For this week's project, we're back to my roots! Which means we're creating knock off Restoration Hardware colors today! This project is easy peasy, just apply to wood and watch the magic happen! You're going to love this tutorial to easily achieve the Reclaimed Gray Oak look.
Here's the "before" of this typical, out dated oak table. There's a million of these babies floating around from the 80's and 90's. It shouldn't be too hard to get your hands on one, and at a good price.
If you're using a brand new, or raw wood table, please skip down to step #5. Thanks!
1.] STRIP
First you'll want to apply a thick layer of Citristrip to the table. Citristrip has a tendency to dry out before it can eat away at all the layers of stain and lacquer. So covering the wet stripper with a garbage bag helps keep the moisture in while it works.
2.] SCRAPE
When the stripper turns white, it's ready to be scraper off. Remove the bags and scrape as much of the mixture off, as you can. You'll want to try and get down ti the raw wood if you can. But being careful not to scrape or damage the wood itself.
3.] CLEAN
You will want to wipe the table down with mineral spirits and a rag to remove any existing residue. This should remove any sticky residue from the tabletop.
4.] SAND
Here's the labor portion. You want to use a palm sander and 80 grit sandpaper to make sure the wood is completely down to raw. You can see in this video what I mean.
5.] STAIN
Weatherwood released a new stain that can turn oak into a beautiful driftwood gray, called Light Oaking. This product can work on any wood, so it's less complicated than some of their other products.
6.] LIGHTEN
If you want to lighten the look, you can add a coat of White Maintenance Oil. It adds the look of patina and is just generally gorgeous. Simply brush or wipe onto wood, allow to sit 3-7 minutes. Then wipe off with a clean cloth. Or you can watch the video above.
See how pretty and soft the white maintenance oil is? It's much more subtle than a paint product and really just makes the wood look sun-kissed.
For additional project looking to achieve the Restoration Hardware look, you can search our archives or check out this post below!
To digitize or not…Is that the question? COVID is shaking things up in the retail world. This year, digital startups may look like frantic Irish immigrants planting their stakes in the e-commerce land grab. Like Tom Cruise in Far and Away, companies will be expanding market share.
Who can enter? Really anyone! Meet one competitor in the e-commerce coatings race, Becca Berger. MBA turned entrepreneur extraordinaire. This scrappy little lady owns a company called WeatherWash Coatings, an earth-friendly reactive stain that turns raw wood into barnwood by using tannic acid inside the lumber to achieve a specific color. Her product has no pigments or dies. No VOC’s. She invented the most earth-friendly product on the market. If you check Home Depot online, her reviews are 4-5 stars. Recently her product launched through Walmart online, and from day one sold as much as ten brick and mortar stores. How is that possible?
Rebecca has a strong foothold on Instagram with 32,000 followers. Type “wood stain” on Instagram’s search, and she’s often ranked #1. She has over 17,000 followers on Facebook. An impressive portfolio. Support videos. Chat support. Phone support. A blog. An app and an algorithm. She doesn’t even have a brick and mortar store. She doesn’t want or need a storefront. 100% of her sales are e-commerce. She started with stains because it’s niche, and the most significant competitor, Minwax, lost distribution with Home Depot after Sherwin Williams acquired the lagging brand for an eye-popping $11.3B.
“Since stain sales were in decline, I thought, this is exactly what Jeff Bezos did with books. He started niche and expanded. I started in stain, and I’m in the process of expanding into the paint.” Speaking to hyper-growth she claims, “I’m a big fan of Jeff Bezos ‘fly-wheel of growth,’ which relies heavily on Amazon’s 2-day shipping model and a simple website. Storefronts are closed for twelve hours. Even when they’re open, COVID has made it so clients can’t enter a Sherwin Williams store. My products can be delivered right to your door once you order them from my website. Also consider that if harmful emissions can be reduced, the coatings industry is going to have to reformulate. The majority of VOC off letting happens in this industry. So, innovators like me are going to have to make every effort to save the planet instead of ‘cover the earth’.”
The largest entrants in the digital market space race are undoubtedly Walmart and Home Depot; Walmart is the world’s largest economy. Depot is the world’s second-largest economy. Four years ago, in their 2017, 10-K report, Depot revealed they plan to compete with Amazon by spending $11B on “store, supply chain, digital experience, and people.” With that kind of funding, the retailer known as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla expects to be on equal footing with Amazon’s 1-click, 2-day order fulfillment by the end of 2020. Can Depot achieve the “flywheel of success” by buying success? Maybe? It should be duly noted that part of Bezo’s high growth strategy is attributable to acquisitions like Zappos, Petco, and Whole Foods. But Depot is not in acquisition mode, so most likely not.
In 2001, Home Depot opened its online store. Nineteen years later, they are still nowhere near Amazon’s e-commerce platform. According to Depot’s 2019 10-K, their ambition is to be a “One Home Depot experience.” However, that vision is not clearly defined. What is clear is that Depot’s initial $5.4B investment in e-commerce is taking longer to recoup than expected. Why? There are many reasons, but one major obstacle is that 90% of developed software will not be utilized. Not to mention when the software is finally available, the hardware used to write the software is outdated. More software development questions will buzz around like murder hornets, “What is our hardware budget? What should we expect to pay for software development? How long will it take? Why isn’t it working? Can we outsource development?” Bezos has already answered ALL of these questions, and he did it about nineteen years ago.
Bezos developed a sturdy platform from HTML source code to the back-end JavaScript. He also custom built the hardware so soundly, he is one of the few companies that survived the dot com bust. He then expanded Amazon by investing in more hardware and software. Bezos owns AWS and an undisclosed share in Google, meaning that large retailers relying on Google’s SEO or Amazon’s AWS services will compete with Amazon on Amazon’s hardware/software. The end game may be what happened to mom-and-pop bookshops, here today, gone tomorrow.
Competition is also ramping up. E-commerce is a different game than retailers are used to playing. Historically, retailers had to battle for sales in newspapers, radio, and TV ads. Suppliers were never a threat. Each retailer competed on price, product, and availability. Now retailers could lose sales to suppliers. A cheetah gazelle relationship is developing between the two. So, who is the cheetah, retailers or suppliers? That’s hard to answer because suppliers like Sherwin Williams are building websites that sell directly to end consumers while simultaneously maintaining 4,106 brick and mortar stores. But they aren’t the only ones building websites. Inventors like Becca, mom-and-pop shops, Walmart, Depot, Sherwin, Ace, and Amazon all have websites. The cheetah is whoever gets to the Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-For-Me e-commerce consumer first, captures the gazelle, stakes their claim, expands their fences, and grows market share.
Amazon will maintain a steady lead once it grows into hardware and paint because the e-commerce onboarding process for Depot and Lowes can take up to a year and costs suppliers several thousands of dollars, which means lots of suppliers won’t even make it to Depot/Lowe’s online e-commerce platform. Not only that, but Depot is marking suppliers’ products up 100% even though they aren’t shelving suppliers’ products, picking, packing, or shipping. The value seems to be the brand. Lowe’s onboarding process is equivalent to Depot’s. Sherwin doesn’t even have a process for onboarding suppliers. They have an email that they don’t reply to. Most of these overlooked suppliers will go straight to Amazon for no other reason than it only takes fifteen minutes for suppliers to onboard, giving Amazon a favorable lead. Of course, a faster cheetah i.e., inventor, could sprint to the lead by leveraging platforms like social media, a professional website, and leveraging relationships with established e-commerce brands. Still, these contenders are often acquired early on, so finishing the race becomes questionable.
In a nutshell, Mr. Bezos may have fired the first shot for the digital market space land grab, took his place on the start line, and quickly sprinted off with the competitors. Time will tell who captures the gazelle and carves out their claim. Will it be retail brands? Suppliers? Inventors? Mom & pop? or Amazon?
All the baby angels!! In Italy, these angels are called Putti. 👼🏻👼🏻👼🏻 The ones I shared in the below post are all from larger portraits in the Uffizi - found in Florence, Italy. I love the ones with colored wings. I hope you will friend me on Facebook, so I can see what you like to do, too!
This project is so heartwarming. The kitchen in the center of the home today and this one is no exception! Let's see how to get the look of their gorgeous table!
For this project we used alder, if you're using a different species check out this color chart for weathered wood options: Color Chart. Sand the boards and with 80 grit sandpaper and now they're ready for you to apply stain.
2.] STAIN
If you want a pure gray, you should use Reclamation, if you want a gray with brown in it, use Salvage. Using a wide brush or sponge brush, apply heavy coat of stain. Like in the above video, the wood will absorb the stain as it dries. The color will change from raw wood to stained.
3.] LIGHTEN
To lighten the wood, use White Maintenance Oil Topcoat. This will lock in that light driftwood look and protect the wood. It's a wipe on and wipe off application. Use a brush or rag to apply and a clean rag to immediately take it back off the wood. The longer it stays on the wood, the whiter the wood will get.
4.] PROTECT
To seal the wood, use Weatherwood Polyurethane. This will lock in that light driftwood look and protect the wood. Just brush on 2-3 coats.
You can save 10% on Weatherwood products, like you saw here, with code WELCOME10.
Hello architects, designers, industrial designers, contractors, painters, DIY-ers, weekend warriors, and close friends. We had a very interesting week. Not sure how you're all handling COVID, but three of our employees tested positive. As if that weren't dramatic enough, WeatherWash received a "cease and desist" from Sherwin Williams!
Why did we receive a cease and desist from a company that makes $56.3 billion a year? We were wondering the exact same. We've attached the letter so you can read it for yourselves. It would seem that the hundred year corporation is threatened by our tiny company using their hashtags. Well, not theirs as in Sherwin's hashtags. Minwax's hashtags. Didn't know that Sherwin owns Minwax? Well, now you do. I imagine Sherwin needs to watch those hashtags after loosing a major distribution deal with Home Depot. I mean, the ad budget for Minwax is probably a couple of hundred million, but that's not where the value is. It's in for SURE in the hashtags... and we have been legally warned.
If any corporations legal departments have contacted you, please email us. We are very interested in getting to the bottom of these inquires. Of course, we want to give Sherwin's legal team the benefit of the doubt here and explain why they're targeting a female tech entrepreneur.
On the surface it seems like they feel threatened by her massive Instagram social media following, which is four times theirs. And since they can't compete with an earth-friendly product, they're trying to chip away at market share any way they can. But that's just surface talk. We will hope to deep dive with a phone conference and will write a follow up! So stay tuned.
Take a walk down this Bologna restaurant alley with us!! It’s packed with tourists, fresh food, people eating, & rad details. I’m crazy obsessed with these colorful buildings- they’re all shades of red, orange and yellow. It’s looks so warm and inviting. Bologna was such a wonderful surprise. We did an overnight here and toured the famous spots!
1.] SAND (SORT OF): Normally, I'd say you should sand wood and with 80 grit sandpaper, but for projects that have intricate carving you'll want to use something else. You can purchase denatured alcohol, it's inexpensive and faster than sanding. Apply it like you would stain, with a spray gun or paint brush. Make sure to the wood the day before you plan to stain, so it can completely dry.
2.] STAIN: If you want a pure driftwood gray, you should useReclamation. If you want a brown with brown in it, useSalvage. Using a wide brush, roller, or sponge brush, apply heavy coat of stain. Like in the above video, the wood will absorb the stain as it dries. The color will change from raw wood to stained.
Once you're wood is dry, which takes about 30 minutes, you're ready to move to the next step. You will see the before and after transformation of raw alder to Reclamation stained below.
Allow the oil to penetrate for 5-10 minutes. The longer it sits, the whiter the effect. The use a clean rag to wipe off. If it gets too pale, just buff the finish back down. The White Maintenance Oil will provide light to medium wood protection.
4.] SEAL: Depending on your project! If you need heavy duty wood protection, you will want to use Weatherwood Varnish over the cured oils. If it's a cabinet or something, that will need the varnish!
If you're really loving this color and you'd like another project idea, check out this:
The famous Florence Duomo is frescoed with these EPIC images from Dante’s Inferno and it’s the largest fresco in the world! ⛪️ Definitely take a minute to zoom in, because the detail is unreal!! 😍 The bottom shows all the demons and satan in hell. 🔥 You can see angels proclaiming that Christ is on the judgement seat. 👑 Around the dome’s center the apostles look like they’re about to fall off the painted ledge! 😱 INCREDIBLE!
1.] WOOD: Here's how you can get the look, first make sure you begin with sanded white oak. 80 grit sandpaper will do the best job.
2.] STAIN: Use a wide paint brush to apply Weatherwood's Reclamation stain. The stain is reactive, so apply a heavy coat and allow the wood to absorb it. As the wood dries, it will turn colors.
You'll see what I mean in the above timelapse. We stained both sides of the door, even though this is going to be used as a headboard.
3.] HIGHLIGHT: Once the wood is dry it will be dark, apply Weatherwood WHITE Maintenance Oil to highlight the wood grain. Just wipe or brush on and wipe off. Apply per the video above or the bottle's directions.
You can save 10% on Weatherwood products, like you saw here, with code WELCOME10. I hope to see you at tomorrow's party!
This chapel is often referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the Early Renaissance. The fresco interior was done by the artist Brancacci in 1425! The artwork tells the story of Saint Peter- including his time with Christ and his miracles. Michelangelo came here as an art apprentice to learn from these same frescos. You can see the female Satan / snake in this work is similar to Michelangelo’s own on the real Sistine chapel. Incredible to see where a master drew his inspiration!
Pine is the least expensive and most abundant wood species for most Americans and when you purchase unfinished wood pieces it's often made of pine. So I created the PERFECT stain for it! This little plant stand was made from pine scrap and it's getting a new look!
Materials
Unstained furniture piece (can be new wood or stripped, this is made from PINE scraps.)
Michelangelo is a true master. Walking through his town, over 500 years later, I couldn't help but imagine what it would've been like for him. To be growing up in Florence, the end of the 1400's! You would've seen people walking in renaissance garb, oil lamps burning, children and animals in the streets. In some ways Florence has changed but it others, it never will. Towards the middle to end of Michelangelo's life, he returns to Florence to work on the crypt of his benefactors and Florence's rulers, the Medici! We visited the crypt which was styled after the Pantheon. Check out the post below, you won't want to miss it!
You guys are going to LOVE this fireplace refresh from our friend Kelly at Street Flea Style! She turned her outdated red brick fireplace into a modern and updated space! The previous mantel began as a nearly pink color! But don't worry, wood is forgiving and it's 100% gorgeous again.
You can use this same staining technique on FAUX BOX BEAMS -like this post- or on solid wood beams, like I'm going to show you today. You can stain any wood, but we're working here with cedar. That's a super common wood for this type of project.
1.] You will want to stain the red cedar with Weatherwood Salvage stain. We strain the stain and then put the stain through our gravity sprayer and applied it to the wood in even coats. We apply a heavy coat of stain and let the wood air dry for 30-40 minutes.
Depending on the red cedar you have, the color result will be anything from brown to dark gray to gray and brown mixture. That's because the tannin in cedar varies so much. Check out the Color Chart for more options! For a DARK GRAY result, use Pining Stain. For a LIGHT GRAY result, use Light Oaking. For a BROWN color, use Salvage Stain.
BEFORE: As you apply the stains, you can see the wood turn from bright red color.
AFTER: And in about 30 minutes, the wood changes to a beautiful barnwood brown. You can This type of stain completely alters the undertone of wood.
