Q: We would like to match the look of our twenty year old pre-finished oak flooring to a new unfinished oak staircase. We tried refinishing a small separate area of the original flooring and the grain looked very pronounced, unlike the original flooring. The original stain doesn’t make the grain as pronounced. The wood is a medium brown color. How do we duplicate this look?
A: As you have discovered, if you stain oak the large pores tend to pick up extra stain. There are several ways around this, and the manufacturer of your pre-finished flooring may have used any of them. The easiest and most practical for you is to fill the pores of the wood prior to staining. The filled pores should absorb stain more like the surrounding wood. Other options for even more uniformity are to seal the wood and pore filler with one thin coat of sealer prior to staining with a gel stain, or using a tinted topcoat instead of stain to add your color uniformly. Both these latter options require more skill in layering the color evenly.
Q: What finish do you recommend for high traffic area like stairs?
A: It depends on how you define high traffic, and what you want to spend. Honestly, most off the shelf polyurethane floor finishes will be quite adequate for home use, but if you are asking about ultra-durable floor coatings, look into one of the self-curing waterbased finishes, such as Bona Mega or Traffic, designed for commercial use. These tend to be quite expensive and are usually sold only through suppliers for professional flooring contractors, but they are more durable.
Q: I am making new kitchen cabinets of bubinga and want to fill the pores. How do I go about doing this, and can I do it prior to assembling the doors?
A: Filling pores is pretty straightforward with dramatically colored woods like bubinga. That’s because you won’t be staining, the only step that throws a monkey wrench into simple pore filling.
Yes, you can fill the pores and seal the wood prior to assembly provided you won’t need to machine or sand much after assembly. Fill the pores with a standard pore filler either applied to the raw wood, or applied after one thin coat of sealer. Both ways work. The filler I would suggest is TimberMate, which is easy to use and is compatible both over and under every finish I have found. It comes in more than a dozen colors and you can custom color it yourself for a custom tint. Either create contrasting color pores with a much darker (or lighter) pore filler, or match the filler to the wood to minimize the appearance of the pores. If you’ve never used pore filler before, practice on scrap bubinga first, but you will find it quite easy.
Q: Can I mix stain into varnish in order to get the color I need to match existing cabinets?
A: No. Stain and finish are meant to behave very differently, and are therefore formulated with different goals in mind. Mixing them can mess up both. That does not mean you can’t add color to finish, though; you can, just not with off the shelf stain. In fact, many companies do this for you. Varathane, for instance, has a line of tinted polyurethanes, both waterbased and oil based, that match their line of stains. Thus, you can stain the wood, and if you still want more color, you can add it using the tinted topcoat either in the same color or a different one. To tint your own topcoat, add small amounts of artist’s acrylic colors to waterbased polyurethane, or small amounts of either artist’s oils or Japan colors to oil based polyurethane.
Michael Dresdner
Metaphors be with you.
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