Working with wood

Published on 04-10-2020 | By Jasdeep Garcha

The last couple of days have exposed an incredibly deep rabbit hole for me. I recently started a shelving project for my office space that involves five 8 foot wooden planks that are 10 inches wide. I knew nothing about preparing or finishing wood prior to this project, but have invested a considerable amount of time in figuring it out. The below notes are mostly for future reference, but hopefully they are useful to others that start a similar project.

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As far as I’m able to tell, there are four major components of preparing wood for use in an interior or exterior setting.

Choosing wood

There are many different types of wood, and they each have different properties and appearances. Depending on what you’re maximizing for, you may choose differently (e.g. price, durability, grain patterns, etc.). Each type of wood takes stains and finishes differently, so that’s a good consideration, as well.

In my case, I wanted something cheap so that if I messed up any part of the process, I could easily get another piece of wood to start over. The most common types of 1 inch wood planks at a local hardware store seem to be the following, ranging from least to most expensive:

I chose pine for its price and availability (it is also referred to as “common” wood), then chose 5 boards that were of similar length and had the least bend in them. In practice, it seems like all boards have some imperfection so it’s impractical to find the perfect board to start.

Preparing wood

Because of the imperfections and roughness of unfinished boards, preparing the wood requires sanding down rough portions for consistency when staining and finishing the wood.

It’s recommended that on all wood, you should start with a rough sand paper (between 80 and 120) and then gradually work your way up to a finer sand paper (220) to even everything out.

Pine tends to be a softer wood with early and late portions that absorb stain differently which leads to blotchiness. In order to even out the future stain applied to the wood, folks recommend applying a conditioner or sealing coat on the wood. The most common recommendations actually call for two coats so that the surface is as flat as possible. For some woods, this is unnecessary.

Between conditioning and staining, use a finer sandpaper to even out inconsistencies (e.g. 400).

Staining wood

Most resources I looked at argue that staining is an incredibly delicate art. There are tons of different colors, and those colors can be diluted or applied in several coats to achieve different variations of stains. From what I gathered, it’s an incredibly frustrating process, but the main points are the following:

Finishing wood

This is where it became incredibly complex in my research. There are a lot of ways to finish wood, and I’ve listed the major ones below:

Type
Useful on
Wax
Shelves, food-safe items (e.g. cutting boards)
Shellac
Shelves, antique furniture, cabinets
Lacquer
Interior decorative pieces
Varnish
Outdoor furniture, trim work, decks
Polyurethane
Bar tops, counter tops, desk, chairs, floors, utility surfaces, coffee tables, nigh stands

I'm sure I missed some use cases and properties, but the above is the gist of what I’ve read. While each finish has different properties in terms of UV tolerance, water resistance, etc., ultimately the finish you use depends on the resulting look/feel and use case of the item you’re finishing.

Resources that I found helpful:

Other tips:

Update [4/23]: Here's the finished product! I used a clear shellac finish.

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