@ GG, I used Waterlox original on the wood. My kitchen gets a lot of use as we have five kids and a busy kitchen. As far as keeping the wood waterproofed it’s perfect. Water beads right up, it’s awesome. We also have two bathrooms with wood counters that have Waterlox on them, one is the bathroom our three teenaged boys use daily, the other is our powder room and only bathroom on the main floor so it also gets a TON of use. Waterlox is darn near perfect to keep the wood safe from water. Now, as far as it getting a patina... my kitchen island has some minor scratches in the finish (it is not down to the wood) and our boys’ bathroom counter has some cloudy marks on it from some products that reacted... pretty sure it was bleach... but none of this has affected the waterproofing. Our powder room hasn’t had any issues except the one time a guest left a big glop of hand soap that I missed for a few days, it ate through the finish... I’d used a new kind of soap, some natural crap with botanical stuff in it... now I only use foaming soap in that bathroom because it’s not going to drip big glops of stuff when a messy guest uses it. LOL! But the nice thing about using Waterlox is that it can be touched up without having to refinish the entire surface (like what you have to do with something like polyurethane) so it’s easy to periodically touch up the scratches, you just put it on the area and feather it out a bit. Only downside is that until the product dries it STINKS to high heaven... and you need an open area for it to cure properly... so I only do touch ups when I can open up the house overnight and use fans for air movement, it needs the air movement to cure properly. (I much prefer when I can apply it in our garage, but I can’t do that for touch ups, and I couldn’t do that for our island as it had to be installed first.) If you decide to use Waterlox and do it yourself, I found a YouTube series by “askwoodman” to be MOST helpful in learning how to use Waterlox. He gave GREAT tips that I use all the time now. (My hubby does the building and designing, and any painting that is done with his sprayer... I do all painting that is done with a brush, any staining, any Waterlox finishing, and much of the sanding, especially any sanding between coats of finishes.) I typically use about 5 coats of Waterlox, but I think I got about 7 right around the sink area and under the sink area just to give it a little extra. It takes 24 hours between coats.
Q