the local store has it in stock, and the nearest location that I can get it is an Ikea in frikkin' Arizona. I think to myself "great, it probably has some chemical in it know to the state of California to cause cancer" and so they can't sell it here or some junk.

Just to be sure I drop by the Ikea after work and check to see if maybe it just had a different California-specific SKU or something, but after searching the shelves I can't even find a spot tagged for it, never mind any cans of it.

As a last ditch effort I check with one of the guys manning the "I'm totally lost and need to find something" terminals and he looks it up and is like "oh, you're out of luck, we don't have any. Next shipment of it says it should be here next week."

I wasn't so sure I believed him, but I drop in the week after, this past Thursday, and wouldn't you know it...


Fuckin' miracles!

2 comments:

Mr.T. said...

I only wish I had matching stain for my front door; it needs a lot of touch up. The painters all said they'll try to match as best as possible but I suspect its still going to look like crap.

Nicoya said...

Might need/want to sand it back to a reasonably even color of bare wood and then stain on top of that instead.