Now that things are moving towards reopening and I’ll be renting the cottage out, the contractor working on the bathroom is finishing up things. They installed a new window, vanity and molding. Next up they will put in all of the fixtures, but this weekend I’m going to take advantage of the weekend to stain the new molding. We were able to salvage a good portion of original molding, but the cap to the baseboards wasn’t original so we just replaced that with new wood. Also, the door and window molding wasn’t original so we used new wood for those areas.

For the wood, I’m going to try a few techniques to color things. For the window, I try gel stain to color the unfinished wood. The window is pine and reading about wood finishing, the books all rave about gel stain as being the best for pine. It’s not traditional but since I’m in a time crunch and the wood is not old, I figure I’ll try gel stain to see if it will go on cleanly. Using the gel stain, I’m not too impressed with the results. It doesn’t seem to be much better than using water or oil stains and I don’t notice a drastic reduction in blotchiness. It seems just as bad as the other stains and I’m leaning towards trying a coat of a different product to smooth things out.

Next up I get to work on the floor and door molding. The original wood I stripped and just applied linseed oil to. For the new wood, I’m going to try a technique I saw on General Finishes website to simulate barnwood. They suggest doing a 2 stain combo where you start with a dark water based stain, wipe off, and then sand it away. Then follow up with a lighter stain and wipe that off. I do some tests and the problem is that it’s hard to effectively sand away all of the dark stain on irregulary shaped molding.

I compensate by thinning the darker stain and also applying sparsely. I use a tobacco color for the dark color and then a light brown for the 2nd color.

It takes some finessing to get the look correct where I need to go back over and blend in some of the colors and simulate some wear and tear. Overall it works really well for simulating the old wood.

The door molding is a similar process, but a little trickier because there’s more wood to work with. For the most part things go OK, but I find there’s always a spot on wood that gives me an issue. On one part of the molding there is a spot that doesn’t seem to absorb the dye evenly. These spots always cause problems because I try to fix it by overcompensating with adding more dye. The other temptation is to keep fussing with the problem area which never works out. It seems that you want to have multiple small changes rather than trying to do 1 large change. But my human nature always gets frustrated and I start pushing things by trying to repair the issue. Once I get the dye somewhat OK, I push things and apply another pass and things start wiping off leaving bare spots.

Eventually I give up and just walk away from fussing with the molding.