"George" george@least wrote in :

Red doesn't, and won't look like white. It'll look pretty if you
treat it right, and that means not like white. Your "fumed" finish
will have to come from a can of stain. As long as you don't mix in
the same piece, should make a nice bed.

George is correct that you can make some nice furniture in this style with
the red oak. You're likely going to want to get really familiar with dyes,
rather than pigment stains. DAGS for this oft-covered topic.

I'd like to add that you will want to pay attention to grain, particularly
with red oak. The relatively open grain will take stain differently than
will most other woods. This means that you need to understand what that
will mean in your finished projects, or you will have more, (or possibly
less) grain showing than you wish to have.

Make a small table, or something with a leg similar to what you anticipate
using on your magnus opus. Use you finishing schedule (which you have
tested earlier on scrap), and see how the grain looks after a couple of
weeks. Red oak has a tendency to look considerably different on edge grain
from face grain, in the same piece.

Woodsmith, FWW and probably a number of other magazines have had articles
over the past few years on how to take what you've got, and make it behave
more closely like QS, or match up well within the one leg piece. They've
explained it better than I could here.

And have fun with this project. It's nice to build stories for the family
for later on.

Patriarch