I’m currently involved with 3 projects at once.  Multitasking.  When my back hurts from one, I move to the other. The weather turned wonderful.  Low 70s is my kind of temperature and makes me want to work.  I put on my earphones and turn on the audio book and I’m in my own little world.

I finally got around to putting the Waterlox on the dining-room floor (I did the living-room floor back in Dec/Jan.)  I am using the same method I used with the living room.  I put painters tape along the boards to divide the room in half and moved all the furniture to one side.  When the finished side is cured, I’ll move the furniture back to the other side and finish the remaining floor.  It looks good so far.  It will have to cure for 7-10 days before I can start on the other side. (photos to come soon.)

In the meantime I am stripping the back stairs that leads from the kitchen to the upstairs landing.  I haven’t decided what finish to use yet.  The oak front stairs was just completed in the garnet shellac but the pine back stairs borders the kitchen with the natural heart pine woodwork so I may leave those stairs a natural color, too.  I’ll just use Waterlox if I do.  I’m only halfway done with the stripping of the back stairs. I tried both the strong chemical stripper and the Peel Away 6.  Both are so messy. The chemical is so much faster but requires thick gloves and being really careful. Even a little splatter will burn your skin.  Of the parts I have already stripped, the chemical cleaned it best. The downside to the chemical stripper is I can’t leave for a moment in case one of the cats happens down the stairs. Another question I have to answer is if I want to sand out all the marks and dents on the treads.  It’s part of the allure of “antique.”  Some of the treads are worn down in the middle from a century of use.  It would be nice to have the stairs look spanking new but I love the history in the old look. I think the sanding will be minimal. It is what it is, old stairs.  People often try to make their new wood look old like this.

My husband and I bought the paint for our kitchen.  It has been on our list since we bought the house but we just never got to it.  It’s not all that big of a project so why live with ugly dirty, green walls and a green ceiling?  Yesterday we said, “Let’s just do it.”  The worst part will be cleaning those old high ceilings and repairing the cracks.  My neck hates that stuff. It’s the pits to be short and everything seems harder when you are short.   My husband volunteered to do the ceiling. I say, “Have at it!”  We picked a light pale yellow.  It looked pretty light at the store but I knew through past experience how yellow yellow can be when it is up on the wall.  I have the paint sample card up on the wall this morning and I think we picked the perfect color.  We haven’t found a lighting fixture yet that we like for the kitchen.  I’ll keep my eyes open on eBay to try to find a restored vintage lighting fixture that will look right in our kitchen and doesn’t cost a fortune. There is also a foot-square grate near the ceiling.  We want to take that down and see what the original color was.  It is painted green like the walls  now.  I think it would look really nice black and I have a feeling that is the original color.

I think any of the colored shellacs are the hardest finish I’ve ever applied, especially on open-grained woods like oak.  The alcohol dries so fast on the outside of the coat that it pulls the finish up around the pores leaving ridges and also lap marks from the edges where the brush ended.  Any edge always gets darker and reflects the light to make it even more noticeable.  I have bought products that were suppose to increase the open time for shellac before it dries but they didn’t help much.  The only thing was to fill the pores and sand the ridges.  But sanding a colored shellac can leave light and dark areas unless you are perfect.

I came across some antique literature that used ammonia in some recipes for shellac.  The ammonia is suppose to stop the ridging. Just add a few drops in your shellac/denatured alcohol mixture to help prevent the ridging. I carried it a bit further and did a little experimenting myself.

I did some experiments and some were failures.  I think the failures (which was that the shellac bubbled off or flaked off) were caused by the mix being stored too long, like 2 to 3 days old.  I had no trouble with the mix when it was fresh, meaning using it the same day. Even the literature said to only use fresh mixtures.  It is also possible there was some left over wax on the wood from a stripper that wasn’t cleaned off good enough or my mix had too much ammonia in it.

To be sure that my shellac  mix (below) had good bonding, I put some on my counter top.  Actually, I spilled it but left it to see how hard it was to remove.  With the regular shellac, when dry I can chip it off with a razor blade or just use ammonia on a sponge to wipe it off.  When this mixture dried, it was just as hard to remove as regular shellac is on my counter top.  So I’m pretty confident there won’t be a problem. *I should note that I used dewaxed garnet shellac.  If the shellac is not dewaxed, I can’t say it would work.

What I did:  (disclaimer: it worked for me but you do your own experiments as the results may not hold true under different circumstances.)

• Shellac mixed with denatured alcohol – 3 pound cut  (you can find garnet shellac flakes on the internet and add denatured alcohol to make your own mix or buy it premixed on the internet.)

• A small bowl of water

• Household Ammonia (not diluted)

I took just enough of the shellac/alcohol mixture that I would be using that day and put it in another container.

I dribbled a very small amount of ammonia into the shellac and stirred.

I took the spoon out and let some of the shellac drip from the spoon into the bowl of water to see if it coagulated or dissolved in the water. (You shouldn’t add so much it dissolves the first time or you may have added too much.)

If it coagulated, I dribbled a little bit more ammonia in the shellac mixture and stirred.  I repeated this until the drops dispersed/dissolved in the bowl of water. (afterward you can clean your bowl with ammonia if you need to) You want the least amount of  ammonia in the mix that it takes to get it to dissolve in water.  Too much ammonia  in the mix can bring up the shellac from previous coats when you brush it on. After all, ammonia will strip shellac off of wood when used full strength.

When the mixture has enough ammonia to dissolve in water, the mixture can be thinned with a little water.  Too much water will make the finish blush white when you apply it (but it does evaporate out.)  The water made the application smoother but also made it dry a  lot slower and would cause drips on the vertical surfaces.

It takes longer to dry and will take more coats to build up color but I think it gave a better, more even finish. Your brush will also clean up with water unless it has started to dry in which you’d need ammonia to clean it. I haven’t tried it yet but I imagine this mix would mix well with water-based dyes.

Have fun experimenting and test small amounts so you don’t waste your shellac!  See my results on my front stairs here.

Wow, this has been a long project.  It involved a lot of experimenting with shellac, shellac on-shellac off and also dealing with humidity.  I had a few-day window of lower humidity this past week and finally was able to finish them.  I’m really happy with how they turned out.  I tried different sheens by adding a shellac flattening agent.  I ended up with a moderate amount of sheen.  The flatter it is, the less mistakes show but I love the sheen.  In the photo you can see on the step’s riser second from the highest step shown, on the left-hand side, there is a small section that is still dull which I have now fixed.  I didn’t even see it until I took the photo but thought I’d let you see what a difference in sheen a little Shellac Flatt makes. I previously coated the whole stairs in the flatter sheen but didn’t like it and put a coat over it and had missed that spot.

Today, in a separate post,  I’ll tell you the shellac recipe (using some ammonia) I used for the stairs. There was no stain used on these white oak stairs.  The color comes from many coats of garnet shellac. Some of what you see on the stairs are reflections from a stained-glass window on the left. Also, half way up you can  see the grain pattern and rays of  a quarter-sawn riser. A few of the risers are quarter-sawn with the rays and some are not.  I’m not sure why they wouldn’t make them  uniform when they built it but the patterns are so pretty I embrace the ones we do have.

Due to overuse of my knee….again…I have to lay off the work on my stairs for a few days, which is 2/3 done. So, in the meantime, I’ll blog about other things.
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We were in the process of making an offer on our house when the real estate lady told us the owner-ladies selling the house thought we probably hated the wallpaper and would love the chandelier hanging in the dining room. The opposite was true. I kind of liked the wallpaper at the time, but not at all looking back at it. And the chandelier was pretty bland and was not of the arts and crafts style at all. More colonial in style, I guess. I’m thinking it may be from the 40s. It just didn’t fit the style of the house.

We have searched high and low and across state lines to find the right fixture to look right in the house. We finally found one in New York state (which, if you live in Erie, is not very far away.) We found some fixtures that needed too much work but this one was restored and ready to hang, and in our price range. I would have loved to have the gorgeous art-glass shades but we have to be practical. They can be added at some future time when the utopia promised by our politicians comes true. I won’t hold my breath and I really do like this fixture anyway because it is of the period of our house.

So here is a photo of a light that is very similar to ours except we have different shades and there are only 4 lights. Ours is from 1910 and is still in the box and stored until we get to hanging it but this photo will do to give you the idea of what it looks like.

These are the type of shades I’d like to add to the fixture at some point. This photo came from vintagelighting.com. I like the iridescent shades.

I posted about my Eriez Stove a few years ago in my personal blog. I couldn’t find much about it and I had people emailing me asking me how much I thought their stoves were worth. I had no idea! I wondered the same thing about mine.

I’m making a page in the sidebar for Eriez Stoves and I hope anyone searching the web will stumble upon it and provide their photos and information regarding Eriez Stoves.

Mine came down through the family. I loved it in front of the fireplace but with our new configuration of the furniture, that spot is reserved for the flat-screen TV (when we do get one some day.) I moved it in front of the window in the dining room and will most likely put a potted fern on top of it. Even though there isn’t a great place to put it right now, I love the stove and am going to keep it.
This is what my Eriez stove looks like. (Continued after photo.)

Mine is a gas heating stove. It had been converted to have a red electric light inside to look like it was operating. I have since removed that so I can put candles in it. From the research I’ve done it seems Eriez Stoves sold mostly cooking ranges in the later years. They sold their buildings to the Marx toy company in 1936. I have an account with newspaperarchive.com and have found some sketches of some Eriez stoves in some old ads but really no information. If you have an Eriez stove, range or radiator and wouldn’t mind sharing a photo, please email me and I’ll post it on the Eriez Stoves page. Any additional information would be nice, too. I can’t advertise it for sale or give you an appraisal. I just want to have a central place to compare photos but can give contact information for those providing photos if they want.

Here are a few links to information regarding the Eriez Stove Manufacturing in Erie. I’m guessing any Eriez stove would have been made prior to the date of sale, 1936, to the Marx company. However, I read somewhere that they had opened a base of operations or warehouse in the Los Angeles area at some point so I don’t know if that kept operating or not.

http://cgi.ebay.com/1933-Eriez-Gas-Range-Stove-folder-Erie-PA-/390168307003
pamphlet showing Eriez gas ranges (an ebay item, the link may not be good for long.) Scroll down towards the bottom to see the photos.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/1801770.pdf
an application for patent on a new model of Eriez stove 1931.

http://www.marxmuseum.com/home/marxhistory.html
1936 Eriez Stove Co. buildings bought by Marx.

I was going to fill the grain on the boards we just took off just the other day but these boards hadn’t been stripped with stripper. After seeing them in the light I realized I had scraped them with a paint scraper and card scraper. Some of the other baseboards I had used stripper but not these. My memory is shot but it was a long time ago because I started too many projects at once and it’s taken a long time to get back and finish some of them. So I won’t be using the Timbermate filler on these like I had planned except on the very top that has the round-over detail and some frayed parts on the end cut. When you use the scraper method instead of stripping to get the old finish off, the pores mostly likely will still be filled with finish so you won’t have to fill the pores. I’m becoming a big fan of scraping the old finish off instead of using strippers.  Even the safe strippers are a big mess.
Look at all those long nails. It made it so hard to get these off. The big board is the 8-inch wide baseboard, the other the window bottom trim board. Note the two grooves sawed into the back of this board.  The reason is because they are wide and by cutting into the back, it cuts the grain tension so the board won’t warp with the differences of humidity.  Much like cutting the edges of a pork chop or bacon to keep it from curling up when you fry it (that’s what I read somewhere.)

When we got the bottom trim board off of the window we were amazed at the beautiful quarter-sawn rays (tiger oak) that was on the unfinished back of the 4-inch wide board. Quarter-sawn is the way they cut the board.  It is more expensive and gives you these beautiful rays going across the grain of the wood.

The board also has a beautiful aged brown (almost like fumed oak) color to it which makes the rays stand out even more.This part of the board the rays aren’t as perpendicular to the grain as other parts of the board.  The board is 8 ft long so there is going to be variations. It would make a pretty piece of furniture but it is going to be refinished and put back to its original spot under the front window.

Below…This is the front of the board in the photo above. The front finish was so bad that it hid the rays. The light areas is where the finish separated and it is peeling up like dried egg whites. I’m assuming someone, at some time, put another finish over the shellac and it wasn’t compatible over the years.
Most of the woodwork in the house had the same bad finish, some more than others so I decided to refinish all of it.
The board is also blackened on the edges where air must have passed over it over the almost 100 years. I noticed this with most of the baseboards we took off. Some kind of soot. The original heating source is radiators heated by a gas boiler and still is. Our kitchen had a wood-burning stove. We can tell by the covered circles of where the stove pipe used to run through the wall. I suppose after time soot builds up behind even the tightest areas where air may get to. In this picture you can see the soot (it’s not mold) where the boards were behind the radiator. I never got the old wallpaper off back there. After we got the boards off I started scratching at it again. There is only about 3 thick layers here. There were 5 on most the other walls but they are really glued on good. Maybe they skipped a couple of applications of wallpaper back there because it doesn’t really show. The photo makes it look like a lot of room back there but there is about 6 inches between the radiator and the wall.

As I looked at our board, I started wondering how much a board like this would cost today.  It’s old-growth, quarter-sawn white oak but only in the real visible areas did they use the quarter-sawn oak in our house.. I looked it up and was shocked. It is not uncommon to cost $30 a board foot for the old-growth QS white oak. Woodworkers making the craftsman and/or arts and crafts-style furniture pay high prices for such wood. I shutter to think people actually would PAINT over this increasingly rare old woodwork because they don’t want the hassle of refinishing it. Worse, some have just torn it out and thrown it away.  Their loss.

I found this website article really interesting. It tells you how you can tell the old-growth oak from the new oak with photos. http://www.stuswoodworks.com/gusguild/2009/04/buying-quarter-sawn-white-oak/

So far I’m a bit disappointed. I mail ordered the Timbermate Wood Filler because it sure looked like it worked really well in the YouTube commercials. It’s water based and no waste as you can add water to the sanded off powder and reuse it.

I first tried it on about a 6 ft piece of 8-inch wide, old-growth white oak baseboard.

I diluted it down to the consistency of thick paint and smeared it on the board. I left it proud of the surface so I could sand it down flat and smooth. When it dried I started sanding it off with 120 sandpaper. The directions said not to use coarser than that. It sanded pretty easily and turned into a powder like corn starch. You can save the powder and add it back to the bucket and reuse it. It sanded off nice and smooth. Then I brushed on my first coat of garnet shellac. The white-oak colored Timbermate took on the color of the garnet shellac and looked good. But the grain and ridges still started to build like it does when I don’t use wood filler. You can really see it in the raking light.

Shellac has that tendency to “pucker” up along the ridge lines because of the surface tension of the quick evaporation of the alcohol in it. I ended up having to do just as much sanding and rubbing back as I normally do. Maybe I sanded it down too far.

In the next try I made the mixture a little thicker and this time I sanded it off using 320 sandpaper and didn’t sand down all the way down to the wood. I could see the grain but I didn’t feel the grain. It took a lot longer to sand with the 320 sandpaper. I thought that would work better than my first try. It did, but I still didn’t get that nice smooth surface you see on the commercials. I think perhaps it was because of the nature of shellac. I did get my final smooth surface with no grain showing with less rubbing out. I guess I was looking for miracles.

I have more baseboards to do. My next try will be to put Waterlox Original on top of the grain filler as a first coat and let it dry overnight. Maybe if I can keep the the shellac from soaking into the grain filler, it won’t pucker up on the ridges. I’ll let you know how that works.

Thursday: Feb 12, 2010

I’m having a heck of a time refinishing the woodwork in my house because it is oak with deep grain and pore patterns. Either you have to use a grain filler or you have to put on lots of coats of shellac and sand it back until the pores are filled or it looks really cheap. I’ve been doing the latter. It’s been a battle on all the window woodwork, the colonnade, and the stairs. I tried grain filler before and it was so much more work because it dried like cement. I even tried using a watered-down plaster mix for the filler but it didn’t take the stain well and the one window has a “pickled” look to the grain. It would work well for something painted that needed the grain to be filled and it certainly was cheap! I’ll have to redo that one at some point because it isn’t painted.

I saw a commercial for Timbermate on YouTube and ordered some. It came yesterday and was frozen solid and hidden in a snow drift that developed on my porch. I didn’t hear the doorbell ring. But right on the package it says it is not affected by being frozen, thank goodness. Hopefully I’ll get to another of the baseboards this weekend so I can try it out. I’m moving right along on my projects but at a snail’s pace.

I also received my quart of satin Waterlox so I can top coat my baseboards to cut the (garnet dewaxed shellac) shine to a satin finish. I have “Shellac Flat” but I like the way Waterlox dries so slowly and evenly for my top coat plus the extra protection it will give for spills and other accidents that may happen (we have cats.)

Hopefully soon, I’ll have some photos to show you how good it turned out (or not.)

In my last post I said I was refinishing the baseboards…still a work in progress. This post is about getting them removed so I could refinish them.

Before finishing the other half of the living-room floor, I needed to finish removing the baseboards. I started that project long ago but because of the damage I did to the wall, I stopped, plastered the damage and never got back to it. It was now necessary to finish the job and I couldn’t do them in place because I have an injured knee. My husband volunteered to help (he actually did all the work and I filmed.)

Back when I removed some of the baseboards I remember my husband coming home and asking what I did that day and my reply was that I took off some of the baseboards. That doesn’t sound like much. It was hard to explain the amount of work it involved. Oh well. But now I think he has a new appreciation for the sweat that was involved as I removed them during the hot, humid summer without air conditioning. I damaged the wall because I didn’t put the crowbar only where the baseboard was nailed. That is where a stud is in the wall behind and it gets support. Nor did I use some kind of backing to even out the pressure on the wall. I pried the boards off all along and cracked the plaster which made a whole ‘nother project to do.

One question I kept asking myself was why did they think they needed to nail those old, wide baseboards on with so many 3-inch nails? It wasn’t likely they’d fall off if they even used those thin finishing nails like they do today. I figure the reason was probably that the boards are so wide (about 8 inches) and with high humidity where we live the baseboards would likely warp otherwise. Now there is the question of using big nails to put them back on and if I don’t, will they warp? And why is everything harder to do in an old house? The answer to the last, of course, is because they used quality, strong materials and wood. You have to love these old houses.

Here is a video the removal.

If 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