I'm sanding down the edges of my stairs as we want a runner carpet rather than edge-to-edge. Want natural wood at the edges of the carpets but there are a few gaps to fill.
Any recommendations for flexible wood fillers that can take that that sort of movement and will also take a stain?
No such animal to my knowledge. There are fillers that take a stain but unfortunately they look nothing like the same stain on the adjacent wood. My advice would be to finish a small section of wood first and *then* find a matching filler. Plastic wood, Brummer stopper or those wax crayons made by Liberon maybe.
Might use a combination. I need to fill some nail holes etc so a traditional wood filler will do for that but there are gaps between the horizontals and the uprights that might need more of a mastic style flexible, albeit paintable, filler. You're certainly right about trying an area that won't be on show at the end of the job.
good filla is Sikkens guppa ...
Retain the sandings. Mix stiffly with pva or similar. Use result as filler.
OK - I'll add it to the short list. I like their external woodstains for sure.
of my stairs as we want a runner carpet
when I did that recently the "filler" dried and ultimately sanded to a
*lot* darker colour than the wood....bugger!OP:- Could you just use decorators caulk on the horiz/vertical joins you mention (step to stringer) assuming stringers to be painted.
Cheers JimK
Good idea but not in this case - the sandings are very dark, 90 years of use! The bare wood is a weathered pine shade.
Maybe. Difficult to get the right colour though. And although caulk is flexible I find it does tend to crack after a few years. I something with the durability and flexibilty of silicone mastic but paintable.
Sandings are always much darker, whatever the wood. It seems a logical solution but it doesn't work in practice. I recently collected sawdust from some Victorian pine floorboards and it was as near as dammit a terra cotta colour, completely different from the face of the boards. IME a light oak shade of filler is usually the closest match for clear varnished wood
...you're painting the stringers aren't you?
could be a long search! what colour silicone would you want?
NB. how would paint flex on silicone without cracking??
Cheers JimK
Yes the stringers and 'skirting is painted white. But I'm staining, waxing or varnishing the risers and treads and that's where I need to make good the old wood and fill the gaps between the risers and treads.
Well, I may need to varnish and afterwards run a bead of caulk / mastic along the gap between the risers and treads.
The yanks keep banging on about siliconized acrylic latex caulk but we don't seem to sell it here. It's flexible, has silicon durability and is overpaintable.
I agree there. Thanks.
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