Furniture, Wood and Cabinetry Finishing - can I do a different stain, on top of lacquered pine?

Apologies if this topic has already been covered; I *did* try Search for it!

I just bought some assemble-yourself pine furniture with a lacquered finish, and you will get a good idea of my DIY abilities when I say that my 13-yr-old son did the assembling.

The light lacquered pine is quite pretty in itself, but unfortunately looks just plain bad with the wall color and the whole room, really; it would be so much better with a darker stain. Is this possible?

Thanks for any advice with this!

Applying stain over a lacquer finish will not work- the lacquer finish would prevent the stain from penetrating into the wood. If you applied stain, it would just wipe right off. There are certain types of lacquer than can be tinted, (you'd be applying more finish, but it would be tinted lacquer) but I doubt that would get as dark as you want it.

You could always prep it and paint it.

Thanks XSleeper. I can at least have a look for some tinted lacquer, maybe that would help.

And, ignorant question here, but when you say "prep", do you mean sanding, or priming, or stripping, or maybe all the above?

Tinting laqcuer, polyurethane, and other types of finishes is something that is usually only done when requested by the customer at a paint store. The paint store usually will not stand behind the results as this is a type of "advanced technique" if you want to call it that. Sorry if I led you to believe that tinted lacquer is a product you can find on the shelf in stores.

As far as prepping the piece, sanding, shellac primer and paint would be one method... chemical stripping, sanding, then prime and paint would be another. You could also chemically strip it, sand it and try to stain it a different color, but I doubt you would get the color you desire. If it's white pine, that's difficult to get a nice consistant dark color on it.

thanks again!