Making new pine look old

Nothing gets remotely close when you see the old and new side by side. Caustic soda helps, and is probably partly responsible for the look you have on the doors. Having the new surround dipped should tone it down a bit. Vandyke crystals is a good, natural colour (1% solution), but you really need to kill the brightness in the new wood, and that isn't easy.

Take the chain of the nearest motorcycle, wrap it in a load of very oily rags, and beat the fireplace to death.

Then using a dremel, drill it all over with 1mm holes,

Next play a blowlamp all over it gently till a toasted brown.

Now, using the coarsest wire brush you can find, remove all the soft wood between the grain.

Finally wash it with caustic soda for that 'stripped' look.

That should just about match the awfulness of whatever 'stripped pine' you have already.

And its what the repro boys do, more or less.

If it is only the colour you would like to change - I have found applying knotting with a sponge or rag to the whole surface can give pine an 'antique' colour.

Franko.

Get a scrap piece of pine and use a hot air gun to singe it from the stark white. It does require some care but may give you what you want.

Having read through all the 'kind' suggestions above, can I suggest the following which I used to get 'modern' pine skirting and door facings to match the soft brown that untreated old pine naturally goes

- it's the gentle set honey look that I was trying to approach and the following was in my eyes (and SWMBO!) passably acceptable.

Ideally you will need to get some matching wood to the fireplace to experiment on. I found that I needed to stain the pine gently pink first using Colston's Red Mahogony 'watered down' with white spirit - the rate is part of the experiment! I then used several coats of 'Light Oak' to give the colour and shade I wanted. The pink staining seems to be the key.

Best of luck

Rob

Either a weak solution of caustic sode (teaspoon in a litre of water) or household ammonia will darken it down & give a nice 'honey' sgade.

I was going to say this too! You can't do it in one pass as some areas will absorb more and thus darken, but you can rag or sponge selectively to even things up a bit. Also, you may be slightly disappointed at first but after a while it will look more natural, especially from a distance.

My partner went to the local furniture repro workshop and persuaded them to sell her a coffee-jar of their secret stain gunge - a fiver if I recall correctly. Looks fine to me, but then it's not my opinion we're setting out to meet.... :o)

That's quite expensive for a jar of coffee.

Owain

Dilute wash of caustic soda. This has the great advantage that it emulates the natural aging, so it won't look odd in a few years time.

Then if you're finishing with wax, choose an appropriate coloured wax (Briwax or Liberon). This is how commercial "antique pine" is usually finished. Don't overdo it though - most waxes are far from light stable and they tend to fade from that attractive honey colour you liked in the shop to a bleached khaki with rings left under the plantpots.

_Don't_ use any sort of dye stain. Pines will blotch (if you have to colour them, it's done with a surface glaze)

_Don't_ attempt to mechanically distress it. Techniques that might work on oak will look awful on pine, as they highlight the relative hardness and softwood of the annual rings. It'll end up like driftwood.

I think I'll give the dilute caustic soda a try on a scrap piece of pine to see how it looks.

Where can you buy the stuff?

Any hardware shop / ironmongers. Just look under drain cleaners.

Don't buy the sort with added aluminium swarf.

If you're going to use stain then just use Antique Pine stain.

MBQ

I think most of the sheds do it. I know Focus do

"Antique pine" doesn't really mean anything. Colron dyes are usually combinations of red-yellow-black oxides, which are basically too bright for antique shades.

Found it in a posh Boots Chemist last week - about the only thing of any use in the place...

Geo