barn door dilemma (and painful lesson learned)

As I've mentioned previously, during our renovations we added a sliding barn-style door inside our house. It closes off the wing adjacent to our foyer, where my office, our little "mail room" (the counter where our incoming paper gets sorted and then recycled or filed), a coat closet, and a small powder room all reside.

As a result of some design challenges related to the track for the door (a post for another time), it was one of the last things to be installed before the project went on hiatus while the contractor went and built a new bathroom for some friends of ours. Now he's back and fairly quickly working his way through the punchlist of remaining work.

Staining and sealing the barn door was one of the biggest items on the punchlist. But we've run into a little snag...

This is another one of those painful remodeling lessons that it never would have occurred to me to think about before it was too late. Apparently, some woods don't accept stain as well as others. And -- you guessed it -- the type of wood on our door is one of those that doesn't handle it so well. (My after-the-fact online research tells me that "pine, cherry, birch and maple are notoriously difficult to stain".)

When Mark had finished staining the door, it had a blotchy quality, almost like there were dirty fingerprints all over it. I asked him about it, and he explained that parts of the wood are softer than others and therefore accept more stain. And that there was nothing we could do about it. Being a tenacious and stubborn creature, though, I nonetheless decided to see if I could fix it...

So, with some guidance from Mark, I used steel wool to try to sand off some of the stain in places. The result? Mixed. I also added a second coat of stain, thinking that if we darkened the finish, the splotches might be less noticeable. Um, no.

So then I went online for advice. Which is probably where we both should have started. Because, it turns out that if you take the proper steps before you stain the wood, you can minimize the problem we encountered. I never knew this -- and apparently neither did Mark (poor guy is doing all the touch-up painting, staining, and sealing after the painting sub bailed on our project) -- but if you partially seal the wood before staining it, it causes the wood to accept the stain more evenly, eliminating the blotchy quality. Here are the detailed instructions I found online for how to do this.

This learning comes a little too late, though. So now the dilemma: Do we go ahead and seal it, and live with the splotches? Or should we paint it instead? In the bright afternoon sun yesterday, the possible paint colors looked great, and I was pretty sure we'd end up painting. Then, come evening, the stain looked much better to me, even with it's poor complexion. So now I'm just torn.

If we go with paint, we'll probably do something in the gray-blue-green family, in a gloss finish. We considered Mesa Red as an option (the color of our exterior windows and doors), but it just felt like a little too much. A palish, grayish blue-green seems like it would work well in the space, which has three creamy yellow walls, one wall of exposed red brick (with brick-colored paint above it), and a gray slate floor that has a slight teal cast to it due to the use of blue-green grout. The color definitely needs to be a mid-tone -- something lighter than the floor but darker than the yellow wall -- in order for things to feel balanced.

So, weigh in, friends. What would you do?