Wood Preservative for indoors
so, oxalic acid is still made and commonly referred to as wood bleach and it does blonde wood. i am wondering if you are thinking of TSP. i think the modern tsp is some substitute.
you will have to put something on them to keep them from splintering.
bob, we used to put wax on floors all the time. i am hoping to do my stairs with some and if it is slippery, i will advise.
andriywww1990
in General Discussion 4 years and 5 months ago
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markwalker | 4 years and 6 months ago
Would you happen to have advice about what to use on stair treads. Our house is 115 years old, and the staircase is sound but the wood of the stair treads and risers need some love.. It seems dry, splintering on the edge in places, and it’s grain is raised, possibly due to steaming the carpet that was installed over them. I would like to clean them up, with a light sanding, seal the wood and recarpet them.
The products out there range from paints, “natiural” oils and varnishes of various kinds. Including spar varnish, tung oil, linseed oil, polyurethane etc.. it is not oak but a coarse grained wood I can’t identify.
hkapstein | 4 years and 6 months ago
I think your efforts would be wasted under a carpet. Is it good to seal the wood? Maybe, but the studs and joists are not sealed, and they keep going.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
ok. so when i first worked in old houses, i would see stair treads that were nearly worn through and i thought “wow, look how old that is” . as time went on i noticed that not only were most stairs not worn through, even my stairs at home would begin to edge wear with the soft part of the grain going first if i did not keep poly on those stairs and if i did not poly the edges as soon as any wore off. Polyurethane is your protection and it sits on top of the wood and with any surface, if you keep it poly’d, the wood will not wear. it will wear the poly. but you have to get more poly on ASAP if you wear to wood.
i would not use oils as they soak in and make wood look nice and might offer some protection in that it keeps it from drying out, but you need something to sit on the surface and keep the soles of the shoes away from the actual wood.
if they are really splintering. you can try cleaning them up a little, staining them, and once you have them where they look good, you can use a bar top epoxy finish or west system epoxy to coat them. once this is done, you will have to recoat them with the same product or at least another epoxy. (west system says you can coat their product with poly but i don’t like to do that and i would not do it on stairs).
hasibur.rahman07 | 4 years and 6 months ago
Steve can you weigh in on this article: Is this the right approach? https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/interior-projects/how-to/a9483/4-steps-to-saving-a-scuffed-up-staircase-15962251/
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
that is pretty spot on for a beginner. or for him to tell someone who is a beginner. i would use a random orbital to move fast and would sand to 100 or 120 with the orbital and then use the straight line sander to remove orbits, backing up to say 80 then 100, 120. it is hard to find a straight line sander anymore. i have a shop full of old craftsman’s which i found on ebay (and am now selling) but sometime about for years back, festool began making a pricey straight line (i bought one and love it).
sometimes we have to sand the nose back, carefully as feet wear the same spot and will chew the nosing up. be careful. don’t take too much off. i would prefer a straight line sander on the nosing and run it back and forth using maybe a heavy grit as they are not too aggressive.
also, he says if the finish is worn through, you have to take the entire thing down. yes and no. i keep telling people in here i am going to do a video of how to repair a finish but have yet to do so. and you cannot repair a fresh finish as the poly will burnish into the wood grain (so if you poly something and find a defect in the finish, you cannot sand new off and fix it, it must age). but you can sand with say 150 or 180 over the finish and sand the bare wood to 120 or so and seal the wood and then coat the repair and then sand lightly with 180 and then recoat. the problems with matches occur because we do not know what grit the wood was originally finished to and what product was used and even if a light stain was used. a pro has all sorts of dyes and tricks to play with this and make a match. i have to touch up a spot outside my bedroom and on the stairs now and i am not sanding the entire thing off. but i may not get it perfect either. i did a repair in a kitchen floor on washington park a decade ago and it came out spot on and when that happens i think i got lucky.
boots will wear the treads faster then shoes and sneakers and those are the spots that need attention my stairs, after the winter.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
so the regions where i have heard water softeners mentioned seems to be where the water comes out of aquifers and i suppose that might be say suffolk county were the Water Authority pulls from wells, and perhaps does not treat it for minerals, and down south, where many homes still had their own wells. i did work in a house outside of the city where i lived – in the city limits but outside of water district and the customer had a well pump and right next to it was a big water softener tank. those were the kind of people served by these water softener companies. as i mentioned, i knew the owner of one and if i talk to him, i might bring this topic up.
the people behind where i grew up in suffolk county (recall the post about flue lining for a wood stove in a fireplace; those same people) had their own well and pump and i am going to ask the son if they had a water softener and see what he says. i did ask him how deep that well was as his father put a new one in in the 1970’s and i think he said it went down about 150′ (into the aquifer).
Guest User | 4 years and 6 months ago
Thank you for the water update.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
so i found this here and then went and wrote a reply apologizing and asking the mods to pull it and i reposted it where it belongs and someone pulled that reply but not the original misposted reply. i don’t get it.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
if the forum would automatically collapse as we moved from one post to another, there would be less of this. we would only be posting to the one we open.
hkapstein | 4 years and 6 months ago
But with a carpet on top? The poly will protect from abrasive wear, but that shouldn’t happen under a carpet, and if you want to restore them later you’ll be refinishing anyway. If by carpet you mean a stair runner where the wood is partly exposed that would be different . I’m picturing a wall to wall carpet type finish.
Perhaps the goal is to protect from steaming, but carpet is routinely installed on unvarnished plywood.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago
we would rather a carpet runner here but it is so much easier to sweep bare stares.
markwalker | 4 years and 6 months ago
Photo attached. We have at least four kinds of wood in this staircase:.
We do like wall to wall as this is a 2 family house. I’d like to clean the steps up because I hate simply hiding a mess. The last carpet was office type carpet and the “steam” process actually soaks the carpet while an extractor machine similar to a shop vac pulls the dirty water out. It is hard to say why the raised grain but it is now very ‘textured’
markwalker | 4 years and 6 months ago
Sorry, here is the photo. [Thumbnail_IMG_1192](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s2/:brownstoner:d9g3:thumbnail_img_1192.jpg.jpg)
Looking more closely I believe this might be ash-wood.
hkapstein | 4 years and 6 months ago
Looks more like dish out than grain raise, but let’s see what steve thinks. It’s most likely pine. Personally I’d do one of two things. One would be hire a floor guy to refinish them nicely, and then use them with or without a runner, obviously the runner will save a lot of wear and tear. Two would be carpet over them as you describe and not do anything else that’s not required to install a carpet. If the goal is to preserve them for future refinishing, I doubt whatever you are going to do now will make them more successful, and possibly it could be detrimental IMHO.
Now you may feel that the wood is “drying out” and needs to be oiled up or something to prevent it from disintigrating. Bob Flexner explores this concept in Understanding Wood Finishes, and explains that the idea that wood needs to be oiled, nourished, fed, or moisturized is a marketing concept that is not correct. The purposes of finishing are mostly to protect the wood from moisture, to improve the appearance of the wood, to prevent abrasive damage to the wood, and in some cases to prevent UV damage to t he wood.
Some poly might provide protetion from spills or perhaps the steam cleaning, but it would also need to be sanded off for refinishing in the future, which would be detrimental.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
urbandad thank you for deferring to me,
i have the very same grainy wood on my stairs and it will finish up nicely. it is not ash. it is a soft wood and i think it is a very old growth and dense (hard) pine. this is sort of a guess. but the grain when finished does look like ash or oak and i was looking at some pine doors a few days back and had to look twice before i decided it was pine. I think that has to do with it being old growth, unfarmed wood (slower growing and tighter grain) (i will ask Erich about this at adriatic as he has a degree in forest products and see what he says; adriatic also carries hard pine stair tread but the grain is wider and i do believe that modern tree farming aims for faster growth each season, creating wider grain we see on the modern treads).
if you have a lot of grain rise, it could be because someone walked on it without finish on it and the soles of hard shoes will eat at the soft wood between the grain and leave the harder wood. i have a little of that occurring on my steps now (from wearing work boots in the winter ) and soon i will have to address it with a coat of poly). as you sand these, you may find that the soft wood sands away faster. a sanding sealer may help stabilize the soft wood a bit. but use on that is dewaxed so that you can stain the wood after using the sanding sealer, if that is what you decide to do. then you will have to put a seal coat of poly and then two coats of FLOOR (high build) poly (if you do oil).
at this point, with the maintenace issues, i am very sorry i did not refinish my stairs with water base finish (and i am not yet convinced we can put water base over old oil) as it can be recoated fast. with oil, we have to coat every other step one day and do the others the next.
if you are considering finishing these, let me know and i will post a photo of mine. when i first did mine i got a lot of oohs and ahhs from visitors who looked at the stairs.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
its heart pine.
RobertGMarvin
in General Discussion 4 years and 5 months ago
FWIW the artist who painted designs on the risers of our ground floor stairway a couple of years ago also sanded the treads and put on a few coats of poly marine varnish left over from our front doors. That’s probably not the optimal finish, but it’s held up well and shows no sign of wear.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
i do not really see any dishing. it is 12 coats of paint on the sides where the carpet was.
that is going to be a pain to sand off and it has a lot of lead in it, underneath. a less experienced sander will take an aggressive wheel to remove that fast and try to work it into the corners and will gouge the wood with the edge of the wheel or will ride to much on places that the paint has come off of and lower those spots and then you will have to call guy like me to sand the each tread off. and trust me, i teach people how to sand all the time and then they go and do what i tell them not to do and then we look at each other and wonder why the surface is uneven.
this is what i would do and do not use lye. get some methylene chloride and ventilate the house and use it to remove the paint (follow the safety directions; air is important). you will get right into the corners. and do not bother with any other paint removers (when they banned the methylene we tried everything else and then i found out as a business i can still get the stuff and the day i learn ed that i went right back to it) and the ones they made to replace the methylene is flammable and i am not sure what is worse, burning your house down or dying of exposure to methylene but i am 57 and have used that product since i stripped an antique mirror frame when i was 13 years old. you can still buy methylene chloride, you will have to sign some papers. call rock miracle (they are in brooklyn). if they will not sell it to you because you do not have a business (i can almost post the forms they send me to purchase it here for you, but won’t), get a federal tax id number in your name (no, having one does not mean you have to file a tax return, it is like have an ss# only for a business; i still have mine from when i was a sole proprietor) and then they should accept the “fact” that you are in business as a sole prop. look on line, there are companies that will ship methylene to you for less than rock mir.
by the way, talk about incompetence. we have used methylene chloride for decades. i have used it for decades. all of a sudden they have to outlaw it for use by the general public because of the dumbing down of our trades people, people who do not understand that: 1. read the directions and follow them like we were taught to do in first grade and 2. if it smells like it will kill you, it probably will kill you and you need a lot of air around you when you use it. this is common sense and because some people do not understand that, the rest of us have to change our lives and the way we have been doing things since rock miracle opened for business in 1938.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
so this is the difference between marine varnishes and interior poly and at first thought, it will not make sense. the marine varnishes are SOFTER than the interior varnishes. yes, you read that correctly; the interior varnish is the harder product. that is because the exterior varnishes must flex with all the changes on the wood brought on by the changes in temperature and humidity. Marine varnish is also more expensive than say interior poly (a quart of Pettit Captains Spar is about the same price as a gallon of Last n Last oil base floor finish).
here is another difference: you can build marine varnish to 20 coats if you wish but if you did that with interior floor finish it would chip off because it is so hard. they tell you on the cans of interior floor poly (oil) (for those of us who read directions) to apply one seal coat and two full coats and no more. and there is a reason for this-