I’ve recently been on a journey to understand how to stain wood. Now, I know that sounds dramatic but hear me out. If you just google “how to stain wood” you’ll get endless results of DIY’ers slapping the most toxic big box store stain on 2x4s and calling it a nice piece of furniture. My goal when it comes to staining is to do it in a more professional manner, the key thing being that I’m taking the time to choose the right method and type of stain to give me a result that enhances the project.

This project was a great opportunity for me to test out a simple water based pigment stain. We’ll avoid the deep discussion on the different types of stain for this project but what’s important to note here is that the stain is water based. This added the slight challenge of how and when to finish this project because if I oiled the pieces too soon there would be no way for me to touch up the stain if parts got damaged. With that in mind, I had to take a different approach to this project than I’ve done in a while and that is having all of my pieces fully finished before doing the main glue up. With that limitation on the project I then had to go back in and adjust the design so that there were no parts that needed to be flushed up after the glue up, which would allow me to easily assembled the project and account for any human error that may come into play.