Traditional craftsman houses have a considerable amount of stained wood finish.  Consider this house just a half block away from ours that was on the market some years back.

The old house on our property had a lot of exposed, unfinished redwood.  We love redwood, but that is a lot of reddish brown to have around.  The newer part of the old house, built in the 1980’s had quite a bit of stained Douglas fir, which can get quite a yellow-orange tint to it.  Quite a few other wood types, like Maple, can get that kind of orangy color when finished and exposed to sun.

For our house, we knew we wanted some stained wood to give it that authentic craftsman feel, but not too much, like the picture above; about 50% of the inside of that house was stained wood, which made it dark and was a bit overwhelming.

So we have select rooms with doors and windows that are stained, as well as our front door.

To avoid the yellow-orange look, we chose Alter wood, which we figured could get us a nice stained look, minus the orange-yellow tint, without having to go too dark.

It didn’t quite work out as we had planned.  Perhaps we started with the wrong stain.  With the first coat of stain, the wood had orange-ish steaks through it.  With the second coat, they were lighter, but not entirely gone.  With the third coat we finally achieved a brown color without the orange showing through.  It is darker than we had hoped, but it looks really good.  Take a look at our front door, which now also (finally) has the glass in it.

The downside is that our painting bid only included one coat of stain.  We have just a few things left to stain, and are at about 400 hours of work of additional work that is outside our bid.  These are the kind of unexpected expenses that can really add up.