I've had these banisters in my house for ages that had this really poorly done ugle brown/maroon paint. My wife got fed up with them and decided to strip and sand them.
Wonder of wonders, what's under there is some kind of dense hardwood with some great grain to it.
Now I'm trying to decide how to finish it.
My initial plan had been what I always do: basic stain plus a wipe on poly of some sort. Pretty good, pretty easy.
However, this is significantly higher quality wood than the cheap pine I usually work with. It was suggested to me I look into a Tung or Danish oil, and I've now fallen down a deep rabbit hole of wood finishing.
Any preferred finishes that emphasize grain for pretty wood in high traffic areas?
Whatever you do, test the finish first. If you can remove the piece and do a test on the bottom, do it before you commit to the entire piece.
I'd probably do what you said, maybe use some sanding sealer first, and then stain and wipe on poly. I've had great success mixing poly and oil based stain 50:50 to make a wipe on finish.
Wish that was an option, but whatever dingaling installed this stuff put all kinds of caulk on the bottom edge and then nailed it in...
Somebody committed a series crime against wood with this lol. Just trying to come up with something reasonable.
Why would you go with a stain+poly vs a finishing oil of some sort?
Oil based poly will smell much much worse than shellac. Water based poly wouldn't be so bad.
OP will have to deal with the smell of the stain anyway, might as well do it right and use oil based poly.
I'll agree that shellac is a joy to work with and looks great, but I'd be worried someone would attempt to clean the wood at some point in the future and damage the finish
We've been dealing with the smell of citristrip this weekend lol, we can deal with the poly smells. Our house uses evap cooling which provides a ton of options for ducting air away from where the people are.
Citristrip isn't bad in comparison. Oil based poly is pretty strong