I need to draw on the Forum's experience and see if I'm about to make a mistake. Thanks in advance for your help.
When we bought this house, it was a spec house. The builder didn't put a single cabinet in the laundry room. Naturally it's a disorganized mess now and my wife and I have designed and I've built seven large cabinet carcasses to put in the space.
My wife wants the cabinets to match (as closely as possible without being insane about it) our kitchen cabinets. Those cabinets are made of maple plywood with solid maple cabinet doors. (We've built the new laundry room cabinets out of maple plywood, too.) I've stained maple cabinets before and I've never gotten them as dark as our kitchen cabinets are.
After we discussed that potential challenge, my wife called the company that built and installed the cabinets for our home builder and asked what finishing product they used.
To my surprise, the cabinet company (I'll call them HC) said that to match their finish, they'd recommend Valspar Exterior Stain - One Coat Stain And Sealer.
It's this product: https://www.valspar.com/en/products/...t-stain-sealer
HC suggested taking one of our kitchen cabinet doors to Lowe's and having them match the tint of the stain to that door.
Well, we went to Lowe's and had a discussion with a guy in their paint department. Like me, he had serious reservations about trying to match a stain through their machine. But we found a Valspar tint card color that looked promising and we bought a gallon of the Valspar product to take home to test.
I'm running several small (2"x3") test pieces of maple plywood with the Valspar exterior stain to see what it will look like. My first test piece is very, very close to the look of our existing kitchen cabinets - so that's great. But I plan to continue testing with plywood pieces that are sanded to 220 grit and 320 grit, and also with one or two coats of the stain.
Having done the one test piece, I've abandoned the idea of two coats of stain - you can't see any grain at all through two coats. But I'm toying with the idea of one coat of this stain and then one coat of polyurethane on top of it. But I'll see how the test pieces (with and without poly) look before making that decision.
So with all that, here's my question: Has anyone used exterior stain on interior cabinets before? Every time I've done cabinets before, I've used interior stain and two or three coats of poly. So this is new territory for me.
I should note that the Valspar product I'm talking about is water-based, but it still has carbendazim in it - a fungicide also used on crops. I've checked into that and it appears to be lightly toxic - but is also used in chemotherapy, believe it or not.
Also, anyone put poly over an exterior stain before?
Reply With Quote
