[sparced]

Anyone tried polyurethaning the lagan countertops for use as a desk?

Can i just apply the polyurethane right away without any sort of sanding or cleaning of the surface?

Do you sand between coats of polyurethane?

Thanks in advance

[NBeth]

My desk surface is a piece of Lagan before it was called Lagan (brain temporarily can't find name!). I think I may have applied a single coat of Behandla after giving it a light sanding, but I didn't do much and it's just fine as is. After all, a desk doesn't really take a lot of moisture.... Anyway, I imagine you could poly it if you wanted to do so (e.g. you were planning to use staining paints and inks directly on the surface). In previous lives I've done those kinds of projects and I think I would just put down one of those plastic desk mats to protect the surface if I went that far. Go for it!

[sparced]

Thanks, the old name i believe was pronomen.

I was thinking about leaving it as is, but i liked that wet polyurethane look.

I've decided to give it a very light hand 220 grit sanding to give the poly something more to stick to. Then lightly sand with super fine steel wool between coats of poly to build the finish more.

Should make for an extremely large and low maintenance desk that looks pretty nice as it's solid wood. Plus super cheap at $59 for an 8 foot piece of Lagan. It's ashame it's not in-stock more often at Ikea. They sell out within days and only restock every few months.

[sparced]

Lot more work than i expected due to my inexperience, but it came out great. Ended up using gloss polyurethane instead of satin.

I also ended up using an electric palm sander to smooth out the polyurethane. There was some unevenness that wouldn't go away with just regular hand sanding in the first couple coats. Not sure if it was the wood soaking up the polyurethane or what.

Comparing the before and after, it was totally worth polyurethaning. The installed Lagans at Ikea seemed very dried out. Whereas my Lagan has a mirror gloss finish on it.

I'm attaching a picture, but it looks much nicer than what I was able to capture.

I set the 8 foot countertop on top of two file cabinets with one Vika Curry in the middle for extra support. Probably didn't need the Vika Curry, but i didn't want to chance any warping or instability.

Whole thing probably cost me less than $100 since i already had the file cabinets and a few extra days of time since I was fairly inexperienced with large scale polyurethane finishing