Poplar looked a little bit like watermelon. The pine board looked the least natural with this stain. We chose to experiment with this stain color because of its mid-range tint with red undertones. The unconditioned Birch side, again, struggled with accepting the stain, but you can also see the conditioned side of each board is slightly darker.ģ. The green that is generally very pronounced in Poplar, turned into more of a warm gray. Both of the oak species took on a sort of Cerused look I’m very into. You can see clearly the wood’s color undertones (yellow, pink, green, neutral, red) but they aren’t nearly as pronounced. Minwax recently came out with a Simply White stain and I’m in love with it! It really softened each wood tone and color while not masking any grain–like semi-opaque stains do. All of the wood types accepted the stain well, except the non-conditioned Birch side.Ģ. This stain added very little color to any of the boards, (maybe slightly lighter with a tinge of green), but really brought out their natural color and grain. We let the conditioner penetrate for 15 minutes and then wiped off any excess and removed the tape and got to work applying 6 different stains to all five of our types of wood.Īs a reminder, here are all the types of wood in their natural, raw state:ġ. You’ll see just how necessary it is in a minute, because of course we took our observations one step further and only used conditioner on the bottom half of each piece of wood so you can see the difference it makes. To give each wood the best chance at sporting stain, we started our study with Minwax’s Pre-Stain Wood Conditioner. Treating raw wood with conditioner helps prevent streaks and blotches by evening out the absorption of oil-based stains. It can be applied over any wood but is especially necessary when working with soft or porous woods like pine, alder, birch, and maple. White Oak has the most neutral undertones.Īnd I bet you’ll never guess Red Oak’s undertones. The ever popular and inexpensive Pine has yellow undertones. Not only does the hardness effect how a wood will accept stain (harder woods tend to accept stains better and more evenly) but also the natural color of the wood. The wood types we chose also are vastly different, ranging from extremely soft (birch) to hard (red oak) with undertones all over the map. But with limited resources (not to mention space), we settled on 5 popular species of wood commonly used by DIYers, with 6 different stains 2 light, 2 medium and 2 dark. We’ve been wanting to do a wood/stain study for years now and in my head, I wanted to do every type of wood with about 20 different stains each.

Pickled maple kitchen cabinets