Yes, You Told Me Staining Is a Headache. 

I Am Going to Try It Anyway.

The prerequisite for access to this article is, “Let Me Talk You Out of Staining Your Floor.” 

If you have not read it, go back and do it now. Please.

 
Okay, now that you are committed to staining, despite all the challenges outlined in the aforementioned article, there are some steps you can take to make your staining job more successful: ü            Try a dye.
Up to this point, we’ve spoken exclusively about applying stain to floors, but there is an alternative.  Dye is also a colorant you can apply to the floor, but it works with much, much tinier morsels of pigment than stain does.  According to Bob Flexner in Understanding Wood Finishing, “Each individual unit of dye is a molecule.  In contrast to pigment, which colors wood by lodging in crevices, dye colors wood by saturating the wood fibers with color.”  Pete's does not have much experience using dye, but the photo above shows that it can be done successfully.  That example is even more impressive because it is fir, a wood that is notoriously difficult to stain.  All that said, we still think that if you need floor color this dense and opaque, you could get the same effect (with less time and headache) with paint.

 

ü            Apply your stain carefully.

We’ve shown you what can happen if you apply too much stain, if you don’t wipe if off properly, or if you coat over it too soon.  Wood can hold only so much pigment.  Unlike paint, a second coat does not improve coverage.  If you want to maximize color saturation and coverage, you should apply stain with a buffer (we use a round berber carpet remnant instead of a pad), followed by a pass with a clean towel under the buffer to wipe off the excess.  This method tends to spray stain toward walls and trim, but it also gets maximum depth of color with a lower risk of over-staining.

 

ü            Beware the phrase, “I’m planning to stain my floors to match my trim…”

Customers who use the words “color match” make us nervous here at Pete’s, especially when they are talking about stain.  There are so many variables that control the final color and intensity of a stained floor that it can be difficult to replicate one particular tone, even if you know which brand of stain was used to create it originally.  Which, usually, you don’t.  Keep in mind that, if you hope to replicate a color, you need to be considering woods of the same species, age, and maybe even grade. The wood species used for baseboards and window casings in your property may not match the floor.  For example, shellacked white oak trim in a house from the 1920s has a color and a patina that will be all but impossible to replicate even on an adjacent white oak floor, let alone one of maple or red oak.  If precise matching is important, find some practice boards the same age and species that you are trying to stain.  Sand them, using the same grit series that you plan to use on the actual floor, and then apply various colors and formulations of stain until you find the one that comes closest.

ü            Be a fussy sander.

Because stain accentuates improper sanding technique, you should strive for the most perfect sanding job you can do.  This means that you must sand using all the grits in the recommended sequence.  For example, if you start at 24 grit because your floor is old and damaged, you must sand with 24 grit, 36 grit, 60 grit, and 100 grit (especially on the edger).  When you are done with the 100 grit, get down close to the wood and check for scratches using raking light from a trouble light.  If you find any, use a 100 grit sanding sponge and your own arm strength (no palm sanders since these can over-polish small areas) to lightly sand out the scratch, always rubbing parallel to the wood grain.

ü            Learn to use a buffer.

Once you are sure there are no visible scratches in the floor, you’ll want to use a buffer to blend the invisible curving scratches around the edges of the room with the straight scratches left by the drum in the main field of the floor.  Buffing will also help close the pores of the wood, which tends to slow down stain absorption and makes it easier to control blotchiness.  Buffing is done with a floor polisher or buffer, usually 16" in diameter.  Buffers are not sanders; they are lighter and have much smaller motors.  They use a slow, oscillating motion to drive a sanding screen, backed by a one-inch-thick, squishy white pad. Screens, because they are essentially open-weave fabric encrusted with fine minerals, simply have less abrasive in contact with the floor than sandpaper and will, therefore, always be much more gentle than sanders. Still, the screen driven by the buffer should always be finer than the last grit that was used on the sander:150 grit is adequate for most wood species.  Remember, you are not trying to remove wood with the buffer—you only want to remove and blend scratches that might become apparent when the stain is applied.  Note: if you have never run a buffer before, take a lesson on one: they can be a little squirrelly for the first-time user.

 

ü            Consider a stain conditioner or gel stain.

The major cause of blotchy, uneven stain is wood with pores that are not uniformly spaced through the wood (like maple, birch, or fir), and pore walls with inconsistent density.  If you are not trying to stain your floor very dark, there are two ways to correct for this problem: one is to apply a stain conditioner or wood conditioner to the floor which controls stain penetration by stopping up the largest and most open pores. The other is to use gel stains, which are formulated to be thick and viscous and so keep the pigment on the surface of the wood, effectively bypassing the problem of uneven pore distribution.  A third possibility is to add up to a quart of stain per gallon of certain tung-oil penetrating finishes (Waterlox is our favorite—check it out on http://www.waterlox.com/), which results in a lighter but much more uniform color, even on maple.

 

ü            Try water-popping the floor.

If you are trying to make the floor particularly dark and opaque (i.e., obscure the wood grain or figure), water-popping is an excellent method for opening and widening the wood’s pores and allowing them to hold more pigment.  You “pop” the grain of the wood by lightly misting it with water—a clean, pesticide-type sprayer works well over large areas.  The light mist of water causes the grain to swell, which opens the pores of the wood.  The wood is allowed to dry, and when stain is applied, it penetrates deeply into the opened grain, which leads to a darker, more uniform stain color across the more porous earlywood and denser latewood.  This method was used on a pet-damaged maple floor and it camouflaged the pet stains enough that the house was able to sell without having the floors replaced.