Faux Wood Workshop

The main reason you stain a piece of wood rather than painting it is to show off the wood’s natural features: its grain, its splits and checks, its knots. The knots can be especially interesting, peppered about in irregular shapes and patterns.

A knot begging for some love

The goal is the same with a stained faux beam: Show off its best features, including its knots.

When you’re about to stain an unfinished faux beam, pay special attention to those knots. To make them stand out, make them a little darker than the other parts of the beam. You can do this in two ways:

- Before you stain the whole beam, paint each knot. Use a fine brush to paint over the pattern of the knot, emphasizing its features. Let the paint dry overnight, then stain the whole beam including the prepared knots.

- Don’t prepare the knots ahead, but go ahead and stain the whole beam. Then wipe off the excess stain everywhere on the beam except for the knots themselves. Or, without wiping, dab extra stain on the knots as the stain is starting to dry.

If you have short cutoffs left over from cutting the beams to length, experiment on these first to get the effect you like best.

A Knot Being Painted on Faux Wood Beam

Stained Faux Wood Beam with Knots Painted First

As you may already know, you install faux beams by first attaching several wood blocks securely to the ceiling or wall, and then attaching the beam to the blocks. The blocks are inside the hollow beam, so they’re completely hidden.

What’s not completely hidden are the screws you drive through the sides of the beam into the blocks. You have to countersink them a little into the beam and then fill the holes with matching caulk or wood putty. Or do you?

If you’re like me, the first impulse you have when you need to screw something in place is to grab for a box of drywall screws. They’re cheap and they’re handy. But hold on. Using finish screws instead can make hole-filling easier or even eliminate it.

Finish screws, or trim screws, are flathead screws with smaller heads than normal. Some have Phillips heads, but the ones with Robertson square-drive heads are even better. It’s too easy to strip the smaller (#1) Phillips slots. If you don’t already have a square driver, you can pick one up where the screws are sold. Sometimes the box of screws includes a free driver bit.

Finish screws are also available in colors. If you can match the color of your beam closely enough, and the beam is high enough up that you can’t see the small screw heads from the floor, you might get away with not having to fill any holes.

If that little cheat won’t work, at least you’ll end up with smaller holes after you countersink the finish screws. Smaller holes are much quicker and easier to fill, and harder to see.

In this case, smaller is better.

If one of the prefinished beams on our site suits your project to a T, you should definitely go ahead and order it. Staining a pile of unfinished beams is way down the list of things that most of us love to do. It’s messy, time-consuming, and (let’s face it) pretty boring.

But no prefinished beam can fit everyone’s needs and plans. You might want something more distinctive than a traditional walnut or pine color. And some of our beams are only available unfinished. With all the effort and expense you’re putting into your project, you want the result to be right — including the exact color of your beams.

If you’ve done much staining, you know colors can be hit-or-miss. You know the color on the lid of the can or the chart at the hardware store can only give a general idea of how the finish will actually look. And it’ll look different on polyurethane than on pine or oak or maple.

Thank goodness for free samples!

In case you don’t know: You can order a sample of any beam we sell. Order as many as you want, because they end up being free. It’s true: When you decide what you want, and place your order for the actual beams, you can deduct from the beam order every penny you paid for the samples. (Well, unless you went overboard and paid more for the samples than the whole cost of the beam order.)

That means you can order several samples of different beam styles, try out different stains and techniques on them, and see what you’re going to get before you commit to the Big Order. Let the stain dry completely before you reach any conclusions. And be sure to choose and apply finishes according to the instructions on our web site.

Sure, it takes some time and some fussing. But the results are worth the effort.

Timber, Raised Grain, Regal, Rustic, Woodland, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes the choices are overwhelming. Where do you start? How can you home in on just the styles that suit your project?

Fortunately, if you know something about what you’re looking for, you don’t have to wade through page after page of descriptions and specs for each and every beam style. You can let the Beam Selector do the work for you.

Say your project design calls for one or more beams with an exposed end. The end doesn’t butt against a wall or against another beam, but hangs in the middle of somewhere exposed to view. Obviously you need to know which beam styles are available with a cap to close that exposed end.

It’s a perfect 1-2-3 job for the Beam Selector:

1. From any page on the website, click Beam Selector Tool.

2. Let your eye scan down to item 8, Available with closed ends, and choose Yes.

3. Click Search for Beams, and behold the results.

In 10 seconds you’ve narrowed your choices to Timber, Woodland, Sandblasted and Chalet. Not only that, but at a glance you can see essential specs for each style: shipping time, largest dimensions, number of sizes, number of sides, endcap availability (of course) and suitability for truss construction. Click any style to see the full details.

I always believe in letting the computer do as much of the grunt work as possible, so I can do the brain stuff.