sorry if silly question: staining over painted wood

You need to strip it first to get the desired effect. Putting stain over white painted wood will only slightly darken the beams in a uniform color.


If you don't want to go that route, you can attempt to do a faux finish on the white beams. There are u-tube videos showing how to do this with a variety of sponges and tools to make it look like you have wood grain showing.

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e got at least 8 beams that are already painted so I just need to find the time to strip the paint.

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To me, that's the best way to do this. If you apply a faux finish it will never be anywhere near as smooth of a finished product as stripping, staining and putting a few coats of poly to finish it off.


Edited to ask this: Are these support beams made from a single piece of lumber and solid or are they made with 4 separate pieces of wood to form a box around a support post?

If one solid beam, you should be good to go with stripping and finishing.

If they used 4 pieces of wood to form a box beam just make sure the wood is 1 solid piece from end to end and not some of that finger-jointed stuff made up from many smaller pieces of wood glued together to form a board.

Lots of trim lumber is now finger-jointed and only good as paint grade lumber since the grain will be all over the place with darker graining next to pieces with bland grain. You'll never get that to look good.

Single piece of wood. Older house. I considered doing my own four piece box but that's more money than I'd like to spend.

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If you don't want to go that route, you can attempt to do a faux finish on the white beams. There are u-tube videos showing how to do this with a variety of sponges and tools to make it look like you have wood grain showing.

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This is the route I would go, but I absolutely despise anything to do with stripping paint and refinishing wood that was painted, especially these days with all the good strippers being banned.

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t I absolutely despise anything to do with stripping paint and refinishing wood that was painted, especially these days with all the good strippers being banned.

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I've had a lot of success using a heat gun to remove paint from wood surfaces but you have to be careful to not scorch the wood when heating the paint.


It's a fine line between just removing paint and scorching the wood surface Naturally, the more layers of paint you have, the longer you have to let the heat gun do its work in an area.