Stained with dark gray water stains, our vintage midcentury modern coffee table was a sentimental piece. My husband inherited it from his great aunt, who had originally bought it in the 1950s. It matched her dining set and end tables, which we also received. However, the peeling varnish and dark marks left it wanting.
We took it upon ourselves to completely refinish the table. Even though it didn’t end up as easy as we hoped, we found results worth sharing.
Removing Gray Water Stains from Wood
The first part of restoring our midcentury modern coffee table involved removing the gray stain. In order to get to the stain, we first needed to sand down the varnish on the top. The varnish hid how bad the situation was. Once we could see the bright, light colored wood, the gray stain stood out much more clearly. It had soaked into the wood itself.
We started by applying alternating applications of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide soaked microfiber rags to the stains. Each application took ten minutes. With little results, we left the hydrogen peroxide on over night. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much lifting of the stain. So we let it dry, hoping for progress. Finally, we headed to the hardware store.
This Behr Wood Cleaner was the only thing we could find with Oaxilic Acid, which is supposed to lift these hard to clean gray stains. The jug was 100x as big as we needed, but we bought it anyways. We diluted as directed then used a paint brush to dab onto the stain. With a couple applications as directed on the bottle, we had a beautifully clean white surface to stain and varnish.
Matching a Heywood Wakefield Vintage Stain
The next difficulty we ran into involved matching the stain on this 60+ year old coffee table. When shopping in the store, it’s hard to compare which each stain might look like on every option of wood there is, and we didn’t really want to mess it up the first time.
After some research, we found that the MinWax Golden Oak is supposed to be a good replica of the original stain. We tentatively applied it… and the first layer looked better than we could have hoped for. The stain is a minuscule amount lighter than the original, but we layered on several applications for a deeper color.
There are several websites that claim to have perfect matches for the vintage stains, however, I’m skeptical that there could still be minor differences. For the cost (which was huge!) I would rather pick up the local hardware store option and tweak it if necessary.
Varnishing and Finishing our Coffee Table
Since part of the stain came from water soaking into the table for too long, we took extra precautions with the varnish. We applied each layer, sanded, and reapplied five times. On the final sanding, we used an extra-extra fine sand paper to get a glass like finish.
Ultimately, we’re super happy with the results with restoring our vintage midcentury modern Heywood Wakefield coffee table. It looks beautiful. Better yet, the restoration left the table as good as the original condition. No one would hardly know how horribly stained it once was!