Today my floor finish arrived by UPS. I ran out doing the living room and wasn’t able to start on the dining room. It’s taking more than I thought. In the meantime I’m working on the baseboards that are removed. The big 14ft x 8-inch oak baseboard is now in my dining room on some plastic-covered furniture being finished in garnet shellac. It’s taking a lot of coats to get the deep garnet color to match the woodwork I’ve already done. I’m having lots of problems keeping a wet edge because of the length of the board. It’s too bad I like dark woodwork because using clear would be so easy. I have to let it sit a day after several coats to sand it level to get rid of any “mistakes” that happen, then apply some careful top coats. I’ll sure be glad when this big one is done. I’ll be glad to just get this one room done. I’m not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. But does it ever get done? I keep changing my mind of paint color and putting in more electrical outlets, maybe a new mantle because this one isn’t the original (there are ghost lines of where the original was.) I fear I’ll be too old to enjoy it when it’s done.
More Baseboards….
January 20th, 2010Icicles Crashing Down
January 14th, 2010It sure sounds like someone is in my house and I’ve gone downstairs and searched around many times this morning. Oh, those cats! Running around banging into things! But no, it wasn’t the cats because I happened to be looking out the window when this huge feet-long icicle came crashing down. All the banging all morning long has been icicles melting in the sun (finally) and the warmer temperatures. It’s been a long time and I may just go outside this weekend.
Living Room Floor Finished
January 13th, 2010I actually finished the living room floor on New Years Eve day. But then I noticed some cat hairs stuck into the finish here and there and here I spent so much time vacuuming, swiffering and taking a tack cloth to the whole area immediately before putting on the finish. Even though the three cats were locked out of the room, their fuzzy little hairs float in the air when they shake or move and drifted through the air onto my floor with the heated air flow.
I contacted Waterlox to see what would be the best way to attempt a removal of the cat hair. Their response was to:
Do nothing. They have a way of working themselves out. Or take a razor blade and carefully remove it and using a Q-tip apply finish over that little area. They recommended against sanding the hair out and re-coating over the sanded area because there may be blending problems.
I tried the razor blade on one of the hairs and made things worse. I didn’t want to just leave it and hope it “wears” off. I went against the recommendation and used sandpaper. First I used 1500 grit (auto) wet/dry but it wasn’t aggressive enough to get the hair up. I then went with 320 and carefully sanded the hair until it was gone. I went over it with 800 and 1500 sandpaper to try and blend the area. After cleaning the spots with mineral spirits and wiping dry, I re-coated the spots using a little sponge brush. I rubbed with a clean, lint free sock around the edges to try and feather it. Because it takes so long to dry, it levels itself out pretty good.
The following day I could not see the repair. If you have a floor that is so flat and perfect and glass-like, maybe a repair would show but with the large amount of grain in oak, I can’t tell. I went on to find some more hairs and a little piece of grit here and there and fixed them. Once in a while I had to add a second coat the next day over the area that was repaired because I got a bit aggressive on some hairs that were deeper into the finish. It was pretty easy but did take some time because it takes so long to dry. Really, I couldn’t even see the hairs unless I was standing just so and the light was shining just so but I figured it would bother me knowing it was there so I fixed it. It’s good to know that if the cats do scratch the finish or if I find something on the floor that needs repairing that I hadn’t noticed before, that it is easy to fix.
Now it’s time to tackle the rest of the baseboards from that room.
Corning Museum of Glass Part 2-Ancient Glass
January 12th, 2010If I had even one shard of 1500 BC glass I’d decorate my whole house around it. In the short slideshow are some pieces that date back to that time and to the early A.D. I think a couple may have been reproductions but almost all were the real deal. I was more fascinated by the antique pieces that I didn’t take many photos of the ancient pieces which is a shame because there were many really wonderful pieces. The museum is located in Corning, NY about 191 miles from Erie, PA
Corning Museum of Glass-Part 1
January 8th, 2010Between our living room and dining room we have built-in china cabinets (or book shelves) with leaded glass doors. I have them filled with mostly ceramic or glass knick-nacks. What I’d like to do is clear out most of it, add glass shelving and some lights from the top to shine down and spotlight some gorgeous art glass. I got this in my system because we visited the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY. I expected to see how they made Corningware and the history of glass and how they made it but I didn’t expect examples all the way back from ancient times to modern art glass. It was so classy and the displays so interesting. There are rooms just full of examples and explainations of how craftsmen came up with the colors and what experiements with chemicals they did to get the different colors. I couldn’t possibly have taken photos of all of it, not even 1/100th of what was there. I made a video slideshow of some of the examples. The Corning Museum of Glass is just 191 miles from Erie which is 3 hours and 8 minutes away (according to Google.) It’s a most wonderful weekend get-away!
Here is an example of some of the glass in the slideshow.
Included in this first slideshow video are examples of Tiffany, stained glass, Frank Lloyd Wright, prairie-style, cut crystal chandeliers, reverse painting on glass, micromosaics, depression glass, art nouveau, art deco, modern, vaseline glass, tables made completely from glass and more. Ancient glass from more than 1300 BC and later will be in a following post.
Art-Glass Page
January 5th, 2010This year I’m going to be adding an art-glass page on the sidebar. It will include art-glass video slideshows of the Chihuly Exhibition and the Corning Glass Museum photos I took when we last visited. But first, I’ll post them as a blog entry. The first will be the Chihuly Glass Exhibition that took place in 2007 at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh. We went to the night showing which cost more but was so worth it. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy this beautiful art glass mixed in with a few orchids. Wouldn’t it be beautiful to have a garden of art glass? I checked Chihuly’s schedule and there are some exhibits in 2010 in Columbus, Ohio until July 4.
2009 Personal Life in Photos
January 4th, 2010I post a lot of photos of things I’m doing to the house and furniture but this video is a look back in photos of my non-house related life in 2009.
Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2010I spent New Years Eve day putting the 3rd coat of Waterlox on the second half of the living room floor. I changed over from the lambswool applicator to a short-napped paint roller. It had been used and washed before and most of the loose fuzz was gone. To be sure, I vacuumed it. I found that the lambswool applicator soaked up too much of the finish and I wasted so much during the clean-up. The roller put on a really nice even coat. I was a little worried about all the bubbles that it made on the surface, though. I kept watching it and they slowly, over a couple of hours, went away and the finish leveled out before it turned tacky which took longer than normal because of the cold weather. The roller was easy to scrape the excess finish from and I saved it in a jar for the chairs I’m working on.
I have 3 of the baseboards completed with finish. I added some Shellac Flat to the last 3 coats to give it a satin sheen. After a week, I’ll take some steel wool and give it a layer of paste wax to finish it off.
After the 4th coat of the living room floor I’m taking a week or two off of working on the house to get my back and knees rested (they hurt!) before attacking the dining room. We went to see Avatar for New Years Eve and I had to limp in.
Merry Christmas Card
December 23rd, 2009(It takes a fews seconds to load after you click play.)
Found Behind the Baseboard (pic)
December 23rd, 2009After all my complaining about taking that baseboard off, I got rewarded. I’m so into local history in general and the history of our house. I was sanding the floor with my orbital sander along the edge where the baseboards were and a little piece of paper came flying up through the air and landed in front of me. It was about an inch square and dirty. I picked it up and took a good look at it but couldn’t tell what it was. I took out the magnifying glass but still couldn’t read it very good. Next I put it on the flatbed scanner and scanned it at 1200 dpi and enlarged it.
It was a 1933 canceled stamp from Chicago celebrating 1833 to 1933, Century of Progress, Fort Dearborn . These are little treasures that make all the work a little easier to deal with. I also found a little scrap of wallpaper that I hadn’t previously known was on the wall. It is a light tan color with a tiny cream-colored heart on it. It’s a small piece so I don’t know what the rest of the pattern was.
Finding the little stamp put a halt to my day’s work and put me into search mode. I took a needle-nose pliers and a tweezers to pick up stuff that was down in the cracks at the end of the floorboards that was previously hidden by the baseboards. Lots of lint debris, a hairpin, a stick pin, some blue paint chips, a tiny piece of newspaper that read, 1924, and a partial piece of what looks like part of a greeting card.
Because of the delays I’m not even going to try and finish the living-room floor before Christmas. What does it matter if I’m a week later, it’s still going to get done. The floor is totally ready to finish (sanded and vacuumed) but I don’t want the smell in the house for Christmas. So tomorrow will just be putting my tools and supplies away, cleaning the house from all the dust I created again and wrapping presents.
