My end goal with my house is to covert over to a beach themed cottage decor so I would love to have some pieces with a gray weathered wood finish. Most of the stuff I will be staining to look like weathered wood will be pine so I have been testing various solutions.
Helpful videos
For those of us considering a solution of vinegar and steel wool to stain wood there are a couple of videos I would recommend to learn about the process. Rundown – Ebonizing Wood Follow Up explains what iron acetate — the result of steeping steel wool in vinegar — does and how it looks on different woods. He also explains how to enhance it with a tea solution.
The other video I suspect is by the folks at DIY Driftwood although they don’t fess up to that during the video. It goes through trying to get a weather wood finish using 5 different techniques on different woods.
My testing
The last time I tried vinegar and steel wool I let it steep for a week and it turned pine almost black. I want a GRAY weathered wood finish so I wanted to see what would happen if I let it steep for a much shorter length of time. I tried it after 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours and it gave me brown, darker brown, reddish-brown. I added a whole lot of white vinegar and it was still brown. I diluted it more and got brown.
I let the solution site 1 weeks, 2 weeks, 3 weeks. No matter what solution I used of steel wool and vinegar I get anything from brown to reddish-brown on pine. This solution doesn’t give an aged look on pine in my opinion. May work great on oak, but I’m not building things in oak.
That’s why I found the videos above — I wanted to understand what steel wool and vinegar do chemically and that the tannins in tea increase the effect for ebonizing or turning wood black.
Some tips on steel wool and vinegar
- make sure you have real steel wool — apparently there is fake stuff
- wash steel wool to remove oil that protects from rust
- do test on the same wood you will be staining using a scrap piece
Weathered gray finish
Back to the drawing board to figure out how to get gray. I was hoping to go directly to gray and not have to stain it dark and then use white wash or liming wax to lighten it.
I wouldn’t mind trying the driftwood finish at DIYDriftwood.com, but $5.80 shipping for 2 little packets that cost $14.99??? I tried emailing and asking if they could send the packets in a USPS first class envelope but they said the packets couldn’t be sent air. They were so resistant to the idea I didn’t tell them that USPS first class goes by truck. Guess they want their shipping fees.
I tried a couple small cans of gray stain and I felt they went on like paint.
I finally tracked down a can of Minwax Wood Finish Classic Gray 271. The lady at Home Depot said it’s a relatively new color for Minwax and they didn’t have it in the little cans yet so I ended up with a quart. I did a test on a piece of pine and loved how it looked.
I used it as a test on an ottoman tray I made and I’m so happy with how it looks. It is a weathered gray with some of the lighter grain showing through the stain – not solid coverage at all. I love the grays and browns — that’s exactly what I was aiming for. This is an oil stain — be sure to thoroughly stir it before applying.
This is how the tray looked after applying 2 coats of stain.
