Oregon pine door facing problem

[DIYJenny]

The door facing on the vestibule door of my 1935 bungalow required some attention. I stripped it down to the bare wood and then applied a wood stain to bring it up to the right colour to match in with everything else. The result was a disaster as it was all blotchy and looked worse than it was before. I now know that this is a problem with pine. It has taken me simply ages to strip off all the wood stain and now I am back to the bare wood again.

Can a member of the Forum please advise what i should do since I don't want to make another mistake. At the moment the wood is rough due to cleaning and I don't want to do anything further until I have some sound advice.

My grateful thanks.

 

[misterhelpful]

How many coats of stain did you apply to the door? Just one coat on bare timber, especially pine, will almost always look patchy. You also have to work quickly to avoid going over spots that have dried, or this will also cause patchiness.
All you can really do is stain it again, and hope for a better outcome, or get someone in who has experience with wood-staining because it can be a tricky thing to do if you haven't done much of it before.

 

[DIYJenny]

Thank you very much misterhelpful. After I saw what it looked like after the one coat I stripped it all off. I made sure every last bit had been removed and then I decided to varnish it. This brought out the colour more than I thought it would and it looks pretty good, thank goodness. I will be sanding it down and putting on more coats of varnish. You are quite correct, wood staining is best done by a professional. I had actually very successfully stained another piece of wood on the staircase but clearly it was not pine.