Staining a Window Sill by Picardy Project

diy, windows

Staining a Window Sill

By Picardy Project on May 03, 2012

This front room window has been a long time coming in getting finished. After I stained it (a month ago, hello unpainted walls), the sill was looking worse for the wear

And I definitely needed to clean up where I'd gotten stain where it shouldn't be

The sandpaper came out to get the sill down to bare wood

It appears that the sill is redwood, but the quality of the wood didn't seem super great, so I was eager to use the wood filler to get things nice and even and smooth

The next day the wood filler was dry so I went back to sand it down, which took a long time and made my arm tired and actually (pathetically) made my middle finger and pointer sore for like 3 days

It would have made my life easier if I had used the palm sander, but, well, I didn't

The wood filler filled things in really nicely because the sill wasn't in terrific shape before

But it was looking good now so I brought out the stain I custom mixed 1+ years ago to match with the original baseboard stain throughout the house

And I got to staining

After one...

...and two coats...

...I wasn't liking how red it was. Our baseboards aren't nearly as red, and I made sure to mix the stain a lot before I used it, but I suspect that because the sill is redwood the red stain really pulled that red out. My solution was using a 3rd coat on the sill and this time using the gel stain which had a lot more brown to it. And my oh my it looked sooooooo pretty

I waited several days to really let everything cure and then I lightly sanded it down to get it ready for the first coat of poly

After it dried came another round of sanding and then it got the second coat. But after that second coat we thought the window frame looked not as rich and gorgeous as the sill did

And that's how I decided to put a THIRD coat of stain on the window. And let me tell you, it takes about an hour each coat with all the little nooks and crannies and making sure everything is even and smooth and blah blah blah so it's not my favorite thing to do. But FINALLY this past weekend I got my shit together and put on that 3rd coat of stain. And I wasn't nearly as careful as I should have been (because I was annoyed with round 3 of stain)

So when I was done I spent another 45 minutes with a bunch of fucking q-tips and nail polish remover cleaning up all my smudges. But I have to admit it looked gorgeous after

I love how rich the color is (after 3 coats)

And I can finally check staining the window off my list. Now I have to figure out how the hell to sew a roman shade. It's in my "Sewing 101" book, but the instructions are like 8 pages long which indicates to me that it is not sewing 101.