A scratch in a piece of furniture is usually impossible to eliminate completely without refinishing the piece. However, you can often hide it pretty well with any of a variety of stain pens or coloured wax crayons. They can simply be rubbed in, or melted, even colours mixed during melting and f...
Bill in Sydney, Nova Scotia would like to know how to maintain the aesthetics of his carved wood door but he needs to re-stain it.The large flat areas, those that have taken on most of the weather problem, can be sanded down. The rest should be carefully stripped so as to not bother the carvings...
There is often a need to fill holes in wood before staining. One of our viewers asked, how do you get the filler to take the stain evenly with the wood alongside it?The old trick of glue and sawdust is a sure stain problem, the glue will not take stain at all. Plastic wood is also a very poo...
Bill from Edmonton, Alberta has coloured and varnished concrete outdoors, which has turned out to be just too slippery.To keep the same look but eliminate the safety hazard I would suggest another coat of the same finish but while it is wet, sprinkle in painter's sand. You can find little contai...
An e-mail from Jan in Verona Ontario:Last year I made a white cedar adirondack chair. I finished it with Varathane Natural Oil finish for interior and exterior wood. Parts of it are fine other parts are black after sitting outside one summer. I'm in the process of making another one. What can ...
George from Hamilton, Ontario suggests using round toothpicks to plug the holes left by staples after pulling up a carpet.It does plug them easily and permanently, but if you are going to stain the floor, the end grain of the toothpick will take on a lot more stain than the rest of the floor, mak...
Last year on the show we followed the process of metal plating at a company in Toronto called Mayfair Plating. At the end of the interview I caught my guest by surprise when I asked him if he could plate baby shoes. He said he has tried but couldn't find out how to get it to work. So I asked o...
Working in his fathers shop, Val Bernardo, showed us how he gets that shiny polished edge on stone counters. A surprising amount of the final polishing is done by hand with colour coded polishing grits. We were visiting York Marble, Tile & Terrazzo in Toronto.If you need to do some serious ...
One of our viewers had removed a stair rail and the absent newel post left an ugly hole in the hardwood floor at the bottom of the stairs. How to patch it gracefully?You will probably never get an exact match with a small patch. So I recommend cutting out a full board in front of the steps, a...
Linda from Kirkland Lake, Ontario has sanded and finished her deck with an opaque stain and finds it impossibly slippery. She has tried painter's sand, but it doesn't work. What to do?The opaque stain is the problem, together with too much sanding. A finely finished kitchen table is slipper...
