Painting Lawn Chairs; Correcting Too-dark Wood Stain

Tag:apparatus instrument, Painting lawn chairs, wood stain
From:http://www.apparatus-instrument.com/

Q. I have some nice white plastic lawn chairs, but they get very dirty and I cannot keep them clean. Can I paint them? Also, my refrigerator has become all pockmarked with rust spots. It has an orange peel finish, so I cannot sand off the spots. Is there any practical way to paint it?
BARBARA GULA, Dedham
A. For the deck chairs, sure you can paint them, say a darker color so they won't show the dirt as much. Use a special aerosol spray paint for plastic called Fusion. It is made by Krylon and is sold in paint stores. As for the refrigerator, those rough surfaces are tough to handle. You could try this: Wire brush it to remove as much of the rust spots as possible. For any left, treat with Rust Reformer or other brand name that contains phosphoric acid, which turns the rust black and makes it paintable. Then spray with a good oil-based spray paint. Thinking twice about it, bite the bullet and have it professionally painted. It's expensive, but they will do a good job.
Q. I stained a door and some trim in my house with Minwax, but when I finished I found it was way too dark. What can I do to lighten it? The wood had some sort of pre-stain treatment.
CYNTHIA WATKINS, Durham, N.H.
A. You cannot lighten it, you must sand it all off to the bare wood. The pre-stain treatment (with a stain sealer) was done to make the stain go on more evenly, and may also have reduced how much the stain penetrated, making sanding easier. With the bare wood showing, find a lighter stain, and put it on sparingly. The way to do that is to dip a cotton pad (made from a folded cloth) in the stain, squeeze it out and wipe on the stain. It is sloppy (wear protective gloves) but this allows you to control the amount of stain that goes on. Do a small area before stepping back and admiring it. That will guarantee success. Of course, be careful of overlapping; the stain dries quickly and you will have trouble blending in the edges.
Q. I have my mother's old chopping bowl, the one she used for years. It is very rough on the inside, and I keep it as a keepsake on a table. Somehow water got into it and made an ugly brown water stain. How can I take it out?
DAVINA SCHUMAN, Reading
A. You could sand it, but that would never do for such an old artifact. So instead of sanding, you could try to find a woodworker who could plane or gouge out the stain. "Gouge" sounds rather drastic, but a gouge is a curved chisel designed to take off thin layers of wood. One such worker is Peter Follansbee, a friend who is a woodworker at Plimouth Plantation and will not be caught dead with sandpaper. Call Peter and tell him that the other Peter (me) suggested him. To give you an idea of what Peter does: One of his furniture pieces is in the Museum of Fine Arts' permanent collection. That's pretty good when you ain't dead.
Nesting birds solution
We received two dandy ideas about how to prevent birds from nesting on a sill under a window air conditioner. The handyman suggested tacking hardware cloth (steel mesh) under the unit to keep the birds out.
Here is what Susan said in an e-mail: "My 85-year-old mother, Mary, came up with a solution 15 years ago. She placed crunched aluminum foil in the sill, shiny side up. The birds don't like the texture or the shine. No nests for the past 15 years! Cheap fix."
From MBR of Arlington: "Birds around my window air conditionersdrove me crazy last summer, and I found lots of poop when I took them out in the fall. But I found a solution that sounds much easier than the steel mesh you suggested. I got some bird spikes at my local hardware, intended to keep pigeons from roosting on window sills. It was fairly easy to rig them up and along the sides when I put in the air conditioners this May and they've worked just fine. I wanted metal, but ended up with plastic that can easily be taped to the air conditioner or secured other ways. Probably just slotting one or two underneath would solve the problem."