Wood Preservative for indoors

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.

markwalker

in General Discussion 4 years and 6 months ago

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andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago

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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.

Guest User | 4 years and 6 months ago

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Thank you for the water update.

andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago

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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).

andriywww1990 | 4 years and 6 months ago

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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.

hasibur.rahman07 | 4 years and 6 months ago

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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

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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).

hkapstein | 4 years and 6 months ago

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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.