Media Stand - ta-da!

I hope you all had a great weekend! Here in Toronto it remained nice and warm, and we had a very productive weekend. We also made some time for a lovely Sunday brunch at Bonjour Brioche in Leslieville (I'm pretty sure everyone knows about it...but if you haven't tried it you should. French goodies at their best!).

Our projects from this weekend are ongoing, however the Mr. took it upon himself to finish our media stand project last week while I was in Vancouver (great surprise!). Our original post is here where I asked you all - what should we do with it? The screaming majority of you said: Paint it!

Keep scrolling to see if we took your advice...

As a reminder - here's what it looked like before:

As you can see - it used to be the EXACT colour of our stairs! Must have been a trend...

The Mr. took this outside and sanded it down to the bare wood - it took a LOT of work.

Like I said above, most of you recommended I paint it...but I have refinished a lot of pieces with paint and it just didn't seem right for this stand. The stand is solid wood (we think it might be maple?), so we went with the vast minority of the little impromptu survey and stained it.

Staining was a three step process (once you got beyond the million-step-sanding process): Wood Conditioner, Stain (we chose Ebony), and Polyurethane protector. 

Here's how the Mr's hard work turned out:



I think he did an amazing job on it - I couldn't be happier with the results. I like the warmth of the stain, and the fact that it brings out the wood grain. I thought paint would look harsh against the very black TV and other electronics.  The sub (to the left) will be moved somewhere, and I'm hoping to get drapes up in this room to "fill in" that corner. In the meantime, we're happy oooh-ing and ahh-ing over our first stain-based refinishing project.