Stained

I don't really like stain. It manages to be both sticky and oily at the same time, and the colour selections tend to be the same ugly neutrals that I could find at the Clinque counter.

It wasn't really on my radar for the bathroom until my friend Heather came over last week and mentioned that I could probably stain my doors to match the vanity. I hate the ugly doors enough that this seemed like a good idea. I had tossed around the idea of painting the back of the door bright orange, to match the accessories in this room. My mother, though, expressed her displeasure at the orange in the bathroom by asking what I was going to do when I wanted to change it, so I think painting the door may have induced a heart attack.

Here's the original color. All of the doors in the house are identical to this one, and I think they're all repulsive.

So while my many purple paint patches dried, I decided to try to stain the doors in the Halloween Bathroom.

The vanity has definite grey and brown tones in it (they call it a "driftwood finish", and I like thinking that the vanity is some sort of post-tsunami debris that washed up full of fish and Godzilla scales.)

 

I picked Varathane's Weathered Grey stain, which seems approximately the right colour. I went back and forth about getting one with poly already in it or not, and wound up deciding to go with the straight stain so that it wasn't glossy. This was probably a mistake, but I did save $5! hooray!

I've done two coats of the stain so far, and It's coming out nicer on the closet door than it is on the door to the room. I think it's going to need another coat, but I'm letting it dry out for a while first. The colour is slightly bluer than the vanity, but I think it'll look fine once it has had a chance to dry.

 

An added non-bonus to stain is the drippiness. I'm currently as spotted as my cat. and look like I might have some sort of disease. I'm OK with this, because my childhood taught me that if you have spots, you can live in the zoo.