How to Bleach Wood | Beachy Dresser Flip

Can you bleach wood? Unsurprisingly to anyone who’s ever splashed bleach on their favorite shirt, that answer is yes. The catch is, you have to do it right. Keep reading to find out how to bleach wood when flipping furniture.

I highly recommend checking out the video tutorial.

First, we need to take a gander at this bright orange beauty. I picked this dresser up from the thrift store for about $40. It makes a grate flip project due to it’s solid wood makeup and the fact that, while a tad beat up, was in good working condition.

Step one in this thrifted dresser transformation was to sand off all of the old finish. The key to sanding down furniture pieces, is to use fine grit sandpaper. This avoids creating deeper scratch marks caused by high grit sandpaper that will later need to be smoothed down. Don’t create more of a project for yourself than necessary.

For this project, I started with 100 grit and then went to 150 for a nice smooth finish.

Bleaching

Once the sanding was finished, there was still a residual orange tint stained into the wood. I figured this would be a great time to test out bleach on wood furniture. Regular household bleach can be used to remove this type of staining that is difficult or impossible to sand out of wood. Household bleach will not actually lighten the natural color of the wood itself. For that project, you will need a product like

So let’s get to the “how to bleach wood furniture with regular household bleach” question. Start by pouring your bleach into a vessel. Bleach can be corrosive to plastic and metal, so don’t use your favorite bowl if it’s made from those materials.

Brush the bleach evenly over the entire furniture piece. Making sure you don’t leave drips and puddles is important because these areas will lighten faster and could cause some blotchiness.

After your first coat of bleach dries, you can apply more coats as needed. Two coats of bleach was all it took to remove a lot of the orangy coloring.

Don’t forget to rinse out the bleach. I wiped my dresser down with a rag and lightly soapy water.

Finishing Touches

Now that we’ve learned how to bleach wood furniture, let’s check out the finishing touches on this thrift flip. I ended up going over the entire dresser with a very light white wash, wiping the wash off as I went. This way, the white would only settle into the grooves and cracks that were still harboring some of that orange stain. The whitewash gave the dresser a more naturally aged/ beachy feel.

Finally, after sealing the entire dresser with an ” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Amazon. These pulls were a nice contrast to the natural wood and also covered over the spots left by the old wooden handles.

Figuring out how to bleach wood with my regular household bleach is something I will definitely be adding to my furniture flipping arsenal. On this dresser, it saved me a lot of time spent sanding or possibly the cost of buying a new stain or paint.