Get to work!

I need help, and you're not cutting it.

You're falling down on the job!


You're supposed to take care of things outside, but it's still raining. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. I know plants need water, but this is absurd.

I really can't take it much longer. I've taken off yesterday and today to work in the yard, but that has quickly turned into working on the house. It's spring cleaning time, so we've been getting everything spic and span.

However, all this moisture is causing a whole other problem. See, the dog likes his bed, but the fleecy lining gets hot in this weather, so I put a nice cool sheet over it. I went to change the sheet and noticed that there was a bunch of white stuff underneath it. At first I thought it was disintegrated litter (Simon thinks the litter box is a snack bar), but on closer inspection, it's another casualty of the weather:


All the tiny scratches from cat and dog nails created little doors to the shellac underneath; the moist air that gets trapped under the dog bed, plus any moisture that soaks through when he comes out of the rain has caused the shellac to discolor. And I can't just wipe it with alcohol. I tried that-- it's UNDER the poly. I scratched a little off, and luckily, I think it's the clear dewaxed layer that we applied to help the poly adhere that's hazed, so hopefully, I can work on these few boards individually. I plan on rubbing with sandpaper or steel wool to remove the poly and perhaps wipe with alcohol. Then put another layer of dewaxed clear shellac and re-poly.

Anyone have other suggestions? I'm going to try spot treating first and then re-polying the entire board, but I'll redo the whole thing if necessary. Thanks to the blog, we have a very detailed account of what we did with the finish.

I need to re-poly a few boards in the kitchen, as well. They were particularly dry and I think they soaked up a lot of the finish. At any rate, once these things are done, I think I may take up a suggestion left many moons ago to wax the floor. I should be able to just spot wax for a few years if I do that, right? I don't have to wax the entire house every year, I hope... And what do you clean waxed floors with? I don't know. It will make refinishing that much more difficult down the line since we'd have to remove all the wax before screening or sanding, but it might protect the floors underneath, meaning we won't have to refinish so soon...?

It's just such a bummer.

Polyed ourselves out the door...

Yeah, there's some flaws...ours, the PO's...the PPO's...but I'm pretty in love with them anyway.

That's one coat of 2# amber shellac, one coat of the Zinsser SealCoat shellac (a 2# ultra blond dewaxed) and one coat of water-based Varathane clear satin poly.

We got up on Friday and went shopping to get all our supplies for this...and found that no one in town carries shellac by the gallon. At one point I tried our Pittsburg Paint dealer, and he looked at me like maybe I was little stupid and tried to sell me poly. He even spoke extra sslowly so I'd understand that people have moved away from it and did I know that it yellows really fast.

Anyway, we bought all the quarts on the shelf and it was plenty. And Lowes is doing some deal where you get a $10 off coupon every time you spend $50. So it's worked out to cost about the same as buying by the gallon in the end. Once we've got another coat or two of poly on, I'll feel a little more confident in something like success and I'll tally up my grand total.

It feels good so far.

So far, so good...

Here they are with one coat of 2# amber shellac...

Today's secret word is..."shellac"

So, with much thanks to Gary over at This Old Crack House and Di at Life in the Prairie Box and commenter Paul and the good folks at NunkProTunk and countless other people who have become accidental shellac lovers, we have decided to give the old stuff a try.

This weekend, we bought a quart of Zinsser Amber shellac at the big box and little can of red mahogany stain for the kitchen floor. After we got the kitchen floor sanded, we chose a few spots that we knew would be covered up in the end and, really, lets face it-- that floor is already so screwed, what more damage could we possibly do? So we tried the mahogany stain first. After waiting 15 minutes we wiped it off and it looked, well...wrong. It showed the grain very well, but in kind of a fuzzy splotchy way. I've heard that heart pine doesn't always take stain very well...the dark color also showed every imperfection, and here is where we were introduced to the lip caused by the drum sander. It stuck out like a sore thumb. Much edging will be required. Lucky for us, these floors have probably never been refinished, so they have a lot of life before we hit tongue. The color was lovely-- very dark and rich and red. In fact, it was exactly what I had wanted on the cabinets before we found that we'd have to disguise some pretty deep black mastic stains in the kitchen floor. Anyway, I'm really not sure what to do here...More to come...

Then we tested some bleach on the gigantic water stain:


You can see it through all the dust floating in the air there on the left. It's about 2' or 3' X 10' and seems to have originated from a washing machine leak in the next room over. Anyway, we tried a few rounds of wood bleach on a slightly smaller stain that came from the sink, and it didn't seem to do much.

But while the bleach and stain were setting, we diluted some of the shellac from a 3 to a 1 lb cut and brushed it on a few boards. I thought it brought out some lovely pink tones in the wood, but Adam thought too light. We tried the 3lb cut on some other boards and applied a 2nd coat of 1lb...Maybe more orange than we'd like, but with wood that varies as much as this does, it's hard to tell on such a small area. The 3lb test area looked an awful lot like some spots of our original finish that remained around the edge of the rooms, and then again, it looked nothing like some of the other spots-- mainly it was a bit too orange and not dark enough.

Admittedly, we were a little frazzled, worn out and in a hurry when we did all this, and so we didn't really experiment like we should have. We didn't try more coats than that, or try different cuts, etc. I have a hunch that building up the layers will really darken the wood...And a little time for the light to hit the heart of the pine will redden it a bit as well; heart pine is photosensitive and gets darker and redder with exposure to light.

This evening, I plan to go to the big box and get as high quality a piece of yellow pine trim as I can get, with as much heart as you can find in modern cuts of wood, another small quart of shellac (I left the other one at the house) and I will diligently try a variety of cuts and layers and combinations thereof, and see if something looks even close to similar.

Truly, I think our real problem is the fact that we had to take up a finish that we loved that took 90 years worth of wear and tear to create. There weren't many gouges or anything like that, but there were a lot of paint splatters and stains and discolorations and bleaching and the carpet padding-- no, no, no, no, no. That carpet padding glue was stuck for real-- I was eventually able to get it off with a light scrubbing of Oops, but it had stained the wood, and if you scrub too hard, the Oops bleaches the finish (even though the label says it won't). At any rate, it meant we really needed to sand and I'm afraid we'll now have to wait 90 years to get something like what we had...but at the rate we've been going, I think we may be right on schedule!

A possible floor solution?

Literally-- we think we've found a recipe for a shellac mixture and poly coating that will come close to mimicking the way the floors look right now.

Late last week, I stumbled across Goodwin Pine's "professional" section for their website. Goodwin Pine, www.heartpine.com , is apparently the leading company with regards to antique heart pine-- salvaged and river recovered. When I was still shopping for heart pine to patch the floor furnaces, I emailed nearly every company I could get an address for who might possibly sell the stuff. A few were able to give me estimates, many of whom weren't able to guarantee the clarity of the wood. I've mentioned that ours is extremely vertically-grained with no knots whatsoever. Any variation there would stand out like a sore thumb. Anyway, the companies that couldn't help me for whatever reason-- don't do orders that small, don't sell heart pine, don't sell it in that particular grade-- all directed me to Goodwin. And when you see their website and brochure, you see why. They really are a company dedicated to this one, very particular, largely unavailable (new, anyway) species of wood. They have a very specific grading system and a lot of suggestions on the maintenance and restoration of this kind of wood.

Anyway, their "professional" section, which I had not seen before, suggested using a 3lb cut of dark dewaxed shellac, thinned and used as a wash. They claim that this will provide a bit of instant ambering. Then coat over it with a water-based poly. Supposeedly, the shellac dries pretty immediately (it's an alcohol base, after all) and as long as it's dewaxed, it shouldn't interfere with the poly.

Now I've never used shellac for anything, so I'm tiptoeing into some unchartered territory for me... Any tips or hints from anyone who's done this would be greatly appreciated!

As for house progress, we happily made none this weekend ;-). Sunday was going to be devoted to a family gathering, so we decided to take the weekend to catch up on things at our rental-- cleaning, some light packing, a few trips to Target. Our cats couldn't believe their luck to have us both in the house for 3 straight days, a clean living room, and boxes galore for snooping and napping. It was like heaven for everyone involved.

Floor Help!!

On the agenda for today's lunchtime obsession is our floors. If it weren't for the stark unevenness between the floors that were protected by the carpet and those that were not, I would probably say we should just give it good cleaning with mineral spirits to get the carpet pad glue off and be done with it. But the floor boards are continuous throughout the house, and their uneven height (as well as all the paint splatters from careless POs who knew they'd be carpeting and the raised grain in the areas that received a lot of traffic) means a bit of a sanding is ultimately required.

But how do we finish them?!?!? We love the way the antique vertical grain heart pine has aged into the shellac/varnish coating. Lots of rich colors that vary all over. And it's fairly dark (you can see a pic a couple of posts below)...Has anyone out there had any experience finishing floors like this? First and foremost we want to maintain that overall variety of tone, but we'd also love the floors to be somewhat darker amber...

The pics I've seen of floors that just have tung oil seem too light...Maybe they are just so recently finished that they haven't aged enough yet? Should we stain the wood the very lightest color that we see in the floor currently, and let the rest darken? I'd rather not go with shellac, seeing as how we have dogs, cats and kids and that can be a deadly combo on the floors.

I'm just so confused...

Floors part 2

I will be in very much trouble when I get home if all I've talked about is the floor grates...With enough searching, I imagine we can find what we need.

A bigger item on the floor agenda, however, is the finish.

We love the way the shellac looks-- the orangey aged color. And we really love the way the colors are inconsistent. In some places it's streaked honey gold, and it's a deep red mahogany in others. It depends on the grain and the resin and it's soooo nice.

So we're a little afraid to stain it and are thinking of going with Waterlox or pure tung oil. But I don't think this is going to be as dark as we like. It's a tough decision. Stain may, unfortunately, even out the color...Other finishes that "yellow" may take longer than we want, or not be as durable as we'd like (like shellac for example)...The oil keeps the uneven tones, but results are a little lighter than we want. The Sherwin Williams guy was very nice, but of no help whatsoever. I guess we'll be trying a few products in some inconspicuous spots to see which works better...closets oughta be good for that! Just one more little weekend project to add to the list while the electrician works through the rewire.

Our very first project

and I mean VERY first. I left the closing and stopped at the store for a box cutter so I could tear straight into the carpet. First couple of days were spent pulling up the nasty, nasty 20-year old berber carpet and pad. And the pleasant surprise was floors in great shape and with a pretty shellac orange patina. Another couple of days pulling up tackboard and staples and nails. Then our short attention spans moved on to other projects...

Well, now we're back to the floors (kitchen floors are another problem altogether). They're antique heart pine. No knots, or swirly grain. It's very clear and very vertical. And very pretty.

Our first order of business was to price a professional. The main man in town for this is old and cranky. And he'll only patch the floors if he's going to do the whole job start to finish. Including the kitchen it was going to be around $4k. A little outside our budget.

So, Plan B. We have 2 floor furnaces (that are now moot because we've installed CH/A) which are about 2'X3' and 18"X32". And there's a couple of places where they patched with short boards face nailed in a row. I started emailing every supplier of heart wood I could find, gathered quotes. And moved on to another project, again.

Last weekend we tried to measure the area we need to patch and plan out how we would stagger the boards. And that's where I completely broke down. I have visions of big ugly, obvious patch job in the middle of the living room floor. And I can't stand it.

So now we're on the hunt for old registers/grates/grilles that we can put over the old floor furnace space. The grates we have are modern and ugly. And if I'm just gonna leave a hole there, I'd like it to at least be an antique/reproduction pretty hole.

Unfortunately, those are some big holes to fill and we're not having much luck finding anything. Lots of eBay time being put in. Not many architectural salvage places nearby. Anyone out there have a lead for us?