The Pain of Stain
Getting the right stain can be a real pain! (That is the short version of the long post to follow. So skip to the end if you get bored easily.)
It seems like I have made dozens of trips to approve stain colors lately. Every wood species accepts stain differently, so the same color stain will look different on different types of wood. That makes it tricky to mix woods cohesively!
Working with cherry wood makes it even more complex because cherry naturally darkens over time. Take a look at this progress picture of some cherry cabinets we installed to “match” the cherry cabinetry that had aged for about 20 years. Notice how much darker they are in the second picture, taken just a few years later. An expert cabinet craftsman and stain master knows how to anticipate the aging.
