Great Hall Wood Stains

I sent away for eight samples of a floor wax containing a stain, to see which colours might sit well in the Great Hall.

As ever with colours, it is always best to have a swatch in your hands. Relying on seeing a colour on a computer monitor has gone totally wrong in the past. The paint might have been a lovely toffee-colour on my screen, but what came out of the can that arrived through the post was definitely green. In the end, we just used the green paint (with a catastophically distant hint of toffee) in the originally intended room.

Gregor sanded 5 short offcuts of oak flooring for me to use. The test-staining results are below:

On the left of the photo is a section of pine I used to get all the colours in one place. My first observation is that the stain looks tacky on pine, but some of the colours do look good on oak.

You may wonder why there are only 7 test patches - well my sachet of dark oak stain arrived dried out. The company are sending a replacement.

The stains work best where you can clearly see the original wood grain (e.g. American, Antique and Smoked Oak). To my eye the original oak fitttings in the Great Hall lie somewhere between Antique and Smoked Oak, and on balance I would be happy to stain our new oak architraves and skirting boards Smoked Oak.

Obviously, I will be consulting on this one. When someone can hold the samples in place, I will take a picture.

The bigger debate is the floor. Gregor wants us to leave the oak unstained, and I have a great deal of sympathy with this, as the stain will not wear off and one is using the "natural" wood. However, the oak is very, very white - you can see the unstained oak on the left.

I cleaned the surface of a surviving section of Great Hall flooring earlier today, and it is a very dark brown.

So that is the debate: leave the new material "au naturel" or match the historic colour?

The sanding is well underway in the Great Hall. The photo below was taken during the 40 Grit pass. We have now done a 100 Grit pass, and we have 150 and 180 Grit passes still to go.

Gregor and Gavin were reluctant to have their pictures taken during the sanding, but I managed to catch a cameo when they were not looking. :-)