What I like most about this project is that it looks the way I wanted it to, what I like even more, I could actually afford to build it. The cost of a project is one of those things that haunts every woodworker and depending on your budget it can severely limit what you can do on a project. As you probably know, I’m a fan of contrasting woods and one of my favourite combos is White Oak & Walnut. Those two kinds of wood look great together but White Oak is decently expensive for building a whole table. That’s where this project comes in, through some testing I found that by using the Tried & True walnut stain on White Ash, I was able to get a perfect fake White Oak.

Now, staining wood is not for everyone and until this project, I swore I would never stain nice hardwoods! I’ve now become more enlightened and I realize that stain is just another level of control we have over how a project looks. Also, when done right (not the DIY method) stain takes a lot more work than my standard finishing methods.

Using stain is all about intention, if you take a wood like pine and soak it in cheap stain then try to pass it off as walnut, that’s not a good practice. Before starting this project, I did intense testing to find the best combo of stain and wood. I found that using the nice natural tried & true stain combined with the very porous ash wood gave a perfectly coloured finish. So the important lesson here, is if you think you might want to use stain on a project, take some time to experiment a figure out what works best for the look you’re trying to create!