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Stained, Sealed and Suckered

My mother taught me that you don't return presents unless it's to exchange a size, you don't send back a restaurant dish you ordered just because you don't like it, and if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

So this week I flex my green-materials muscle to demand that we get something safer and healthier to finish the wood floors. Our local green building supplier Jeff Rogers at New England Green Building recommends Ecoprocote's TimberSoy stain (bio-based, zero VOCs) and Acri-Soy clear sealer (no hazardous materials). Legare, our builder, has a few questions: Do they also make a wood conditioner that you'd use before putting down the stain? Jeff calls the manufacturer, Eco Safety Products LLC to inquire. No conditioner required, they tell him, because of the way the product is made. Also no to L's question about whether we can mix some stain into the sealer: You need to stain first, then seal separately.

We buy a few little sample cans to try out colors and see how it spreads on some small pieces of flooring. We come up with a color combo of birch and mahogany, Chum leaves town for the weekend, and we leave the job to Legare, the master builder.

Skip ahead to Saturday, when I pop by to see how it's going. Not so good. Like my mom, Legare never has a bad word to say, but he is definitely ticked off. The stain spreads as if the flooring were a paper towel--there's no way he can wipe it off fast enough, and every drip leaves a permanent drip-shaped stain. In half an hour of painstaking work he's only managed to cover about 16 square feet.

The rest of the afternoon is an experiment in dilution, as Legare tries various methods to water down the product and get it to flow more smoothly. Eventually he settles on a one-third Timber Soy, one-third sealer, one-third water mix that seems to work well enough to get a thin coat of birch down. "Okay?" he asks. He looks totally wrung out. It's after 5 o'clock, and I don't have the heart, or the additional funds, to send him back to work to test out the system mixing in a second color. I put the gallon of unused mahogany in my car for my next trip to the hardware store. If my mother were still alive, I'm sure she'd be disappointed.

Read Part Two.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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