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hi was after some advice am in the middle of polishing floor boards all are sanded and ready to go only problem is half my house is an extention so i have half pine boards and half hardwood what can i do to make the pine look like the hardwood before i do i clear topcoat?
I don't think you will as Pine is real hard to stain, easy to bloch. Before attempting it on the floor, I would test on scrap Pine first. Pine has so much soft wood it's a real challenge. I would do some Web searching & reading before tackling that. I have read that sealing it first will make for a more even stain. If you stain it, it will be almost impossible to sand it out to try something else, Better do a lot of testing first. If it were mine I think I would consider overlaying it with a laminated flooring [Pergo etc.] and have it all look alike. You can pour bleach on that stuff without hurting it. My wife accidentally did just that. Almost the whole gallon.
Yes staining pine is tricky. A lot of restorers use a water based stain rather than spirit based one as this tends to get a more even cover and avoids the blotchiness. An alternative if you dont mind loosing a lot of the grain figuring is to lightly paint it before finishing with estapol etc. Get advise from a paint store for this!:)
Good coating of Shellac before applying stain will help with the blotching effect you get from staining Pine. As always, test on a scrap piece of the timber you are using and remember the stain will be lighter if applied over Shellac and may need several coats to bring out the full colour of the stain.
I am going to take a slightly different approach on this. Given that the nature and appearance (grain are completely different) why actually go to the trouble of trying to make the pine look like hardwood?
The opposite approach, I would suggest is be happy that they are different and finish off accordingly to give a good and resiliant surface.
In the old days, you would frequently find a broad range of timbers being used in houses be it for flooring and/or joinery. I know since I have precisely this in both my 1840s and 1826 propertys, and I like this juxtoposition of different timbers.
Now I don't know which pine you are referring to but assuming for a second it is Radiata, rather than perhaps a more desirable pine (ie. baltic, Kauri etc), the one thing you could do is as Munruben suggests, is give the floor a couple of coats of shellac, (even with a little stain added to it, such as baltic or huon) and then once dry, cover off with 3 coats of a Tung Oil mix (ie. Feast Watson or whatever), sanding lightly between each coat of the Tung Oil. You similarly, can coat the hardwood floor with the same mix and that way you will get a level of integration of appearance of your floor.
Just a thought.