Tung Oil vs. Polyurethane on Pine

OK, found the digital!
First shot is tung oil on Southern Yellow Pine, but with dark & pure tung oil combinations. On the right, I wiped pure tung oil on, let it sit, wiped off the excess, then wiped on dark tung oil. On the left, I mixed pure & dark tung oil cut with citrus solvent, then wiped the wood with that combination. To me, they look pretty much the same.









This is our ten year old SYP in a place where it gets little sun.













This is pretty much the most distressed section of floor in our house - right at the kitchen door where all the traffic goes, water gets spilled, cats run around scratching it, etc.











This shot shows the difference between wood protected from and exposed to the sun. For years we had a cabinet sitting on this section. At the top was covered, bottom got sun. Please excuse the dirt - and expect scratches on pine!











We saved some of the prettiest pieces of pine for our cabinets - this is the section of one of the upper shelves we made out of left over flooring. It gets a lot of sun since it is right at the kitchen window. Nice heart pine, considering what we thought we were buying was low quality grade D lumber!

These are my tests of tung oil on Southern Yellow Pine. The tung oil is from the Real Milk Paint Company. I used two kinds - Pure Tung Oil and Dark Tung Oil. For both, I cut them 50-50 with Citrus Solvent, also from the Real Milk Paint Company. Since I also wanted to test Real Milk Paint as a stain/wash, I also ordered some Sky Blue Milk Paint.

The wood is left over pieces from when we did the floors in our current house about 10 years ago. This is not ideal since the surfaces have been exposed to the air. We could not sand them as much as we'd like since our sander that had not been used for years fell apart when we tried to sand the wood. So the wood is not well sanded and has a little bit of a hardened and polished surface. Here are the pieces before any finish is applied:
















I ended up not using all the pieces, so from here out there are only four pieces of wood. Here they are after the first coat:















Here are the pieces of wood with several coats of tung oil. I applied tung oil over the milk paint as that is one way recommneded to make milk paint more water resistant for kitchen use. I also wanted to test the "antiquing" effect of the dark tung oil over the paint:



As you can see, the dark tung oil is VERY dark. I delayed posting the pictures since I meant to do a test with mixing dark and pure tung oil to lighten the overall effect, but have not had a chance to do so. The Real Milk Paint Company recommends mixing the Pure and the Dark Tung Oil to adjust the color.

I also need to take pictures of the same Southern Yellow Pine that we have on our floors to show what color they are after ten years with and without exposure to sunlight.

Here is the latest version of my house plan with a close up of the kitchen area. The door at the end of the stairs is under the high end and is to the pantry. Under the rest of the stairs will be probably a broom closet and storage. The alcove across from the washer & dryer is where we will have our bench for putting on boots and shoes.