I’ve ordered a lot of shellac flakes, buttons, seedlac in the past but the place I used to get it from went out of business a while back and now there are new people running it.  The prices aren’t low like they used to be so I didn’t buy from them.

I checked some of the woodworkers forums to see where they buy from.  After checking the different recommended websites I chose  Shellac Shack from the state of Oregon.  They had the cheapest I could find for 5 lbs of the dewaxed garnet shellac flakes. The problem is they can’t take bulk orders over the internet. I guess their website wasn’t set up for the discount on bulk.   I had to call them and make the order.  Pretty old fashioned, right?!!  I don’t feel comfortable giving information over the phone. On the internet you use those shopping carts that have security locks so you feel more confident (and I always check the shopping cart has the lock icon on the browser.)  But before I ordered I checked the reviews by doing searches and people had only good things to say so I hope everything turns out OK, if not I’ll surely let you know.  He seemed really nice and he said he hadn’t gone to the post office so he’d send it today. That’s service!  Until my shellac comes, I’m pretty much at a stand still for finishing the woodwork trim. That’s OK because I have plenty of laundry and cleaning to do.***UPDATE:  I ordered the shellac on Tuesday and got the shellac late this afternoon, Thursday!!  That’s fast from Oregon to Pennsylavania!  Good job United States Postal Service and Shellac Shack.  The shellac came in 1 lb packages which is good.  When I bought bulk elsewhere all 5 lbs came in one big bag.  It will stay fresher this way.  Also the shellac flakes are pretty fine textured.  Only one bag has a hard clump of shellac in it.  I always get some clumps no matter who I have bought from and a hammer will break it up easily.  I’m very happy. I want to also note that I sent a flat-rate Priority box from Erie, PA to my son in Washington state on Monday and he got it Wednesday morning.  Wow, the postal service seems on top of things this year.

I love my Paslode angle nailer.  It makes short work putting in the quarter-round molding along my baseboards.  I was just a couple of feet from finishing the installation of the molding I had refinished for one wall when it quit working.  The battery hadn’t been charged for about a year so I put it into the charger. It still didn’t work after letting it charge.  I checked for jammed nails, nothing.  Oh, oh, that meant it must be the fuel cell. I remembered having problems installing it before.   I rummaged through the drawer where I keep the Paslode nails, charger, etc and found one fuel cell can.  It didn’t look used but the date on the bottom said to use by 2004.  Well, what difference would 6 years make with canned gas?  My problem has been putting the little top on the cylinder and then putting in the nail gun.  I had one shot at this because I only had one can.  I pushed the cap on the can and to my surprise (but a similar recollection came to mind from the last time I replaced the fuel cell) the can sprayed an explosive spray of ice cold gas and practically froze my fingers.  Well, dang it!  The cylinder emptied before I could get the cap back off.  I looked at the fuel-cell can and saw there was instruction there.  You push the nozzle side down first and then push down on the other side and it will snap down.  I did it opposite and I’m sure that is why it blew out of the nozzle. But the can was still good even 6 years past the use-by date (had I not installed it wrong) and that’s good to know.

There was a tornado watch issued but I needed another fuel cell to finish the job.  I looked at the sky and it wasn’t too bad so I drove to Lowes up on Peach.  The walk from the parking lot into Lowes was wonderful.  It was warm and the wind was blowing.  I found fuel cells made for my Paslode nailer and a $30 digital thermostat, a couple of chip brushes for a new project I started (stripping doors) a pack of sandpaper,  and some shellac sealer.  $100!  Whoa, let me look at that receipt.  It turns out 4 little cans (about 4 inches high) of that gas (I believe it is butane) was $27.  I just couldn’t believe it could cost that much.  And I had just wasted a whole can installing it wrong.   Each can will last for about 1200 nails.  There are 4 cans in the box.  With 3 cans still left I’m sure they will be around still until 2016 because who uses that many nails?  I wish they would sell those individually at the box stores because it is a lot of money when you only need one can.

By the time I left the store there was torrential rain and the strong winds drove the water through my clothes to the  skin.  I never loaded my car so fast before.  By the time got in I was absolutely soaked with rain dripping off my soaked head, and I couldn’t see out of my glasses. It was hard to believe the weather could change in that short of time. That’s Erie.

I followed the instructions carefully and installed the fuel cell successfully this time and sure enough, my nailer worked again and I finished up the job.  I love that nailer even though it sounds like a gun blast causing my cats to go scrambling for cover.

Next Projects:

• I’m hoping to have the last coat of Waterlox on the floor by Friday and hopefully this time the sheen will match the rest of the floor.

• We took the upstairs landing door off and I have started stripping it.  The finish was pretty awful.  I’ll be stripping the door jam, too.  I’ll be so glad when that is done.

This past weekend we spent part of the time getting ready for winter. I sneer at people that say they like winter around here. They are only fooling themselves. It is their way to cope in order to get through this cruel, icy time of year. Let them. I see it for what it is, confinement in a freezer.

My husband brought down the storm windows. He checked them over and cleaned them and the glass inside and out. He told me the paint was good but next year we are going to have to reglaze them. Ugh! Well, that’s next year. So I was spared having to paint them before they were put up. I’ll use that white latex foam spray insulation (Dap Tex, I think) around the inside of the storm windows. It brushes away with a stiff brush and I just vacuum it up when we remove the windows in the spring.

I also sanded our 6 ft high cedar gate I made several years ago. It still in great shape except the spar varnish peels up every year. It makes me mad that I go through the effort only to have it fail. Last year I did an experiment with leftover Waterlox. I coated the south/west side of the gate with Waterlox before winter. It looked really pretty. Waterlox makes a marine product meant for outdoors but this is what I had leftover (the original finish for floors, woodwork and furniture) so I thought I’d try it. This Waterlox didn’t have UV filters etc in it. The sun’s UV rays penetrates through the finish and breaks down the bond between the wood and the finish. However, I did add some gel stain (oil based) to the mix which turned it a nice orangy-cedar color. The gate looked terrific in the spring after surviving temperatures down to zero and snow for months on end. The east side of the gate I used the spar varnish like always. The east side is the protected side as wind, rain and snow usually hit the west side. Both sides looked pretty good but the east side was starting to have small slits appearing in the finish.

I knew summer would be the real test. That humidity and rain coupled with the heat and strong sun rays would do the finish in I was sure. But the Waterlox side survived with very little damage, just a few tiny breaks in the finish. and it was on the side that has most of the hot sun and rain. The other side I had to scrape and sand to get all the peeling finish (peeling like a bad sunburn) off which is what I always have to do every year because that stuff just doesn’t last. This past weekend I put Waterlox mixed with the antique maple, oil-based gel stain on that side of the gate, too, after sanding off the peeling areas of spar varnish. I’ll need to put on 2 more coats to build up the finish and even out the color. The side that got the coating of Waterlox the year before just needed a light, thinned-down coat. The great part is you don’t have to sand between coats of Waterlox (each coat melts into the previous not like spar varnish that you have to scratch the surface for it to bond.)

My thought is that the oil-based Gel Stain I added to the Waterlox has solids in it that perhaps filtered some of the UV rays out. Whatever, it worked good. Even if I have to lightly re-coat it every year, I had to do it anyway and I wouldn’t have to sand it all down to re-coat it like I do with spar varnish. That is huge. Of course I’m putting Waterlox over some areas that still have some spar varnish so it is only going to hold as long as that under coat lasts. So now I’m thinking that next year I will buy some of the marine Waterlox made to withstand the outdoor weather and sun. It so expensive but if it lasts, it would be worth it. The industry just doesn’t make a product that lasts. The sun is a mean enemy of finishes. Even paint only lasts a few years before you have to start repainting. I guess they’d put themselves out of business if you didn’t have to keep going back to buy their products every year. So, like congressmen voting for term limits, it’s never going to happen.

We got the living-room floor finished last New Years (there abouts) and I finally got to the dining-room floor and finished the second half of it just before we left for our vacation.  It had been over 10 days since I put the top coat on before we left so we could have put the furniture back but decided to wait and let it cure a couple of more weeks while we were gone.

One of the first things I noticed when I came through the door when returning home was the shine difference between the two halves of the floor.  I used Waterlox Original and it dulls a good bit as it cures.  It always starts out looking really shiny but then it cures to a medium sheen in about 2 weeks.  It should be almost completely cured by now but the shine is way too shiny.  The last coat of the one side had come from a new gallon I opened. I’m a bit depressed as I took such care putting on that last top coat.  I’m going to have to put another top coat from that same gallon on the other half of the floor to be sure they match.  It is extra work and requires moving all that furniture again.  I think I’ll contact the company and ask “what’s up with that?!”

I stripped the wallpaper off our plaster walls in the living room and dining room a few years ago and fixed the ceilings in both rooms.  What was left was a nice light surface but had some darker areas.  I primed them before painting just to be sure it covered the dark areas and because I was afraid I didn’t get all the glue off from the wallpaper.  I had no problems painting those rooms.

Fast forward to last week.

This kitchen is like the devil.  It’s evil.  It’s HOT! It is very small and has 4 doors with a bunch of decorative crowns on top, a full wall of hoosier-like cupboards with the crowns on them and 2 large windows with crowns. I decided against taping the woodwork because it would take days (exaggeration) going around all that molding. Old plaster ceilings don’t have perfectly straight edges and previous taping was a waste of time and it always bled under or stuck and took the finish off the woodwork. And even when it didn’t, the lines didn’t look straight. Now I know why the old houses have crown moldings, to hide the uneven seams between plaster ceilings and walls. Our kitchen doesn’t have them. Crowns on everything else in the kitchen, though. And I can’t even reach the ceiling where the counters are because the ladder doesn’t get my short arms close enough. Good thing for husbands with long arms.

We are on day, what is it now? Day 5 ? and we still aren’t done. Our tiny little kitchen doesn’t have room to walk with the refrigerator and stove  moved out so a ladder could fit near the wall.  We are so tired of scooting sideways to get by anything.  We can’t find anything.  We put plastic down on the floor and I trip on it, we drip paint and I step in it.  There is no room to work.  Elbow to elbow, “excuse me”, “excuse me!”  There is no air conditioning downstairs and the temperature near the ceiling has to be close to 90 or higher.  It’s easy to get cranky when it’s so hot and you can’t move.   I’ve been working on the dining room floor and the kitchen stairs during the day and when my husband comes home we work painting until we can’t do it anymore. The other rooms were a pleasure, this certainly is not.

Yellow must be a color that doesn’t cover other colors very well.  We paint and paint and the green still shows through.  The paint can says one-coat coverage.  LIAR!!  We bought extra to give it 2 coats just in case.  Two coats still doesn’t completely cover the green underneath.  I always thought the kitchen’s old green was a very light shade but against the light yellow it looks like a darker dull olive.

I went to the store today to get some kind of edger (and another gallon of paint)  because we were having such a time up against the woodwork. I was looking for miracles.  I saw one that looked like it really would work, I was sure of it.  I bought two so if it worked, we could both be cutting in at the same time. We tried one of the edgers to see how it worked before we opened the other one, that way we could return the unused one if it was junk.  It was junk.  My husband told me before he doesn’t like “gimmicks” and it certainly turned out to be just another gimmick and just made a mess and dripped paint on everything. So besides paint, I had egg on my face because I wasted $15 but I can return the other one. He did not rub it in and he could have.  I also bought a rather expensive cut-in brush as a back up.  I figured I could return it  if the edgers worked good, if they didn’t I would use the brush.  I ended up using the brush and it worked much better than anything else. I guess you can’t beat the old standards.

Soooo…what we should have done in hindsight is buy and apply tinted primer and then paint.  It would not have helped the temperature and sweating and it would not have helped doing miles of cutting in around the wood work but it probably would have made a more even color which we’ll get, eventually.  At least we got the one wall done (woohoo!!) and were able to put the appliances back against the wall tonight.  Now there will be room for two ladders.

I must have used a full  tank of hot water each night washing out all the trays and rollers and brushes.  It also take about 1/2 hour to clean everything.  No more. Tomorrow I’m lining the roller pan with one of my recycle bags.  When we are done, we’ll pour the extra back in the can and just throw the plastic away instead of washing the pan and having  paint going down the sink into the water supply.  I’m throwing the roller away, too.  I’ll scrape off the excess paint, let it dry and stick it in a plastic grocery bag.  They should be dried by garbage night. Good riddance. They aren’t that expensive.

It blows my mind that this one room is so hard.

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.

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.

I’m deleting this post until I can make sure it works.  I had some of the shellac bubble up on the risers of my steps a couple of weeks after I applied it.  That’s not good.  I saved the original post and if I can determine it was for some other reason (like there was some wax on the risers or some left over stripper in areas that didn’t get cleaned off good enough) then I’ll repost it.  The treads still look great so I’m not sure what is going on.  Like I said in the post, though, that it may be too good to be true.

I’m holding off on  my original post to make sure the recipe works.  I had some of it bubble up after two weeks.  I’ll repost when I find out the reason why.  But the borax recipe I used a few years ago on some woodwork still looks good.

Our stairs were in pretty bad shape when we bought the house. They had green shag carpet on them and the wood had been banged up from furniture being moved for almost one hundred years. It wasn’t too long after buying the house that I pulled up the carpet and refinished them.

I remember when my husband worked night shift and I turned on the TV in the evening and worked on the stairs, night after night. I scraped and stripped the old shellac off. The moldings took forever. The railing was the worse with all the sides, up and under. It seemed like a lifetime before I got them finished and ready to shellac again.

Zip ahead several years and the shellac job was ruined by our treadmill going up the stairs. It was the most awkward and heavy piece of equipment we’d ever encountered. I remember saying over and over again, “watch out!” “Don’t scratch the stairs!” But it was evident we’d be lucky to even get that monster up the stairs, let alone not scratch the stairs. At the end of the haul up the stairs I celebrated that we made it. A little later I saw the damage. We’d have to live with it for a while because I have too many other things to work on that were worse.

Now I’m back working on the stairs. I thought I wanted to keep the risers dark shellac and sand the treads that had the most finish damage and let them have a natural finish. It would be light-colored treads and dark stringers, risers and railings. I spent a good portion of the day removing the old finish carefully scraping it off with a card scraper along the edges and using power sanders for the rest. After looking at the tread I realize that the lighter treads wouldn’t look as formal for the living room as the dark stairs. So I did all that for nothing. I’ll sand out the damage on the other stairs and add multiple coats of garnet shellac until it is all uniform and the damage is covered up.

PHOTO: Here is my one stair tread sanded off to see if I liked the look. I was going to coat it with clear Waterlox original (medium shine) just like what the floor has. I thought it would look good and it wouldn’t show dust as easily as the dark color. But it’s not to be. The pointing fingers shows some of the damage from the treadmill but it is much worse than is showing up in the photo. I’m going to use a glaze in the corners where all the stair parts meet as that’s a bear to make look even without overlapping. I think using a dark glaze to give it an antique effect will hide any slight differences where the corners meet.