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.)

I 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.