Spots stain didn’t take

Q: I recently applied stain to my new hardwood steps. It has spots that didn’t take the stain – they stayed white. I even tried to apply stain to these spots heavily. How can I fix it?

A: I’m not sure if something was got on the step which has prevented stain penetration or if it is just a quirk with the wood itself. You could try water popping which just means to wet the wood and let it dry before staining. this would open the grain to allow better penetration. But you would have to start over, removing the stain you have applied.

These are new steps. It is not the entire step but just spots. My guess is some residual wood glue was not removed during your preparation. You simply didn’t see it but it’s there.

If it was me, I think I would try to carefully scrape with a hand scraper the spots, sand smooth with a bit of fine sandpaper and stain the spots.

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