Our library is smelling fumy. Yesterday, Husband and I stained the shelves (well, half of the shelves) that he put up a couple of months ago. As we were just getting started, we were chagrined to see that we had purchased the pre-stain conditioner for water-based stain, instead of buying the conditioner for the oil-based stain, which is of course the type of stain which we had bought. Well, he suggested he could go back to Home Depot to buy the correct material, but I opined that with these shelves which are theoretically going to be covered with books, it probably wouldn't matter if we skipped it, and at any rate, we could just do one shelf (the top) and if it didn't look good, we could stop, get the conditioner, and then do the others. Well, as with many things in my life laziness won out and we chose to forgo the pre-treatment. We used an ebony stain and were a little startled at how dark it was. ("Ebony" is black so we shouldn't have been surprised). We like how it looks, though, especially when the light hits that wood grain that we can see through the stain. We still have to put on the polycrilic finish. I remember my Grandma saying that her least favorite part of carpentry was putting on the verathane. I'd just like to be able to apply the stain in a way that it wouldn't splatter across the wall. Several times. I kept thinking, "This is actually fun. If only I were really good at this; we could stain things all the time."