varnishing faded wood - coming up yellow

BennytheBall

Hi

Have a timber shelf running along the inside of my conservatory - over the years it has got faded in parts, while other areas are darker.

I sanded it back as much as possible and applied a medium oak varnish - while it looks fine in the darker parts, it looks bright yellow on the faded sections.

What would you recommend as my next move?

TIA

Alun

What you probably should have done was to have sanded it back to bare wood, applied a separate wood stain first, applying more to the more faded areas, blending it in and then applied the varnish (a clear one in this case would have worked, seeing as you'd already stained the wood). You could still do this, of course.

Wertz

Yeah Alun's way would be what I'd probably do, paying attention to the sanding part, probably need to take an electric sander to the shelf...the tannins in the wood (teak?) have been faded by UV so the wood is lighter in colour in those places....your coloured varnish is only going to make the whole thing shinier and slightly more yellow.
Go for a stain that's as close to the type of timber as possible, or slightly darker

there are wood revivers on the market for bringing back the original colour of faded timber (without actually staining it) but I've only ever used them on exterior weathered timber that had been uniform in it's faded-ness