Mimicing Grey Wood

[Julie Moriarty]

Let's say you have some 80's oak kitchen cabinets. Let's say you want to create a beach house theme. And let's say you have the tools, the skills, the time but not much money.

We're talking shorts, tanks & sandals & po' folks casual version of this: http://www.fauxwoodbeams.com/img_catalog/woodBeams/design/woodBeam_design46.jpg

How would you go about making this happen?

[Bruce Page]

Run down to your nearest pier with a large chain saw?
JK!:) There is a specialized art in distressing wood to look aged. I would like to know how it is done too.

[Andrew Joiner]

Get some weathered wood contact paper and slap it on!

Seriously here's what I'd try. Wirebrush the surface and sand lightly to get rid of slivers. Stain a few areas (about 1/4 of the panel) with white stain. Lightly wire brush the white area edges when dry to blend or fade it in. Stain the whole panel grey. Pad the grey off most of the white area. Test this on the back of a door or an oak scrap first.

Good luck.

[Lee Schierer]

There are companies that sell reclaimed lumber and beams. You can also make your own by just leaving wood sit outside in the weather depending upon how much weathering you want and how long you want to wait.

Here is a link for getting that weathered look (http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/skills-and-know-how/workshops/how-to-weather-and-distress-new-wood). Note: I only found this through google, I have not tried it. As the site says try it on scrap first. YMMV.

[Andrew Hughes]

Sand blast then some secret white wash recipe.Thats how they distressed the wood at Disney Land.I was roofing there when they built the California adventure part of the park.
I think the wood they used was mostly Doug fir.

[Scott Cenicola]

Rustoleum also sells a weathered grey stain which looks really good. I recently read that Lowe's has discontinued Rustoleum stains, so I am not sure it it will be easy to find.

[Peter Quinn]

Happened to have been involved in producing samples for the very same purpose at my last job, and I can tell you it's not a simple thing to mimic what time and weather have so carefully crafted, the best we achieved or saw anybody else achieve was a pale approximation of real barnwood. We also sold allot of actual barn wood, and often had clients looking for a product that "looked just like barnwood" but didn't suffer it's flaws....ie falling apart, harsh under foot, very high cost etc. You can get close, you can get some cool effects, but it's really tough to mimic the texture and the hundreds of colors of grey scale that exist on real reclaimed lumber. So the easiest way to get there is to source some barn wood.

next best thing is a reactive stain. We used http://ciranova-na.com/products/reactive-stain. It makes the wood an inky blackish to dark grey depending on species. Then we wiped on an oil based stain in a just off white pigment, and wiped most of it back off. Takes a bit of practice to to get the mottled inconsistent look ofm he real thing. We started by wire brushing the wood through a large wire brush machine like a drum sander, that's the hardest part to achieve by hand. A wire wheel on a drill can do the same thing but it's difficult to achieve consistent results offer a large surface area.

in the process we often created very interesting and occasionally beautiful samples that I liked but we're often reject in comparison to the actual barn wood samples....hundreds of samples....so don't get discouraged.

[Bill Orbine]

I'm for the steel and vinegar solution. Aside from the DIY site one poster, Lee Schierer, provided, you can also google "weathered wood with steel wool and vinegar". There's a whole ranges of various SW&V solutions to mimic the weathered beach wood.

[Julie Moriarty]

Thanks guys! I suspected, and it looks like I might be right, it's a lot of work to create what Mother Nature does over time. I'm in Florida now and Mother Nature works a lot faster here but it still takes time. We were supposed to close on the house last Friday but there was a title defect that has to be cleared so I'm trying to keep busy by planning and dreaming. I can't do any real work for now.

[Prashun Patel]

Steel wool and vinegar might give you black.

Have you considered ammonia fuming?

[Peter Quinn]

Steel wool and vinegar might give you black.

Have you considered ammonia fuming?

ime almost everything that works gives you shades of black which you then have to ceruse to some extent to soften the blacks to greys. There is no one step application that nails the verigated color of the actual article. True reactive stains are nice because they give different hues to each board which come through in the final product. The vinegar/steel wool thing essentially creates a dye stain of sorts that is much more consistent in color, though it gets absorbed differently in different parts of the wood so may have similar effect if not always quite as natural. Depends on the desired effect and how close to authentic it must come.

[Malcolm McLeod]

Once upon a time, I had fairly good results creating a drift wood texture using abrasive nylon wheel brush. If you want to do the entire width of a door panel, you might need to gang several brushes together on a common shaft (or perhaps they make a wide brush?). It works well on the early wood, but leaves the late wood. A lot like sandblasting, but you don't need a booth and 75Hp air compressor. (Metal wire brush was just way too aggressive.)

Maybe use some ideas from 'antiquing' furniture - - hammer, nail dents, screws hit sideways, chain, abrade the edges with a stranded cable, etc. The canal you mentioned in other post might also be a blessing - - submerge the doors for a couple of weeks and see what the algae, barnacles, and crabs do to it...? Might be hell on glue joints.

As for mimicking the weathered color, I've never tried. Lay things (hinge, bolt, pipe, rock, coiled wire...) on the surface and randomly skip-stain it with some 'weather-colored' stains sprayed from 2'-3' away? Move things and then hit it with another color. Repeat until Southern Living editor knocks door down to do photo shoot.