A new mantle for my fireplace - wood finishing diy.

So, we decided to redo the basement - to some extent. The family room is the first we attacked, and the centerpiece in there is the fireplace. It is right now in the middle of its second birth, and it still has some way to go before it is ready, but this post is mainly about the wood mantle, and finishing it.

The original fireplace was as ugly as they come - all concrete, gray and huge. Now, the huge part I like - it really dominates the room. The gray concrete is the part I hate. Have a look:

Especially ugly was the mantle - two big concrete slabs on top of the thing. And the foot at the bottom was a real danger for the kids playing in that room.

So I took a big hammer to it. And this was its lowest moment:

Patching it took it to a somewhat healthier appearance.

In case you wonder, the pipe coming out of the opening is the original natural gas pipe that fed the fireplace gas insert that the previous owners installed (they converted the fireplace from wood burning to natural gas).

So, next step was to get the wood. I found a nice wood mill pretty far away in the country side - or Stouffville: Century Lumber Mill. They provided me with a good chunk of red oak - it seems oak is a very good wood for beginner wood finishers, as its open pores make the staining a breeze... That's the theory at least.

As you can see, I draped the fireplace in OSB, but that is a discussion for another day. This is the natural look of the wood, and this is how the fireplace looked like with the wood fixed in place:

For the finishing, I found this recipe:
----

This finish looks great on plainsawn red oak boards and is impossible to get straight out of a can. The red dye is incredibly strong. But the gel stain is applied without a barrier coat so it darkens both the earlywood and latewood.

1. Apply Trans Tint bright scarlet to the bare wood and let it dry.

2. Apply Minwax jet black mahogany gel stain.

3. Seal with wax-free shellac and scuff-sand when dry.

4. Apply a topcoat of your choice.

----
You can find it here, if you are curious.

Any way, the funny thing had been the way I did not use any of the originally suggested materials in the recipe...

I started by sanding the pieces. I started with #120 sandpaper and finished with #220. Now at the end I realize I did not take this sanding far enough - I can still see some saw marks in the wood - I should have sanded much more vigorously.

Even though the opinions are split - some/many say that the open pores of the oak don't require a conditioner - I decided to include it, so first step was brushing in the conditioner. As the first stain was to be water based, I picked a water based conditioner.

Now, I couldn't find the bright scarlet Trans Tint dye, or at least couldn't get it at a reasonable price (could have got it, but shipping from the States was a killer), so I found something called ColorFX dye and I thought "red" was looking rather close on their website to what I thought "bright scarlet" was meant to be (in the recipe). The site was shipping from Canada, so the final price was somewhat more palatable.

Once I receive the package I thought the colour matched my expectations. Of course I tried it first on a spare piece of wood from the same piece (the wood mill gave me the cut ends as well, after all they charged me for the whole piece they cut the final pieces from, at the dimensions I requested). I didn't bother taking photos of the trial runs so use your imagination...

So here is the red oak stain with the red dye dissolved in water based clear tint base.

Once the stain dried it actually got an orange tint, but I have to say at the first look (freshly laid on the wood) it looked a definite Ferrari red... It did give my wife a bit of a scare.

The next step did not use the stain mentioned in the original recipe either. I was not able to find the black mahogany gel stain (even Minwax's web site did not mention this particular shade, so maybe they stopped making it?). So I compromised. In my trial pieces I used three colours: red mahogany, espresso, and finally, when I seemed unable to get the darkness I wanted, ebony. This last one seemed to make the cut, so I put 2 layers of it on the mantle, allowing 24 hours for drying. No scuff sanding or anything. Here is the stained wood:

Well, not really, but I did manage to give my wife a second scare...

This is after I wiped it and the stain dried:

The colour was what I wanted, but it looked quite lifeless and shallow. The next layer would fix that - hopefully.

At this step I was supposed to put on a coat of wax free shellac. Well, I didn't. Once, I could not find it at Home Depot - well, it didn't really matter, I could have ordered it from somewhere. However, I read here and there that polyurethane does not work well over shellac. As poly seemed as a given for the finish at this point, I skipped the shellac. Polyu is supposed to be a sealant by itself. so the shellac was not needed - supposedly. As I will never know what look I could have got using the shellac under the poly, I am not missing anything.

Well, the recipe called for a finish of my choice - at least I didn't have to find a substitute... So I googled some more and it seems most people in the know agree polyurethane is the easiest finishing product to work with - however some seem to think you pay in look and feel what you get in ease of handling. Well, I was not about to complain about that on my first wood finishing project. So, polyurethane was in.

I applied three coats of poly at 24 hours intervals to let them dry. Plus some very light scuffing before applying coats two and three, using sandpaper #400. Here is the result:

I have to say it looks as good as I hoped it would... As of right now it is still quite smelly, so the poly is still curing. I hope in about a week or so it will be cured (it is in the basement and it is just next to the furnace, so the air is dry and the temperature is constant and quite warm). At that point I will give it a good polish with wax, and edit this post with another picture.

The idea is to have stone veneer applied on the fireplace itself and also above it on the wall in between the two oak poles. We will see how that goes...

As it is easily visible, this has been a Minwax shoppe - the thing is, I have a Home Depot at about 3 minutes driving time from home, so it is really easy to jump in the car and get there and back. And Minwax seems to be the brand they carry most. It easy to work with and it did the job well.

If there was one lesson learned after all this, is this: the one key skill in wood finishing is patience. You don't need to be handy or smart or anything. The materials available are extremely forgiving. The only thing that is really critical is to allow the coats to dry well before applying anything on top.

A week later: I did the waxing after a week and I have to say I had a hard time trying to find the meaningful difference... I used the cheese cloth to apply the wax and a  cotton painter rag to buff it ten minutes later. The only thing I can say with certitude is that there is a definitive feeling when moving my palm on top of the mantle, my hand slides less easily. Not much in the visible range, though. Here is the last picture, after the buffing:

The pictures in this post have been recorded using my cellphone, a Samsung Note SGH-I717D.