For beams that have already been painted, you'll want to strip the existing paint and use bleach to remove the rest of the color. You can use Minwax gel stain for several kinds of wood surfaces ...

For this project, I’m going for a real-beams look. Using a method called miter folding, I’ll transform a pair of 1x6s and a 1x8 board into a hollow beam. The miter seams will be invisible, and ...