Stain Maple Floors

Secondly a maple floor if properly sanded and conditioned can take a stain and look absolutley stunning picture top left and another stained maple floor below.

Stain maple floors. The use of oil based pigmented stains on maple results in a very blotchy looking floor. Maple flooring is a dense durable product that looks great in a range of decorating styles in your home. You can read what the wood flooring association has to say about maple flooring here. After spending lots of time reading professional floor refinishing forums and generally obsessing on this topic i have read over and over again the staining a maple floor is a bad idea and that many contractors won t even do it because they ve had enough bad experiences unhappy customers.

This is because maple is very tightly grained generally but there are turns in the grain that are more absorbent. Maple must be sanded uniformly. We recommend you use a traditional resin stain over your dye to lock in the color and this will also create good protection from fading. Yes you can have your maple floors stained a different color.

First a natural maple floor finished with water based finish is going to look a lot different than a maple floor that is finished with an oil based finish see pics below. It is an extremely hard wood that blotches due to poor sanding technique. Staining maple is generally not recommended by finish manufacturers since the dense grain does not allow the penetration of most pigments. How to stain maple wood floors that are blotchy.

When trying to stain these woods the hard spots will not absorb the stain easily and when that happens you will have a light patch that looks blotchy. However you should not use a water sealer. Translated this means that either they don t know how to do it it takes extra work to do or they think that it is supposed to. Luckily many brands already offer pre stained maple hardwood planks so you don t really need to go down the diy staining route unless you really have a very unique or custom blend color in mind.

After the resin stain coat has dried seal your maple floor with one coat of dewaxed shellac sealer omu sealer or acid cure sealer. The standard industry answer to this question has been that maple floors are meant to have clear finishes and could not be stained. When maple or hickory kitchen cabinets are stained it is done in a factory controlled environment and they use different types of fast dry spray on coatings. Simply put maple is not a hardwood flooring wood that should be stained.

Maple is notorious for blotching.