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/

The storm windows are completed. I scraped and painted them then gave them a topcoat of a product that has worked really well with my outdoors projects. I used it on my bird feeders and bird house and they were outside for 3 years in summer humidity and winter freezing rain and snow and they look the same as when I put them out (except where the squirrel chewed it.) The windows just need to be put up and then I’ll weather strip them in place for the winter. They came out a bit shiny (really shiny) but I think they will look fine outside. If not, I’ll take some 0000 steel wool and knock some of the shine off.

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More photos below.
I feel lucky to have a work place set up in my basement where I can be out of the cold and watch TV.

I set my chairs up on my lowest work table and removed, cleaned and glued the rungs and set them in clamps overnight.

The two (out of 7) dining room chairs that I’m refinishing are now stripped down really good. It was a very big job. Every time you turn it over you see another side or cranny that didn’t get completed. I started on these chairs many years ago and gave up. They were my second ever refinishing job and I didn’t know what I was doing back then. Not that I’m an expert now but all those gouges and scratches from the metal scraper wouldn’t happen today. I couldn’t get all the old finish off back then. I still had a hard time using one of the strongest strippers out there. I think the finish that wouldn’t come off was actually a tinted wood filler that they left on like a skim coat back in the craftsman era to get it that mission color. Sanding didn’t work because of all the rungs and crannies on the chair and the sander just didn’t fit into the spaces. I tried hand sanding it but that was going really slow so I took out the stripper.

Even with my heavy-duty gloves and glasses I managed to get chemical burns from it. Don’t scratch your nose. That stuff burns instantly when it touches your skin. My best result came with using the stripper and then carefully taking a curved card scraper to remove it. I use an old planter and a brush to apply it, no matter what you use, stripping is a messy, awful job.

Two days work and I got the two chairs stripped really well. I will still have to clean the residue from the stripper off and then lightly sand any marks or raised grain. Then the fun part starts. I like adding the new finish.

The leather seats look awful right now and some some mildew on them from being stored in the basement for so many years. I’m hoping some leather restoring product will make them look good enough to use for now.

I want to keep the original 100-year old leather on these two chairs if possible.