How to correct fading on wood paneling and floors

Q: We recently bought a house with a beautiful wood-paneled sunroom. Unfortunately, where the previous owners had hung pictures on the walls, the stain has faded. We do not want to strip and restain the entire room. Is there a way to match the stain without overstaining the rest of the wall and making it darker?

A: Your situation is similar to what many people experience with wooden floors: The wood under area rugs or furniture winds up being a different color from the wood that wasn’t covered. The “faded” areas on your walls are actually closer to how the paneling looked after it was installed; it’s the uncovered areas that have changed.

LIGHT HITS THE SURFACE

With both paneling and floors, the uneven color isn’t caused by stain fading; it’s a change in the wood and sometimes a darkening of the finish where light hits the surface. Both finishes and wood react to light, primarily the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Finishes, especially if they are oilbased, tend to become more amber. Light-colored woods, including the pine or maybe cedar in your sunroom, tend to darken, while dark-colored hardwoods used in flooring tend to lighten where they are in bright light — at least for a time. After many years of bright light, both dark- and light-colored woods become bleached and pale.

Luckily, unless sections of the wood were covered for decades, the color usually evens out once pictures, area rugs or other coverings are removed, so you might want to wait to see whether the problem resolves on its own.

It’s impossible to say, though, how long that might take. Tom Salisbury, owner of Salisbury Woodworking, a company in Poulsbo, Wash., that specializes in wood flooring and timber framing, recalled installing and applying three coats of finish to a vertical-grain fir floor. Because fir is softer than many wood types used in flooring, the main corridors were then covered with thick paper to protect them during the project’s final phases. When the paper was pulled up just two days later, the covered areas were noticeably lighter, because the floor had changed color where light hit. “Just relax,” Salisbury said he told the owners. “The color will catch up in a week or so.” And it did. But wood that has been covered for a much longer period might take more time to adjust, Salisbury said.

TIME FOR PLAN B

If waiting for the color to even out doesn’t work or takes so long that your patience runs out, you’ll need a Plan B — and maybe even a Plan C and D. Plan B is easy: Hang other artwork where the previous owner’s pieces were. But because you’re dealing with a sunroom, you probably shouldn’t buy expensive paintings or photographs, which could be damaged by bright light. For framing, you might want to use glass or acrylic, which blocks most ultraviolet rays.

Plan C would be to try to even out the color. Because you’re dealing with paneling that has a bead molded into the edges of the boards, completely refinishing the walls wouldn’t be easy, even if you were interested in that solution. “You can’t run a floor sander over walls,” Salisbury said. And even if you were willing to invest the time needed to sand off the finish where pictures once hung, so you could apply stain to those areas, you’d run into one of the challenges of staining pine: The wood absorbs stains unevenly, often resulting in a blotchy look.

Coating pine with a wood conditioner first makes it more evenly absorbent, but even then, stain sinks into the whiter wood, which grew in the spring, more than the darker, denser wood, which grew in the fall or winter. Stained pine has the dark- and light-colored areas reversed, which might be OK when all of the wood is stained. But if you were to stain just the picture-covered patches of the wall, it could look garish.

TINT A NEW COAT

But it might be possible to slightly tint a new coat of finish and apply that over the existing finish on the areas where the pictures once hung. This way, you’d be changing the color of the finish rather than the wood. Salisbury once had a customer who extended a room where he had installed maple flooring about 20 years earlier. The flooring was still in great shape and did not need refinishing, but because it was exposed to light, it had become more amber. New maple flooring in the addition wouldn’t match. His solution was to use Amberizer, a product then made by Basic Coatings, to tint a clear, water-based finish that he had applied to the new wood.

Start with a clear finish with a sheen similar to what is on your walls. Buy small cans with a couple of gloss levels, and test them on small, out-ofthe-way areas of the wall to get the best match for how light reflects. For the tint, you will need to experiment. The Basic Coatings website doesn’t list Amberizer as one of its products, although a product of the same name is made by Loba, a German company, and is $6.98 for a 3.5-ounce bottle from Ampro (ampro-online.com).

Or ask a paint store to sell you a small container of a pigment mix that will create an amber color. Salisbury said it’s possible to add up to one ounce of tint to a gallon of clear water-based finish without compromising its durability. Some websites say you can mix oil-based stain with water-based finish and get good results, but be sure to test whether this works and creates a color you want.

PREPARE A TEST BOARD

There is no way to prepare a test board that will give accurate color results, so try it on a small area of the wall where you wouldn’t mind hanging a picture, and have a damp cloth handy to wipe off the finish if you don’t like the look. Apply the tinted finish with a foam brush. After a minute or two, wipe off any excess with a dry cloth. You might need a small paintbrush to get excess finish out of the recesses along the beads. Aim to create a very thin coat. Let it dry, then evaluate the look in daytime and at night under artificial light. Add additional coats if needed. Feather the edges to help the stained area blend in with the rest of the wall.

The biggest risk with trying to tint sections of the wall is winding up with a patchwork effect that time won’t fix. In that case, it would be time for Plan D: recoating all the walls (without first stripping them), but in a way that doesn’t make the room darker, because you say you don’t want that. You could add white pigment to a clear finish, for example, to get a slightly whitewashed look. Salisbury recommends sealing the knots first with shellac.