Oil, wax and a damp winter: six months spent chasing gloss

01Why the first finishes failed

The cabinet got a wiping varnish, brushed on in a shop at nine degrees and damp. It went on cloudy, took four days to become touch dry, collected every airborne shaving that drifted past, and dried with a bloom in the recesses that no amount of rubbing back would shift. I stripped it, waited a fortnight, tried again on a warmer day, and got the same result in the lower panels. The failure was not the varnish. It was the temperature, the humidity, and my unwillingness to move the work somewhere sensible.

Film finishes want a warm, dry, still room, which my shop is not for eight months of the year. Bringing the cabinet indoors to finish would have solved most of it, and I did not, because the house has carpets and a family in it. What I changed instead was what I was asking for. The gloss I was chasing came out of photographs of pieces made in heated workshops, and it was never going to be the natural condition of anything that left this particular shed.

02Oil, thinned, and a great deal of waiting

Boiled linseed oil, thinned by about a third with white spirit for the first coat, is forgiving in a way that varnish is not. It builds no film that can bloom or sag, it can be applied in a cold shop, and dust that lands in it can be wiped away with the next coat rather than trapped under one. The cost is patience. In January a coat takes four or five days to stop feeling tacky, and nothing shortens that, least of all putting the following coat on early.

The routine that works here is three coats, wiped on generously and then wiped off hard after twenty minutes, with a week between them in winter and three days in summer. Oily rags go outside on the stone step and dry flat rather than going into a bin, and that is the one safety habit I will preach about. The surface that results is dull, a little darker than the raw wood, and it shows fingerprints for the first month. It also repairs with a rag and no stripping whatever.

• First coat thinned by roughly a third; later coats neat
• Wipe on generously, then wipe off hard after twenty minutes
• A week between coats in winter, three days in summer
• Oily rags outside and laid flat, never bundled into a bin

03Wax, and the difference a cold shop makes

Wax over cured oil does most of what I wanted from gloss and none of what I feared from varnish. A soft beeswax paste, thinned enough to spread, applied with a cloth in a shop at eight degrees, behaves like cold butter and streaks badly. Warmed indoors on a radiator for half an hour it goes on evenly and thinly. That is the whole of my technical insight into wax, and it cost two ruined afternoons, because I kept blaming the wax for behaving exactly as a wax at eight degrees behaves.

It buffs up after twenty minutes with a rag and rather more effort than the tin implies, and the sheen is low, catching the light along the grain instead of reflecting the window back at you. Wax wants renewing every couple of years on anything that gets handled, which suits me: fifteen minutes of work and no preparation at all. On a tabletop that sees hot pans and spilled water I would not use it, and there the honest answer is a finish I cannot apply well out there.

04What the surface has to survive

The question I should have asked at the beginning is what the piece is actually for. A cabinet in a bedroom is handled twice a day and sees no water, so oil and wax will outlast me on it. A kitchen shelf gets wiped with a cloth; oil alone, renewed when it starts to look thirsty, is entirely adequate. A worktop that takes a wet pan needs a film finish, and the sensible course is to build the piece out here and finish it somewhere warm, on a dust sheet, over a weekend when the house is empty.

The other thing I stopped doing was sanding. A surface off a sharp smoothing plane takes oil more evenly than a sanded one and looks different in low light, less uniform and rather more alive. Where I cannot plane, on end grain or in an inside corner, I scrape or use abrasive and accept that the patch will drink slightly more oil than its neighbours. Six months of chasing an even gloss taught me a little about finishes and a good deal more about what I want furniture to look like.