Is it ridiculous to consider staining baseboards a new color?

Not necessarily ridiculous, but it would be a pain. Your options are basically to remove them, stain, and replace (possibly damaging the wall or floor) or try to tape them off and stain, praying the stain doesn’t seep under the tape (spoiler alert, it probably will).

If you’re going to do it, I recommend the first option, and recommend keeping careful track of which board came from where. Baseboard Tetris sucks.

The stuff on the market you’re going to look for is called PolyShades. It’s actually an oil based polyurethane finish that is tinted with stain. The color on the can is not going to be the final color if the source wood is anything but natural. And if you use too many coats of PolyShades it will just look like brown glossy paint.

Test before committing.

@Seek Is it easier to just paint? I know stain seems more luxurious, I guess because good stainable wood is usually more expensive than paintable wood. Does the stain you mention work on top of a glossy finish? Whatever coating it is they put on wood?

I want to go darker, so I’m not concerned much with it getting too dark.

You’ll want to sand the wood slightly first to give it something to grip to, but the stain should adhere. Painting is almost always easier (latex washes up easily) but I agree, the natural wood look is so much nicer.

Why?

@elbanditoroso I ask because a lot of the houses we are looking at have that medium color wood and I like the extremes. I like very light or almost grey, or very dark. I lived with medium colored wood kitchen for years in TN and never really liked it. My baseboards there were painted white though. To say more about the cabinetry tangent, I especially don’t like when the door has an arched pattern on the uppers. I don’t know if that explains it well. I like cleaner lines. That medium color with a simple pattern that is arched looks more country to me. I like rustic as an option with wood, but not country so much. I also like a very modern look bordering Asian or Polynesian, but not when it looks too cold.

My cousin s daughter Is going through this process right now. Part of a renovation. They just ripped the old ones off and stained all new ones.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous but I would pay a professional to do it.

It’s probably a lot of work, prying off the boards, keeping track of what came from where, sanding, staining, putting the boards back.

I have painted baseboards in all my previous houses and I’ve always been fine with it. A lot if the houses in OH are wood stained. We haven’t decided on a house yet, but it might be a detail I might need to deal with if I bother to deal with it.

If you do go the remove-and-stain route, I would second @Seek‘s suggestion to mark the boards to identify where the will be replaced. Also, make sure the baseboards are real wood, as opposed to MDB or some other synthetic. If they are not wood, you probably do not want to stain.