Hi folks. I am stripping a fireplace mantle of all the loaded on paint. seems to be southern yellow pine (I think). under the paint was either varnish or shellac, very orange. couldn’t get 100% of the paint off some is still in some crevices,seems like I will start damaging detail if I keep going. It has a very nice grain but it looks like staining it will be blotchy. after the stripping and sanding, I wet it to raise the grain to sand some more and my question is, if I stain this old pine should I shellac it first,will that help even the color?.
this wood seems pretty dry,I am not even sure if I should stain it, are mantles and hearths usually painted or can they be stained? come to think of it I am not sure if I have ever seen one not painted. when I repainted my living room it seems that the white paint on the mantle was too bright for the room, so I thought staining it would tone it down,as the living room is quite a small ? I think this was originally prepped to be painted,’cause they weren’t too shy about how many nail holes they put in it, now if I plan on going the stain route have a ton of holes to refill. I have never worked with this southern yellow pine, is it hard to finish? thanks all
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May be of some help..
http://www.craftsman-style.info/finishing/067-pine.htm
that was a great article . it is amazine how much their is to know about wood. sounds like syp, so I will probably try some shellac then stain it to see, then if I don't like it , like steve says, I'll paint it again, at least i got a little woodworking in.
Whether to stain or paint a SYP mantle is purely a matter of aesthetics. They are done both ways. If you stain you will always see that paint in the crevices. I assume you have worn out a couple of tooth brushes.
SYP will present some challenges of itself. If you try to use a pigmented stain it wants to become striped as the color emphasizes the contrast between early and late wood. But, if you use a pre stain conditioner or shellac wash coat to help tame this you will get very little stain penetration, and only light colors would be possible.
Unless you are able to get substantially all of the old finish off dye might even color the wood less than evenly. This is really hard to gauge until you try it. But dying SYP is, short of paint, the best way to get a medium to dark shade.
You do at least have a good laboratory in the sense that since a painted mantle is quite a normal and acceptable alternative you can attempt a dye/stain based solution. If you aren't happy, you can easily paint over.
By the way, if you are staining, don't try to fill nail holes before staining. Regardless of what the label says no filler will accept stain or dye the same as the surrounding wood. The best approach to those is to get all your color work done and a coat or two of a clear top coat in place. That way you can match your filler to the finished wood and get the holes to nearly disappear.
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