What is Ambered Pine?
Meet John and Andrea’s mudroom! This picture of the pine shiplap accent wall prompted so many texts from people asking one of the biggest questions we see from Facebook posts: ‘What is the stain on that shiplap?’
Our answer: Sunlight!
Literally just sunlight. John and Andrea did nothing to the shiplap before or after putting it up; the sunlight did everything!
As you can see, pine doesn’t usually have that fascinating honey-ish hue when freshly milled. It looks more like this:
When pine is exposed to sunlight for extended periods of time, the UV rays react with the tannin in the lumber to create that golden glow. The wood basically gets a tan. That natural process is called “Ambering.”
Now, we’re going to get a bit nerdy, but, in our defense, this part is so interesting! After doing some digging about tannins, four things became clear:
There are two types of wood, the angiosperms and the gymnosperms.
Generally, angiosperms are hardwoods, and gymnosperms are softwoods.
Hardwoods have a high tannin content, and softwoods have a lower tannin content.
Hardwoods lighten in the sun, and softwoods darken.
There are things that one can do to either accelerate or prevent that chemical reaction in finishing lumber, but we’ll talk about that another day. Today we wanted to exclaim over John and Andrea’s beautiful ambered wall!!! It’s so gorgeous, isn’t it?!?