We are restoring a 500 year old farm house in Tuscany. It has lots of lovely rough hewn wooden beams, many with worm holes. Some of the beams are very dark-which I do not like as it is quite dark already in parts of the house and one room will have fairly low ceilings. Some beams seem to have been re-adzed...letting the nice honey coloured wood show. Our carpenter says that the wood is a local cypress. Some people say do not sand blast as it makes the wood have a horrible patina, some say just scrub the wooden, the rough hewn wooden ceiling and beams in another room...some say use acid to make the wood lighter....my question is what is the easiest and cheapest way to bring the wood back to its natural lighter colour and what is the best way to treat worms, is there a natural alternative also?What finishes and treatments are best? Some also say that cypress beams have a wonderful smell for years, if we re-adze which will be very difficult without taking the beams down, how can we release this smell again? Is there a product we can use to scrub the wood and bring it back to the lighter colour?There also are '=E7otto' tiles used in the ceiling, which are terracotta tiles used between the strips of wood in Tuscan celings, some of these are whitewashed and will need to be sand blasted.
- posted
17 years ago