I needed to resurface part of my wood floor, so I went to Home Depot and picked up a can of stain that looked - from the can - like the color of my floor. It was much too dark, and it looked terrible. I told a friend about what happened, and he recommended I got to Sherwin-Williams.
I brought a piece of the stained wood from the original floor. The store manager spent some time comparing the different stains they had to the piece of wood: the wood itself can affect how the stain looks, so you can't always go just by the picture on the can. It's not the same thing as paint.
He picked a shade that looked close, and he did something Home Depot didn't do: he applied the stain to the piece of wood I brought, on the unstained part, so I could see what it would look like on the wood. He told me that, if it didn't match perfectly, he could do some color matching to get the stain to look perfect. It would have taken a day for him to do this, but he would have done it free of charge.
As it turned out, the stain matched perfectly. I sanded out the mistaken stain from before and applied the stain I got from this store. I first thought there was something wrong, but then I realized: the new stain looks like the floor when I first laid it down. The existing floor is dirty from years of not being polished. If you look at the picture I attached, you'll see this: the lighter color on the left is the current (dirty) floor; the darker color on the right is the newly-stained floor. Now, I just need to wash the rest of the floor, and it will be as good as new! read more