If you want to decorate and protect the woodwork around your home without obliterating its grain pattern with paint, wood stains and varnishes offer a wide choice of finishes. Here’s how to get the best results.

When it comes to giving wood a clear finish, you can choose from a variety of traditional and modern materials, including oils, wax, French polish and different types of varnish. Some are suitable for exterior use, others for interior use only.

Staining And Varnishing Wood

The degree of skill you need to apply them varies; some, are quite simple to use, whereas others, like French polish, require special techniques acquired only by patient practice. The type of wood may affect your choice of finish; for example, open-textured woods like teak, iroko and afrormosia are best treated with an oil finish — they don’t take varnishes well.

.You may decide to change the colour of the wood before you finish it. You can use a varnish which incorporates a colour or apply a wood stain and then coat the wood with clear varnish or another clear finish.

If you don’t wish to change the colour of the wood, but want to restore it to its natural colour — for example, where the wood has been slightly darkened by the action of a paint stripper — you can use a proprietary colour restorer.

Types of varnish and stains

Clear varnishes are like paint without the pigment. They contain a resin carried in a drying oil or spirit and it is the resin which gives a hard protective finish to wood. Traditionally, the resins used were like copal, natural and obtained from various tropical trees, but in modern varnishes they are synthetic, for example alkyd or polyurethane.

While other varnishes are available, by far the easiest to obtain and most widely used are those containing polyurethane resin Polyurethane varnish is available in gloss, satin or matt finishes and for interior or exterior use. A non-drip variety is particularly suitable for vertical surfaces, ceilings and hard-to-get-at areas.

There are polyurethane varnishes which have added pigments and are known as coloured sealers It’s quicker to use one of these rather than to apply a wood-stain followed by a clear finish but you won’t get the same depth of colour, and if the coloured varnish chips in use, timber of a different colour will show through.

Wood stains are colouring pigments suspended in water, oil or spirits. Some come ready-mixed others in powder form to be mixed up. Oil-based stains tend to be more difficult to obtain and are not as widely used as the other two types.