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In this video I want to introduce you to colored oils
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My favorite brand is Watco. It's widely available. It comes in lots of colors and works very well
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And it's ideal for situations where you want to change the color of the wood and you want that finish to be repairable
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This staircase here is in the shop I built. I built this staircase as part of the construction
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Staircases are ideal for this sort of thing because they get so much foot traffic
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The typical way of finishing them is with stain and urethane, which looks great at first
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But once you start wearing through that urethane, it doesn't look good at all
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There's no way you can renew that finish. You have to strip it right back, which is really difficult to do on a staircase with all the spindles and things like that
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So colored oils are ideal for lots of applications and especially stairs
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So let's go up. I'm going to show you something close up
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Give you a little history of this staircase and then also apply some of the soil so you can see what it looks like in a renewal situation
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So let's head on up. So the finish you see here was applied to these stairs more than 10 years ago and we use the staircase just about every day
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Granted, we do take off our outside shoes, so we're not bringing in a whole bunch of dirt and grit and things
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But still, there's wear here, there's traffic, and as you can see, they still look great
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I have been thinking about renewing the finish lately, and so I'm going to show you how that works on this particular tread here
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So the first thing you want to do is just to lightly buff the surface
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I use this 3M rubbing pad. It's a non-woven abrasive. It works very well
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And the idea here is that you're rubbing it to take off any high spots or any dirt or things like that
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And you can see that it makes the surface a little bit lighter, a little bit whitish in color
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That's perfectly normal. And then after this has just been rubbed down like this, no need to do any more than this
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You certainly don't need to sand, you don't want to get back to bare wood or anything like that
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But it's very important during the renewal process that everything be perfectly clean
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So I'm going to vacuum this now, and then I'll open up the can of Wot-Go
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and we're going to renew this particular tread so you can see what that looks like
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So one really nice thing about colored oils is that they're very forgiving
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in that you're not going to have any runs, because it's not a film-forming finish
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It just soaks in, and it colors the wood, and it does provide some protection
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But you don't have to worry about brushing it on and looking out for any brush marks or drips later
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It's a pretty forgiving sort of thing. Now when you put it on, there's a little bit of artistry to it
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in that you don't want to rub really hard with a really dry rag, because that's going to take most of it off
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But then you don't want to be too light and leave a surface film behind either, so it's a bit of a balancing act
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But you can see how it's already bringing this stair tread to life
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It didn't really need it. It wasn't too bad, but I do like to keep these things up
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There we go. A renewed and vibrant look. It doesn't take too long, as you can see
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It'll be about 12 hours or so before this is dry, and then we get another 10 years of steady traffic
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So it's easy to like. Colored finishing oils aren't for every situation
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In situations where you need an exceptional amount of protection, say in kitchen cabinets, bathroom cabinets
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you might want to use a film forming finish, but where it's appropriate, you really can't beat colored oil
