Lately, we’ve seen a lot of images of plywood-clad rooms — walls, ceilings, floors — whose orangey wood grain seemed a bit oppressive. UNTIL we stumbled on this image of a plywood wall that appears to have been bleached, giving a pale, silvery cast. We tracked the image to Finland-based photographer and designer Riikka Kantinkoski, who seems to love plywood. The photo is meant to illustrate a lamp she has in her home, but we’re smitten with the walls.

She’s also the mastermind behind these utterly simple, appealing bleached plywood trivets; cut from 1/2-inch birch plywood; their hexagonal shape allows them to connect in interesting patterns and arrangements. They inspired us to look into exactly HOW TO bleach plywood.

Riikka Kantinkoski
Riikka Kantinkoski

Here’s the gist, from SF Gate:

If you want to lighten the color of plywood, there’s a bleach for the job, and if you want to remove stains, there’s a bleach for that, too…Bleaching plywood isn’t much different from bleaching solid wood, with one important difference. Plywood is laminated in layers, and the surface layer on which the bleach is acting is usually very thin. The bleach doesn’t have to penetrate as deeply to do its job and consequently may not need as much time to work.

When we read the details we though: deefinitely doable though something we’d test on a small piece of plywood. Once we got the hang of it, we’d go to town! A slab of bleached plywood could make a great headboard…

via Japanese Trash

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