My Favourite Wood Stain!

I used this stain everywhere in my home! I love the tone and warmth it has, plus it compliments our flooring and paint colour so well! I added a few floating shelves in this home and stained them with this formula. Our last home didn’t have any ‘nooks’ for decor, so I really wanted to have little spots to add plants and cute things.

The type of wood you use is so important

I ended up changing the wood our builder uses to a birch plywood for the shelving (below) and it was perfect! Exactly what I was hoping for! It was a touch pricier (there’s a few beautiful higher end types of plywood for shelving like this, but the birch was giving me the look I wanted). It was a softer, minimal look that blended in really nice with the stain.

This stain was a custom blend, I used it in our last house (our living room mantle and the bathroom shelves in our basement were stained with this blend). I would recommend using a lighter, even type of wood for it like I did. I’ve tested it on a few samples (including a fir, which is what the standard wood used for our home is). You can see how uneven it stained below, as well as being very ‘streaky’ and much darker.

^^ this is the same stain on both pieces of wood. The fir ends up being much more uneven with the lighter stain blend

However, our dining room beams are made with the same fir wood as above, and using a darker stain it looks beautiful and more even. For this lighter stain though, you will want a uniform wood that stains more evenly.

Before I changed the wood to birch, I tried like 5 different stains on my fir wood sample (I bought the Miniwax sample sizes and went to town on different wood pieces lol) alongside my personal stain blend. It wasn’t working on the fir though, s0 I went another route and picked up some plywood samples and tried those instead. It’s all trial and error, so make sure you test it out to make sure it will stain nicely on the wood you’re using.

^^ I was so frustrated at this point, nothing was working or looking how I wanted it to look!

And finally, here is the end result with my stain blend on birch wood, the absolute prettiest!

And here is the formula that I used… feel free to save this pic to show your paint mixer!

If you end up using this, let me know what you think!

Come say hi on Instagram or TikTok, I share a lot of home inspo over there and if you have any questions about the stain or anything about the house, feel free to dm me or leave a comment below! Thanks for reading!

xx Megan