House of Banister

So, those that know me, know I am so not a fan of honey oak.  Oak itself is an OK wood, the grain is nice.  It's a little prevalent - but there is something about honey stain that just screams builder basic circa 1996.  Anytime there is anything remotely honey oak, I run screaming the other direction.

We use our stairs multiple times a day.  Most families do I think.  So I had to block this out of existence:

I see it ALL the time.  And luckily it was one of the few piece of wood in our house that caused me this level of pain.

I had despaired ever being able to do anything about it, since it wasn't in the budget to change out what is a very functional, non-critical house thing.  I mean no Realtor ever went around saying banisters sells houses.

Then I heard about this stuff (my addiction to YoungHouseLove is well documented):

This is Minwax Polyshades.  Essentially it gives you the ability to change the stain WITHOUT SANDING OR GETTING TO BARE WOOD OR ANY OF THAT JUNK!  Isn't that amazing?  No hard work - you just 'paint' on your new stain!

I checked out reviews on the home depot website, and a few people mentioned it was hard to work with or that it dried too fast.  I figured we could try it out, and if we really really didn't like the result we could a) sand and restain b) paint or c) deal with it.

But man, this was super easy.  I did take the aforementioned reviews into account when I started, attempting to go as fast as possible to retain the 'wet edge' (it dries quick, so you have to plan your route of attack to make sure you don't get any funny transitions).

First though, we had to refresh the posts.  These were primed, but I'm not sure they were ever painted with multiple coats.  Out came some Behr Polar.  Insanely better.

Then we took down the long railing and taped up the posts to get it ready for the stain.  I used maybe 1/8 of the can on both pieces and all told it took maybe an hour.

I loved the color after just one coat.  I did the upstairs gates too, and managed to drip a bit on the carpet #oops.

Seriously, I cannot stress this enough - 1 hour to CHANGE THE COLOR OF STAIN!!!!!

How impossible.  If I had known about this stuff about 6 years ago when I was faced down by a WHOLE KITCHEN of honey oak I would have died.

So Pretty.