In case I didn’t have enough on my plate...

...throw in a last minute business trip on Monday and Tuesday. I’ll admit, there is a slight danger my head might explode but if the pressure is any indication of the quality of the end product- this is going to be a great thesis.

Getting the lead out

For all you who maybe in the back of your mind were worrying about our physical health and mental facilities with all the heat gun/sanding paint removal in this century old house which is almost guaranteed to be teeming with lead paint- we just got test results back and we are in the clear. We both had blood draws on Friday just to be safe, and to get a general idea as to whether we were being careful enough. I guess this means I’m clear to continue using paint chips in my cooking as a flavor booster!

Evidence of our labor

Alas here are pictures on the paint job including some of the trim as well. Our focus now shifts to the dining room as we have two weeks as of yesterday before all stripping or trim removal must be done.

Coincidentally this matter is further complicated by news about my thesis. Rather than being due in 7 weeks as initially thought, it’s due in 1. Awesome! Now you’ll have to excuse me while I crawl into this cave with my laptop. Hopefully I’ll emerge with a shiny new thesis and if I’m really lucky they’ll let me trade it for one of them fancy diplomas.

We got a lot from a few coats of paint

It was a long, working weekend, but the payoff is spectacular. I’m not sure how I’m going to write this post as in my head it’s just me saying over and over again in as many ways as I can, how great the living room looks. Seriously, there is no way I can convey the incredibleness of results of the paint job mixed with the wood trim. I’m not sure if it’s because the room has been a filthy mess since the day we bought it, or because it has never been a functional living space for us but we cannot get over the transformation and the incredible feeling of knowing that room is ours and that eventually we’ll actually be able to use it. In fact, if we could I think I would squeeze all of our belongings in it and seal off the rest of the house and just live in there. What?! It’s probably about the size of a NYC apartment!

Of course to accomplish all this we had to sacrifice our normal weekend sleeping in and I think we literally did not sit down from for more than 30 minutes at any point starting Friday night, but after we pulled up the drop cloth, took the tape off the wall and removed the tape covering the trim it was all worth it. In fact we didn’t make it to bed until 2 am because we spent about an hour just staring at the room and shaking our head in wonder. All you homeowners out there might have difficulty remembering the distinction, but It’s not just that the room looks great or that we are getting closer to having one room done- it’s that for the first time since we each left for college that our residence is our Home (capital H). Well, at least one room of a home. Even when we bought the place it very much felt like an apartment-cream walls everywhere with the details comprised of the cheapest and most generic possible. There were none of the touches that makes a house personalized- perhaps with the exception for the green kitchen, but that feels more like a rental gone wrong. I think for the first time it really sank in that we can do all of those things we’ve previously been unable to- we can paint the walls without fear of losing a deposit or knowing we’ll have to cover them back up. We can get window coverings that are not $3 blinds from Lowes. We can pick out furniture without fear of having it not fit in a new setting.

I think the overwhelming wonder and amazement last night came from all of this coming together at once- the relief that despite all the stumbling blocks and issues we weren’t sure how to handle, that it all turned out well in the end; the immense pride and elation that comes in finishing something you’ve worked so hard on; and that we are able to create something that looks good from a design sense (we think so anyway). We’ve long been thinking that if we could just get one room done it could be a sort of showcase for others- a testament of what we were doing for those who were scared off by the conditions of the rest of the house. I think what we didn’t bank on however was that it would become a testament to ourselves- of what we were capable of, of the promise for the rest of the house, and of how committed we were to making it beautiful and making it ours.

Weekend plans

With two weeks left and counting we’re going to attempt to get the living room painted this weekend. This means we have to cover all the woodwork, clean up the chemical depot (i.e. living room), remove the awesome (read: hideous) track lighting, and of course pick out the colors. Before we paint we need to figure out a way to patch areas where the stripper removed layers of paint. This is largely around the door and window frames. When we started stripping we initially were attempting to do it with the trim in place which meant that while the stripper went on the sides of the wood it also went on the walls. In most cases it took the walls back down to plaster, so we figure mud is the way to go to even out the ridge. I’m not sure how well we’ll be able to successfully replicate multiple layers of paint with plaster, but otherwise we’ll have a ring around the window. The only thing we haven’t figured out is how to get the texture back. it’s not an applied texture or anything added to the paint, just the result of multiple layers of paint applied with a roller with a too-thick nap. I suppose like all of it, it will be a system of trail and error, but hopefully it goes quickly because I’d love to have the walls coated by the time we’re back at work on Monday. It won’t be quite the transformation that having the floors done will be, but I can imagine it will clean up the place significantly- if for no other reason that it will cover the line of dirt that indicates where all of their previous artwork hung (I use that term loosely judging from what was in the house when we saw it). My other motive is once the walls are painted we can attempt to rehang the trim, which I’m sure will be a daunting task in and of itself.

Clint will be participating in the weekend's activities as much as he can, around a quick poster he needs to churn out. He’s now officially allowed to help again, I required a hiatus from him in the staining process for one very important reason- his critical artist’s eye. We’ve discussed at length how when you work on something you become intimate with every flaw, but when you see it as an outsider you only see the overall beauty. This was largely in regards to posters when he would want to burn an entire stack for a inconsistency I couldn’t detect, or other projects I worked on where all I could see was the one thing wrong with it. I knew going into the staining process that it wouldn’t be easy and there’s no way it would be perfect (although in retrospect I had no idea). Given that we typically cannot have a piece of his artwork within eyesight or he’ll silently deconstruct it, I didn’t want him to feel that way about the house- especially not the main room! Although I am a perfectionist my case is much more mild than his, and if anyone was going to pick apart every flaw I’d much rather it be me- it certainly couldn’t be both of us. It also helped along the way to have an objective opinion; especially one that I can trust to understand my pickiness and give me an honest opinion when I needed it, although in most cases he's so immensely appreciate and proud that he thinks it looks awesome no matter what. It's the equivalent of asking your mom to critically and honestly evaluate your work. It certainly helped too that at the end of each night he was willing to stand in the room and sufficiently ooh and ahh. Of course this was the result of me yelling up the stairs "COME OOH AND AHH AT THE TRIM!." Subtle, I know, but he was a quick study and understood his duty, and performed the role well. Then my chest would puff up just a little, but we're saving the full-blown proud peacock dance until it's all done.

5 months of work in photos

When you put it like that it doesn’t look like much- but here is evidence of our labor.

The art of staining

If I didn’t have a deep appreciation for the art of staining before, I certainly do now. I realized in retrospect that everything I have stained before has been a singular type of wood which endured the same conditions as all the other pieces of wood. So once I figured out how to achieve the ideal color once, it was just a matter of taking that lesson and applying it (literally). There was trial and error- once. In this case, I soon realized that the way the wood reacted depended on a multitude of factors- how much I had sanded it, how orange the color was to begin with, possibly something to do with the heat gun, the amount of humidity in the air, the tilt of the earth on its axis and it’s subsequent distance from the sun, what I ate for breakfast that morning, and I think maybe, just maybe, the effect of someone sneezing halfway across the globe.

Thus, as you might imagine, every single piece of the wood I touched with the stain brush reacted differently. On the very first board I layered on the coats of stain, they barely absorbed. The darker parts of the grain soaked it up while the lighter parts maintained the color, which produced a rather beautiful contrast if not a little on the orange side. The shellac produced a high gloss finish, and I figured there it was- the combination for the rest of the wood: three coats of stain, two coats of shellac. The first piece of trim repeated this pattern, and I was quite happy with the results. The second piece however required only two coats of stain. I was somewhat expecting this because visibly the second piece looked a bit darker and less orange than the first. The third piece was the one that runs along the wall between the front door and the door to the dining room. This piece was in the worst shape with various dents, dings and gobs of paint wedged into the wood. So I heat gunned it, stripped it, stripped it again, scrubbed it with denatured alcohol and steel wool a few times, then sanded it, sanded it, and you guessed it- sanded it again. After realizing these efforts were getting me nowhere I thought what the heck- and I threw a coat of stain on it.

What makes the whole process even more difficult is that even with the stain you have a choice- you can leave it on anywhere from 5-15 minutes, and the length of time determines the depth and darkness of the final color. I left it on the typical 15 minutes, but when I went to wipe it off there was almost no excess. I stepped back and looked at the trim which I may as well have painted chocolate brown. The grain was gone, the color was flat, it absorbed rather unevenly so the tones were blotchy, and I wanted to cry. This was the end of the night (Friday) and although Clint did his best to cheer me up I was ready to throw in the towel (or more accurately the brush). I went to bed that night and woke up the next morning ruminating and trying to figure out the next step. I haven’t had much luck with sanding stain- no matter how fine the grit instead of bringing out the grain it brings out the scratches you’re making with the sandpaper. I was afraid to apply another coat of stain because I didn’t want it any darker, but I wanted to even out the color; plus all the other walls so far had three coats. Because it’s an oil based stain applying multiple coats produces a beautiful shimmer, and although it goes under shellac it may impact the final look (who knows-see above). I thought about trying to sand the whole thing down again back to the wood but at this point I was disgusted with the whole wall so I just threw on a coat of shellac, hoping the sheen would offset the unevenness. I sanded down that coat, focusing on the darker areas to try to level it all out when I thought I might have noticed something- the lighter areas of the grain showing through while the darker areas stayed dark. I called Clint in to witness the effect and tell me if I was just losing my mind (there are a lot of fumes in there) and he concurred- it was working! We fervently sanded down the whole wall to uncover the beautiful pattern made by the grain. By the time we were done and reapplied a second coat of shellac I liked that wall better than the others! Clint did a few rounds of the “I told you it'd all be ok” which I probably chased him around the house for, but in the end I was ecstatic.

This trial and error has continued on nearly every piece of wood and it creates a unique a cycle of frustration, disappointment, anger at the trim/stain/shellac/sandpaper, and hopefulness. Sometimes it ends in joy, sometimes I feel like I can live with it and that is enough. We decided at one point that it’s the overall look of the wood, not each individual piece of wood that people will look at. None of it is perfect, and in fact if you examine any singular piece you can see a multitude of flaws. But if you stand back and take in the whole room you see a beautiful montage of wood that has been around for a hundred years, that has endured who knows how many families in the house and that has been hidden and maybe even protected under numerous layers of paint. I like to think while I’m working on it about who installed it, if they had the same dreams and hopes about their house that we do and that took pride in their own handiwork. Someone, at some point really cared for this wood- even though it’s been painted a multitude of times nearly every nail hole was filled with plaster (we’re talking about hundreds of holes). It’s at this point, at the end of the night when I step back and take it all in, that I fall in love with the place just a little bit more. I took some pictures yesterday that show the progress and the mess in which I’m working in- I’ll get them up tonight so you can all ooh and ahh.

Is that a light? There, see it? At the end of that tunnel.

The last five days represent what must be the most productive span in our short history of owning our house. Having Thursday off for my Mom’s brief, but splendid visit, and Monday for Dr. Martin Luther King Day, I decided to take Friday off and bask in five days without work. It’s amazing how long five days can feel at the start of the break, and how short a time it seems when you have to wake up that first morning back to work. A normal person may have relaxed but I decided to make it my mission to see just how much I could get done on the trim.

I started by cleaning the front room because the floor was nearly covered with steel wool, paper towels, sand paper, tools, and various containers of chemicals including stripper, tack cloths, denatured alcohol, shellac, mixed shellac, various stains, wood pre-conditioners, and all of the necessary products to clean out my brushes (not to mention all the sanding dust and stripping debris generated). Once organized I took stock of the room, and made a list of exactly what I wanted to accomplish and assigned each task to a designated day. This may seem like the drive of a mad woman, or one spurned on by overzealous intrinsic motiviation, but alas it is not- it’s driven by the arbitrary date I choose to get the downstairs floors refinished, February 12th. At that date at the very least any and all woodwork that is not removable must be stripped. While theoretically it might be possible to cover the floors and work over them, as you may have noted at the onset of this- I am not a clean worker and there is no way I trust myself enough to play roulette with newly refinished floors. With polyurethane (shellac isn’t durable enough for floors), once any part is damaged the entire floor must be redone- there is no patch-refinishing.

So- what all did I get done, you ask? Drumroll please… with the exception of a few more coats on the large window, the entire front room trim is finished! My hands are marred by scrapes and cuts, I pulled out at least three splinters, and from all of the sanding and subsequent washing of my hands the skin has a thirst no lotion can quench, but it was all worth it. There is still much to be done- in the living room we need to figure out how to stain the quarter-round (we had to buy this new as the whole house is missing it- probably when the carpet was installed), remove the “track lighting” and installing the ceiling fan, paint the ceiling and room and last but not least, we have to figure out the daunting task of reinstalling the trim. In the dining room we need to pull off the trim for dip stripping (I’ve had enough for now), heat gun and strip the three remaining door frames, and paint. The rooms will not be completely done as we’re hoping to one day replace the windows in the two rooms (the small one in the living room is cracked) and we’re still working on the front door. And to top it all off- the date for refinishing the floors was moved up to February 5th! I’m confident we can do it, I’m rejuvenated by actually seeing progress, even if I can’t lift my arms above my head, or make a fist with my right hand. It will all be worth it…one fine day.

Shellac attack

It’s official- we now have one wall of trim DONE. The magic formula appears to be three coats of stain and two coats of shellac. I’m dedicating this post to shellac a. because I’m now so in love with it, and b. it’s one of the lesser known varnishes and I find it rather fascinating. By now you have probably noticed that decisions about the house don’t come easy or quickly, especially when it comes to the woodwork. For one reason I pour myself into the trim for hours each night and don’t even want to entertain the idea that I could ruin it in a matter of seconds, and for another I loathe doing something twice. This gets tricky with the trial and error nature of the work, especially when there are no test pieces. So typically I hop on over to the internet for research and read everything I can get my hands on about something until I have been convinced that I know as much as I possibly could without having done the work. Thus this is the path I followed with the finish.

I usually start with a few trusty house blogs that I have leaned on multiple times for such decisions, House in Progress and This Old Crack House (which I just found out is in nearby Dayton!). Stripping countless layers of 100 year old paint off of intricate trim and restoring it back to a wood finish is, I am learning, qualitatively different from refinishing furniture. For one I had to give in to the fact that there is no way possible I could get all of the paint off of the surface. There are just too many dents, dings, nail holes and scratches that refuse to give up any paint without trading in some wood. Thus the challenge becomes not getting it perfect as this would be impossible, but getting it to look as good and I can, while making it look like it belongs in the house.

This is where the other blogs come in. See- house restorers are picky people. I’m not sure if it’s a function of the effort that goes into the work or if it’s a certain personality type that take on the challenge to begin with, but through house blogs I have found a community of people just like me. Except in many cases they have gone through the trial and error period. So my first stop was their blogs to see how they refinished their trim. And the resounding response…shellac.

As the only finish I have worked with is polyurethane I was starting from scratch with my knowledge base. So I started somewhere easy, like wikipedia and found out that shellac is a secretion from a beetle-like insect from India and Thailand. Umm… what? It’s a sticky substance the female insect produces to keep a hold on the bark of a tree. Awesome. But then I kept reading and found some of the advantages over polyurethane- it dries amazingly fast (approx. 30 minutes), it will never discolor, it’s non toxic (often used in the pharmaceutical industry as a coating for pills), if it ever needs to be refinished or repaired it dissolves in denature alcohol, and in most cases it would have been the original finish on the woodwork so it’s period appropriate. Not only that- but it looks fantastic! It’s pretty glossy, but the advantage of that is that in deflecting light it masks some of the imperfections.

In most cases it’s sold over the internet in flake form and you dilute it with denatured alcohol to produce the “cut” you need, then strain it to remove any remaining residue. Since I’m not a purist and because that sounded like a lot of work, I went with the one and only over the counter premixed brand- Zissner’s Bulls Eye. It still had to be diluted from a 3# to a 2# cut, but it was relatively easy. It’s a bit trickier than polyurethane as it dries very quickly (a function of the denatured alcohol) so you have to keep a “wet edge” but I think overall it’s a pretty easy substance to work with. So alas, all of the hard decisions are over for now, at this juncture it’s just a matter of buckling down and getting the work done. I like this part much better than paralyzing myself in indecision.

At long last- progress

It was a wonderful holiday for us as I hope it was for all of you. I’ve taken quite the hiatus on both the blogging and on the house, but we’re finally getting back into the swing of things. On Monday, after spending the day in our pajamas and alternating between movies and napping, we decided to delve back into the trim. Since we’re both pretty tired of removing the paint and prepping the wood, and because we felt like we weren’t making progress as quickly as we’d like, we did what any true impatient procrastinators would- we decided to start staining what was ready. We picked up a quart of the Walnut Wainscot stain from Sherwin Williams after much thoughtful deliberation (which some might call slightly crazy internal monologues), and tested it out on one of the smaller pieces of trim. We very quickly realized a couple of things: a. we have absolutely no test pieces for trial and error, b. we have no backup plan in case we didn’t like the color, and c. when choosing a color that was tested on pine, we failed to take into account the preexisting color of our wood. See ours is not that light, creamy yellow pine, but rather a burnished orange color, whether left over from the stain or the wood's natural color we have no idea, but the point being that the first coat of stain, rather than come out this rich, warm dark brown, came out orange.

Of course the stain had absolutely no instructions for applying a second coat so we decided to wing it and waited a couple of hours then applied another, but to no avail. That was Monday night and we headed to bed with the all too familiar feelings of disappointment and frustration. What now- should we try to strip that then take it in for color matching? This didn’t sound appealing since it was naturally one of the ornate pieces and I wasn’t too confident we could completely remove all the color. Should we apply one of those stain/polyurethane blends that go on more like paint and hope it covers the color (even though we didn’t want to use polyurethane to finish the wood)? Both of these options are tricky because in order to get all the wood to match it’s generally advisable to follow the same procedure and staining the wood to make it turn orange first felt like a waste of time. This was compounded by the frustration of loving the color on the stirring stick. We thought about taking it to get dip stripped but long story short the piece of trim that we had tested came back is a completely different color- much much lighter, so that means the stain would go on differently and not match the rest of the room.

In my discouragement I recognized that it was a familiar feeling, and then remembered that every major woodworking project I’ve done (mainly furniture) I inevitably become extremely frustrated and discouraged at the stain part. It’s so incredibly unpredictable and the furniture, as with the trim, there truly are no spare pieces that can be sacrificed for testing the color. On one dresser I refinished the mahogany turned out so red/pink I tried to resand the whole thing and ended up going with the poly/stain solution to cover it. On the jewelry box the stain brand failed to mention that to achieve that rich walnut color you may need to apply approximately 8 coats. I can’t tell you how much fun that was on a project that had approximately 800 pieces. But the point is, in the end I loved both of these pieces (although with both there was a point where I gave serious thought to throwing them both away). Remembering the jewelry box process gave me renewed hope that maybe we could get to where we wanted with that stain, if we just kept trying.

So try we did. I buckled down and gave the sample piece a light sanding and applied another coat, and 24 hours later, another. Then I pulled out the sample of the wood blinds we are planning to get for the windows and lo and behold it matches perfectly. It’s not exactly the color we originally wanted, and I have no idea how many coats it will take tto achieve that color around the room, but there are times I look at it and my first thought isn't that its orange and that’s good enough for now. I've even caught myself thinking a time or two that its beautiful so I can only hope that the color will grow on us and that one day soon we wouldn't be able to imagine it any other way. Regardless of the results it will be a huge improvement over its condition before. I suppose the lesson lies in letting it happen, enjoying the process, and not getting too caught up in the results. Funny how often this lesson applies.