Staining Wood Today

In my mind, I had thoughts of staining wood for my entry way Saturday and having the whole thing finished by Sunday.   Instead, the only thing that got done was a disaster.

It didn’t go at all the way I planned.  Here was my vision for the weekend:

I would get up and go to work for a few hours.  I have a lot that needs to be done.  Then, I would take my son to the store to get the rest of the wood.  While he cut the wood for the shoe shelves, I would stain the wood for the coat rack.  While he put the coat rack together, I would stain the wood for the shoe shelves.

Instead, this is what happened.

About a half hour after I got to work, my son started calling to find out when I would be home to go to the store and my daughter let me know that we needed to pick her friend up in about an hour after that.  I didn’t get as much work done as I needed to.  Then I picked my daughter’s friend up and after that we went to the store for the rest of the supplies.  

That part all went okay but things went downhill from there.  I had read the can of stain before I left and it said to sand the wood before putting the stain on.  I also needed sandpaper to get the printing off the wood.  The sandpaper was my first downfall.  I bought the wrong kind and I now know that you have to buy the right kind of sandpaper.  Do not buy coarse sandpaper when you are only trying to get wood ready to be stained.  The sanding matters.  Unfortunately.  By the time I realized this, I had already wrecked 4 pieces of wood – 2 long boards and 2 short boards.  I decided to go ahead and stain the short boards because I really wanted to see the color and I wanted to make sure that I had really wrecked all these pieces.  It looked exactly like I thought it would.  I’m going to use the short pieces the way they are but I will need to fix the long boards before I stain them.  Here’s what they end up looking like when you screw it up:

Can you see those scratches?  That’s what the coarse sandpaper did.  The corner where these two short boards are going is sort of dark and they are the boards that will hold the coat hooks so even though it doesn’t look good here, you can’t really see these scratches inside.

The other thing that I did wrong was not applying the stain evenly.  You can see on the edges that there’s a few dark spots and a few lighter spots.  Oops!  I’m still learning!  I’m hoping to get the first coating of stain on the other boards tonight but it’s getting late.  Maybe I’ll only have time to re-sand the two wrecked long boards.

First, I need to finish up about what happened today.  Shortly after I wrecked those boards, one of my kids showed up with a very swollen eye.  Bad cat allergy.  Instead of cutting the wood, we went to urgent care.  While I was taking care of all that, my mom showed up at my house and wanted help making a photo calendar.  I told her if she wanted to come over some time to use my computer she could but I wouldn’t have time before Christmas to help her.  Those kinds of projects always take hours and I’m trying to get my living room done.  Well, 4 hours later, we finally finished it up, that was after my daughter had spent an hour with her before I even got home.  At least it’s done now.

After all that, it was time to find dinner for everyone.  I feel like I didn’t get a thing done today that I wanted to.  I’ll see if I can get any boards done yet tonight or else I’ll try again tomorrow!